The Spy Who Was Left Behind

by Michael Pullara

  But I was burdened by a desire to console the Woodruff family. It had now been ten years since Freddie’s murder. If I intended to find evidence that he had not died in a botched robbery, I would need to do it soon. Memories were fading; documents were being lost or destroyed; witnesses were dying. The inexorable passage of time was rendering my theories irrelevant.

  So I decided to disregard my trepidation and fly to Tbilisi. I would visit the (alleged) murder site and meet discreetly with a few of the relevant participants. It would be a fact-finding mission only. I would not agitate for Sharmaidze’s release. If all went well, I would be in and out of the country before the government noticed me. I would report my findings to the Woodruff family and then end my quirky crusade.

  I began searching for on-the-ground resources in Georgia and remembered having read about CEELI—the American Bar Association’s Central and Eastern European Law Initiative. It was a kind of legal Peace Corps created to assist emerging democracies in establishing structures essential to the rule of law. I contacted ABA headquarters and discovered that CEELI had an office and a liaison attorney in Tbilisi.

  The CEELI liaison was Carolyn Clark Campbell, a Harvard-educated lawyer whose easy charm belied her prodigious competence.

  “You’ll need a translator,” she said. “You should hire Lali Kereselidze.” I didn’t know it at the time, but Carolyn had just given me the most important advice I would receive regarding my project. “Yes,” she repeated, “you’re definitely going to need Lali.”

  I arrived in Tbilisi from Prague. The airport terminal was a Soviet-era relic built with no expectation of business travel or tourism. It had a concrete floor and a makeshift conveyor belt for luggage. Passport control was two plywood desks staffed by severe-looking women in uniform. There was a scrum of sweaty men offering to drive me to my hotel for $20. I waited a little while and got the same ride for $5.

  I stayed at the Sheraton Metechi Palace. A relentlessly functional looking building, it sat on a hill overlooking the old part of the city. For me the hotel had two attractions: first, it had been home to Freddie Woodruff and the US embassy; and second, it had its own generator and was (in theory) immune to the city’s frequent power outages.

  There was an airport-style metal detector by the front door. It reminded me of the embassy’s security guidelines warning of frequent gunplay in the lobby. I walked outside to watch the sunset. Tbilisi is nestled in a valley on the banks of the Mtkvari River. A city of 1.5 million, it is geologically and politically unstable. There was evidence everywhere of periodic quakes—both acts of God and acts of men.

  I waited for lights to flicker on but they didn’t. The city simply faded into darkness. In the distance I heard the hotel generator kick on. The Metechi Palace lit up like a beacon, a visible reminder to the people below of the power they did not have.

  Lali Kereselidze arrived in the morning, and I understood immediately why the local CEELI liaison had recommended her. First, she had a genius—not simply for simultaneous translation of English, Georgian, and Russian—but for navigating the treacherous minefields of intercultural relationships. Second, she was amazingly well connected. When she wasn’t teaching Shakespeare at Tbilisi State University or tutoring English language students in her home, Lali served as President Shevardnadze’s personal interpreter. And third, she was gracious beyond anything I could have anticipated.

  To whatever extent I succeeded in Georgia, it would be because of Lali Kereselidze. I told her my goals for the visit: I wanted to see the crime scene, talk with Anzor’s defense lawyers, and then interview Eldar Gogoladze, the former chief bodyguard who was driving the Niva in which Freddie died.

  “We can do that,” she said.

  In a country with no central telephone directory, Lali could still find anybody. She dove into her oversized purse, came out with a few scraps of paper, made one or two calls, and then announced that we had an appointment with Avtandil Sakvarelidze.

  The private attorney hired by the Sharmaidze family had an office roughly the size of a closet. He sat at a small metal desk by the window; his secretary sat at a smaller table by the door. The office telephone occupied about one-third of her tabletop. If a call came for the advocate, she would hand him the receiver.

  I sat across from him—my back touching the wall, my knees pressed against his desk—and explained the purpose of my visit. I was fairly sure he didn’t believe me. Nevertheless, he said, “I am available for a consultation.”

  I told him that I had studied the US consul’s daily summary of the murder trial but was still confused: The description seemed to raise more questions than answers. He dismissed my observation with a wave of his beefy hand.

  “The trial was for show,” he said. “It was not in the government’s interest to discover the true facts.”

  According to the advocate, there was never any question of Sharmaidze’s innocence. After being arrested, he had been offered the same deal as his companions—freedom in exchange for testimony against one of the other two boys. The police had beaten all three until the other two, Berbitchashvili and Bedoidze, gave up and accused Sharmaidze.

  “Anzor was simply too strong,” said the advocate.

  I puzzled about the comment for a moment. It described a perverse natural selection in which the weakest and most craven survive.

  “What about the letter?” I asked. Berbitchashvili had written to Sharmaidze implicating him in the shooting and encouraging him to confess. The authorities had found the letter in Sharmaidze’s possession and offered it as evidence at the trial.

  The advocate grunted his disdain. “Fraud,” he said.

  Sharmaidze had described the process to him. Several days after his arrest the guards told him that his pants were dirty and needed to be washed.

  “It was true,” said the advocate, “his pants were filthy, but so were the rest of his clothes. Nevertheless, the guards only wanted his pants.”

  They returned the poorly laundered garment, insisting that he dress himself immediately. A few minutes later they rushed back into the cell and accused him of hiding something (in his pants, of course). They stripped off his camouflaged fatigues, ripped open the stitching around the waistband, and pulled out a piece of paper.

  “It was your letter from Berbitchashvili,” said the advocate.

  I sat silent as I tried to grasp the motivation for such a ham-handed farce. “Why would they go through this charade?” I asked.

  “It was for Sharmaidze’s benefit,” he said. “Torture wasn’t working. They had to break his will. And in order to do that, they needed to show him that his situation was hopeless. Once he realized that Berbitchashvili had betrayed him, he confessed and it was over.”

  I had never before encountered such systematic prosecutorial abuse and so did not immediately comprehend what the advocate was describing: a form of legal process that existed without any substance of justice.

  “Did you object to the letter on this basis?” I asked. “Did you try to show that it was manufactured evidence?”

  The advocate looked at me blankly. I felt like a schoolboy who had just said something particularly stupid.

  “To what end?” he sighed.

  He lit a cigarette and looked out the window. I could see that he was struggling to decide whether I was worth the effort of explanation.

  Finally he spoke. Lali was staring at him blankly, allowing his Georgian words to flow through her and magically emerge as English. I was making notes as fast as I could.

  “I cross-examined Bedoidze,” he said. “During his direct examination, he had pointed to a spot on a photograph and said it was the place where the murder occurred. I got him to acknowledge that there were no distinctive landmarks in that area. Then I asked him to explain how, in the absence of such landmarks, he was able to identify the location so precisely. He didn’t know how to answer the question and became quite agitated. The judge told him to calm down and answer truthfully—so the witness said, �
��I pointed at the place where I was told to point. The police and prosecutor told me that this is the spot where the murder occurred.’

  “As you might imagine, there was a big reaction in the courtroom,” he said. “Bedoidze had done the unthinkable: He had told the truth. But in the end the judge simply struck his answer from the official record. The judge said that the answer suggested that the police and prosecutor had manipulated the testimony ‘—and since we know that cannot happen, the answer must be wrong and must be stricken.’ ”

  The advocate paused to let me process the implications of such institutionalized tyranny.

  “Sharmaidze was terrified,” he said. “He cried for three hours, begging me not to raise the issues of torture or manufactured evidence. He’d been warned by the police that if he talked about those things, they would kill him and his whole family. So you see, Mr. American Lawyer, there wasn’t really much point in objecting to the letter.”

  And with that, the consultation was over.

  I paid the advocate $50—but would have paid much more. He had given me an invaluable insight into the central issue facing lawyers in Georgia: If the government isn’t required to obey its own laws and procedures, how do you get it to do something it doesn’t want to do?

  I didn’t know it at the time, but I would spend the next five years of my life trying to answer this question.

  We stopped for sweet Turkish coffee while Lali fished through her bag to find our next appointment. After only two telephone calls she had a meeting scheduled with Tamaz Inashvili. Sharmaidze’s court-appointed lawyer was working as an in-house general counsel at the government’s Ministry of Electricity. He agreed to see us in the afternoon.

  Inashvili ushered us into a tidy little office. He was a trim and starched young man. His handshake was firm but his smile seemed awkward, as though he wasn’t completely comfortable with human contact.

  I had been forewarned about his speech impediment but was not prepared for what I encountered. His stutter was a spasm that battered and mauled every word before letting it escape. Nevertheless, I did not have to struggle in order to understand him. I had Lali, and she translated his Georgian stammers into fluent English.

  I explained the purpose of my visit and he consented to talk to me. He began by describing the circumstances of his court appointment. Anzor’s murder trial was the very first case he ever handled as a lawyer. It was clear to him that he had been chosen because of his inexperience, his lack of political connections, and his stutter.

  He got word of his court appointment shortly before the trial began. There wasn’t much time to prepare. He needed to review the official investigation file as soon as possible and that was kept at the courthouse. It was winter and the Russians had choked off the flow of natural gas to independent Georgia. The temperature was bitter cold, and Chief Judge Leonidze’s office was the only room in the courthouse that had a fireplace. The judge permitted Inashvili to work there while he reviewed the case materials.

  He sat opposite the judge and quietly studied the investigation reports, witness statements, and confession. The more he read, he told us, the more troubled he became.

  He saw no evidence that established Sharmaidze’s guilt with a certainty sufficient to justify his execution. For Inashvili, it was one thing to participate in a courtroom charade that resulted in his client’s imprisonment; it was quite another for him to play a knowing part in the client’s judicially sanctioned murder. He simply wasn’t willing to do that.

  Inashvili knew that once the trial began he would be powerless to influence the outcome. But before the trial he had something the government wanted and needed: his continued participation as defense counsel. The government was eager to resolve the case during the holidays when no one was paying attention. If Inashvili quit, the case would be delayed beyond the Christmas camouflage.

  And so he decided to bargain privately with the judge—to trade the prospect of a prompt resolution of the case for the life of Anzor Sharmaidze. But talking to the judge outside the presence of the prosecutor was a risky strategy. Leonidze could report this ex parte communication to the bar association and Inashvili could lose his law license. Nevertheless, the young lawyer considered disbarment preferable to participating in his own client’s extermination.

  He collected himself and began talking. At first Leonidze didn’t understand, so Inashvili tried again. “. . . new lawyer . . . first case . . . death penalty . . . withdraw . . .” The judge’s eyes suddenly lightened with comprehension, he told us.

  “Oh—don’t worry about that, Mr. Inashvili,” said Leonidze. “That’s already been decided. We’re not going to execute him. He’s going to be sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Hard labor, but he’ll be alive.”

  So what appeared to be a life-and-death drama was actually a sham. The outcome of Sharmaidze’s trial was known before the proceeding ever began.

  At that point, Inashvili’s principal concern became making sure that the judge kept his word. He decided that the best way to do that was to present a minimal defense: If the judge broke his promise and imposed the death penalty, he could cite his own meager performance as evidence of the secret agreement with the judge. It would destroy his career but it would save an innocent man’s life.

  But in the end Leonidze kept his word. Sharmaidze was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years hard labor.

  “It’s eighteen years now,” said Inashvili. A few years previous the authorities had released Sharmaidze from prison and then arrested him a few days later. They tacked on three more years of hard labor for having allegedly escaped when they pushed him out the front door.

  I was thinking about the brutality of a system that would add a three-year insult to Sharmaidze’s many injuries, when Inashvili interrupted with a question.

  “Does the Woodruff family plan to intervene in Sharmaidze’s case?” he asked.

  “I didn’t know such a thing was possible,” I said. After all, in US courts there is no procedure that will allow the family of a victim to intervene in a defendant’s case ten years after his conviction.

  “In Georgia the family of a victim has the right to participate in the criminal case,” he said. “If they find new evidence—something suggesting that the defendant is innocent or that someone else committed the crime—they can ask the prosecutor to reopen the investigation.”

  He looked at my stack of FBI documents and then at me. I felt as though he was taking the measure of both of us. Finally, he spoke, this time quietly and without stutter. “That looks like new evidence,” he said.

  We exchanged our goodbyes and Lali drove me back to the hotel. Her little brown Lada bounced along the cobblestone streets while I sat in dejected silence. I had gotten involved in this Georgian escapade because I wanted to feel good about myself. I had budgeted a limited amount of time and money to establish my credentials as a humanitarian. And just as I was about to cross the finish line, this stammering lawyer had eloquently revealed that unless I took this case to the next level, my efforts would never be anything but narcissistic folly.

  I rode the elevator to the top floor of the hotel. An English-language sign identified the room at the end of the hallway as the Piano Bar—the watering hole where Marina the barmaid worked and Freddie the spy caroused. There was a mirrored back bar, a plastic parquet dance floor, booths lining one wall, and randomly stacked chairs. The air was stale and the tables were dusty. Nobody had gotten drunk in this room for a long time.

  The Piano Bar was indistinguishable from any cocktail lounge found in any Midwestern Holiday Inn. I thought about it for a moment and realized that perhaps that was the point: It was a place where lonely expatriates could drink and imagine they were somewhere else. The lingering smell of desperation didn’t help my mood. I went to my room and waited for morning.

  Lali pulled into the hotel parking lot promptly at 10 a.m. She had arranged an afternoon meeting with Eldar Gogoladze. We planned to spend the hours beforehand vis
iting the location where the murder had allegedly occurred.

  Lali drove us along the left bank of the Mtkvari River until the road divided. Then she steered the car north onto the Old Military Road. The tsar’s gateway to the Caucasus was a two-lane asphalt ribbon that the Russian army started building in 1799.

  Less than two miles from the turnoff the GPS announced that we had arrived at the FBI coordinates. This was the place identified by Sharmaidze as the scene of his crime. This was where he reenacted the shooting and where the FBI found the shell casing linked to his rifle.

  What impressed me most about the location was how utterly unremarkable it was—a straight stretch of road with thirty feet of grassy apron extending out to a hedgerow of trees. The terrain was the same on either side. There were no prominent features to distinguish this place from the roadside a half mile in either direction. The idea that a blindly drunk man would be able to distinguish this exact spot from any other struck me as dubious at best.

  There were, however, two noteworthy structures between the intersection and the village of Natakhtari: First, there was a small concrete kiosk near the turnoff. The building was slightly larger than a bus stop and appeared to have been abandoned for some time. Lali said that in 1993 it had been a roadway police post. Second, there was the Natakhtari Drain—the water power station for the Tbilisi water system—and its support buildings. A dirt road leading to the Drain intersected the highway about a half mile before the alleged murder site. The road was about fifty yards long and ran past a barracks, a greenhouse, a guard shack, and a water tower. A seven-foot wall separated the shack from the highway and a gated fence protected access to a barracks.

  At the junction of the dirt road and the highway was a kind of ersatz parking area. At its edge there was a large oak tree to which some enterprising soul had nailed an automobile tire—a black “O” suspended about ten feet above the ground. Lali said it had been there as long as she could remember.

  I tried to imagine its purpose and only one explanation made sense: It was a landmark. You could tell someone unfamiliar with the area that you’d be waiting for them at the oak tree with the tire on it. They couldn’t miss it.