The Spy Who Was Left Behind

by Michael Pullara

  We drove back to the city for our meeting with Gogoladze. Lali said he’d been a detective at the police station near the train depot prior to being tapped in 1992 as the chairman’s security chief. Later, he’d been arrested following a failed attempt to assassinate Shevardnadze. The prosecutor suspected that he had conspired with Igor Giorgadze and Jaba Ioseliani to murder the chairman. Gogoladze sat in jail for six months before being released in a general amnesty.

  I was very curious to see how he had fared following this avalanche of disgrace.

  We arrived at the nicest office building in Tbilisi, where several late-model Mercedes and BMWs sat in the parking lot. Obviously, this was home to a prosperous company.

  “This is Cartu Group,” Lali said. “It’s the largest conglomerate in Georgia. They’re in banking, insurance, manufacturing, construction, real estate, media—everything. It’s owned by the billionaire Bidzina Ivanashvili. And Eldar Gogoladze is the vice president.”

  We rode the elevator to the executive suite and were shown into Gogoladze’s office, a tastefully appointed room with European designer furnishings—subdued, understated, expensive. Gogoladze, a short, bald man about fifty, was wearing an Italian sports coat and Gucci loafers. He crossed the room with predatory grace. His eyes were passive but alert. Lali made the introductions in Georgian and he replied in idiomatic English. He dismissed the interpreter to the outer office and closed the door.

  “I don’t know what this interview is about,” he said as he settled into his white leather sofa. “All the facts of Freddie’s death are already well known to the Americans.”

  I explained that I was there to obtain information for the family, that I understood that many of the details of the investigation were classified and that I had no desire to expose any secrets. I apologized in advance if I inadvertently stumbled into matters that he as an intelligence professional deemed inappropriate, that I was after all just a lawyer.

  I was being a little stiff, a little formal, a little solicitous, a little naive—that is, pretty much just being me. But my clumsy approach had its intended effect. It induced Gogoladze to feel superior to me. He did not perceive me as a threat and even allowed me to videotape the entire conversation.

  Everything about Gogoladze proclaimed him to be an insecure bully, a man who believed that his talents and contributions had never been properly appreciated. So I settled into the role of enthusiastic admirer—and the more I listened, the more he talked.

  It had been Freddie who organized the trip to the high mountains, he said. Gogoladze had been reluctant, but Freddie had insisted. He wanted to see the stunning nature, to drink the local wine, and to be with Marina Kapanadze.

  “Freddie had feelings for this woman,” said Gogoladze. “But I’m not sure she was the kind of woman who deserved such serious feelings.”

  This statement seemed an oddly aggressive way to start a conversation with a putative family representative: an unsubtle warning that—if I pushed too much—Gogoladze would be forced to tell some particularly embarrassing truth. It did not dissuade me from my inquiry, but it did make me curious about what he was hiding.

  “I did not know her,” he said. “It was the first time we’d met.”

  People who lie tend to litter their conversation with too many details and this was one detail too many. It seemed implausible that a Georgian intelligence officer wouldn’t know every English-speaking waitress at the only Western hotel in the country—especially when that hotel housed the US embassy. I made a mental note to check on Gogoladze’s relationship to Marina.

  He skipped over the day’s events and started his story with the shooting. It was nighttime. The highway was dark. His headlights were on. Just before the turnoff to Mtskheta he saw three men standing on the side of the road. One of them had a machine gun. That man stepped forward and signaled for the car to stop.

  “My first reaction was to speed up,” he said. “I don’t know if it was the right decision.”

  He accelerated past the three men. He heard a gunshot and then Marina screamed.

  “Freddie was hit in the forehead,” he said. “I saw the wound. There was no chance of survival.”

  He didn’t stop. He wanted to avoid a second shot and to get Freddie to a hospital as quickly as possible. Nevertheless, he paused briefly at the roadway police post and ordered the officers to block the highway. He then drove to the district hospital in Mtskheta, but they had no electricity. He contacted headquarters by radio, reported the shooting, asked for reinforcements, and requested that his colleagues find a working hospital. By the time he arrived at the Kamo Street Hospital in Tbilisi, Freddie was dead.

  After he’d off-loaded Woodruff’s body, he searched the car for evidence of a bullet hole, but found nothing. At first he suspected it was a sniper who had fired through the front passenger’s window. “It was the only window that was open,” he said. But a few days later a forensic investigator found a bullet hole in the hatchback.

  “There’s a resin strip around the hatchback window—a rubber gasket that holds the glass in place,” he said. “The bullet was hot. It melted the resin and then the hole resealed. That’s why we didn’t see it.”

  I was familiar with this explanation but that didn’t make it any less extraordinary. Sharmaidze was alleged to have killed Freddie with an AK-74 loaded with cut bullets. If that was true, then a blunt-nosed 5.45 mm bullet traveling at 2.6 times the speed of sound had struck a strip of silicone rubber and passed through the strip without leaving a trace. It sounded like a ballistic miracle. I was about to ask Gogoladze if anyone had actually calculated the temperature of the bullet or the melting point of the silicone rubber, but he changed the subject.

  The FBI investigators had asked him whether the Niva had been followed on the day of the murder. So I asked him the same question.

  “It was Sunday and I was relaxed,” he told me, “but I was still checking. I absolutely exclude the possibility that we were followed. There was a gas crisis at the time. I saw only a dozen cars the entire day.”

  Gogoladze said he stayed at the Kamo Street Hospital for only fifteen minutes before returning to Natakhtari. He was accompanied by a dozen members of the presidential protection force. The group stopped at the Nerekvavi police post, a repurposed railroad car that had been marooned at the intersection of the Tbilisi Highway and the Old Military Road. A squad of military police were questioning three young men about an automatic rifle they carried. Gogoladze recognized the young men as the same ones he’d passed just before the shooting—the same clothes, the same machine gun. He arrested the trio and delivered them (and their AK-74) to the Tbilisi jail.

  I tried to imagine this scene of professional efficiency, but reality kept intruding on my vision. Gogoladze’s self-exculpatory account did not address any of the troubling details chronicled in the FBI investigation. For example, where was his quick trip home to take a shower? And there was something about the arrest that troubled me—but that was going to require a lot more thought.

  “I resigned the next day,” he said. “I wanted to distance myself so that no one could say I was trying to influence the investigation.”

  This claim of resignation was inconsistent with information I’d gotten from other sources. According to the FBI (and several newspapers) Gogoladze had been fired for malfeasance. However, not all inconsistencies are malicious. I decided to explore the issue obliquely.

  “Why was there no chase car?” I asked.

  The tiny muscles at the edge of his mouth twitched a little. His eyes seemed to narrow.

  “It was Sunday,” he said. “I wanted the men to have a day off with their families. And there was a gas crisis. There wasn’t enough gasoline for a second car.”

  The easiest answer would have been to say that he or Freddie didn’t want a chase car full of armed bodyguards. But that would have suggested that the trip had a goal other than recreation—and Gogoladze had already tried to deflect me from exploring the trip’s
purpose. So he told me a story. Not from shame or embarrassment, but to protect a secret.

  And then he changed the subject again. “The chief investigator confirmed that these criminals also robbed a senior policeman that day. The deputy director was returning from his country house. The criminals beat him and stole a carton of cigarettes—and they tried to steal his car.”

  This was new information to me. There was no mention of this crime in the FBI documents or in the State Department summary of the trial. And none of the three young men had been charged with this robbery.

  “One of the three boys confessed to a cellmate in the jail. He said that his friend—the one with the machine gun—had killed an ambassador. And Sharmaidze was wanted by the police for stealing and for desertion from the army.”

  Gogoladze was trying a new tactic: to persuade me that the accused was a bad man and that the evidence against him was far more substantial than had been placed in the official record. He apparently hoped I would think Sharmaidze unworthy of any serious effort.

  “Two or three days after the shooting the FBI asked for help to find the crime scene,” he said. “I missed the location by three hundred meters—but Sharmaidze found it.”

  The former chief bodyguard was contrasting his well-intentioned error with Sharmaidze’s knowledge in order to prove that the defendant was guilty. It was both sad and cunning.

  “There’s still a lot of speculation and gossip about this case,” he said. “People claim to be investigating but their only goal is to discredit Georgia, the intelligence service, or me. Even now—ten years later—there was a scandalous article in a Philadelphia newspaper.”

  I recognized the reference. A small Russian-language weekly had printed a story linking Gogoladze and Woodruff’s murder to the narcotics trade in Georgia. The publisher had circulated only three hundred copies of the newspaper; nevertheless, this retired intelligence officer living half a world away had found it and read it.

  “Did you know that Freddie had heart problems?” he asked. It was an unexpected question. “He made me promise not to tell anyone. I took him to the best cardiological center—maybe ten days before he died. The doctor told him he was a candidate for death if he did not immediately stop drinking and start treatment. But he refused. Most CIA officers don’t drink very much alcohol, you know. But for Freddie, that was a burden.”

  The conversation drifted away from the past and to the present. “I am now number two in the biggest company in Georgia,” he boasted. “We are the top managers: the president and me.”

  He did not explain what part of his professional résumé had qualified him for this august position. And he did not discuss how he had navigated the path from prison to a vice presidency. But I knew enough about the former Soviet Bloc to realize that employment opportunities for retired warriors were a function of who you knew and what you had done for them.

  Clearly, Gogoladze had a very powerful patron who believed that the former security chief was owed a substantial reward. If I was ever going to solve the mystery of Freddie’s murder, I would need a deeper understanding of that relationship.

  We exchanged a few pleasantries, talked about Gogoladze’s role in the creation of Group Omega (the local CIA-sponsored special operations force), and the rise of financial crime in Georgia. After I received a bear hug and a hearty slap on the back from Gogoladze, Lali drove me to the hotel. I packed for a 4 a.m. flight and thought about what I had learned.

  It seemed like the only thing I could trust about Gogoladze was the fact that he would try to deceive and mislead me. He had insinuated that an investigation would expose an immoral or unethical relationship between Freddie and Marina. He had implied that Sharmaidze was a bad man whose case did not deserve the benefit of careful scrutiny. And he had suggested that (even without an intervening bullet) Freddie’s death had been imminent. Perhaps the key to understanding Gogoladze was to disregard his specific words and to focus instead on the direction those words were pushing me. If I could figure out what he wanted to accomplish, then I could trust that everything he said or did would be directed toward achieving that goal. And his immediate goal seemed fairly obvious: He wanted me to stop my investigation. The question I couldn’t answer was why he was so concerned.

  I flew home to Texas on the wings of self-satisfaction. Of course, I hadn’t actually accomplished anything. But I had made a heroic gesture. Further effort was demonstrably pointless. I was confident that I had done all that could be done.

  * * *

  However, less than a month after I returned the people of Georgia swept away the basis for my confidence. In November 2003 tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Tbilisi to protest the flawed results of a parliamentary election. Citing the risk of civil war, President Shevardnadze deployed the army to confront the protesters. But in an elegantly theatrical response, the student demonstrators gave red roses to the soldiers. Many of the soldiers received the flowers, laid down their weapons, and embraced the protesters.

  The Rose Revolution had begun. On November 23, a former justice minister named Mikheil Saakashvili led the demonstrators to the parliament building where Shevardnadze was giving a speech. Flanked by thousands of supporters, Saakashvili forced his way into the chamber and—waving a long-stemmed red rose in the president’s face—shouted, “Resign!”

  Shevardnadze’s CIA-trained bodyguards hustled the seventy-five-year-old president out of the building and into history. It was the ignominious end of a spectacular career.

  In his place stood a thirty-five-year-old US-trained lawyer known simply as Misha. In January 2004 Misha was elected president with 96 percent of the vote. In February the parliament amended the constitution to increase the powers of his office. In March his party won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections. He launched a vigorous anticorruption campaign and proposed that Georgia join both the EU and NATO. He sent Georgian troops to join America’s war in Afghanistan. He promised to create an independent judiciary and to correct the excesses of the prior regime. He set about pardoning and rehabilitating political prisoners.

  The United States welcomed him as a Georgian paragon of liberal democratic values. I saw him as a threat to my comfortable life.

  Before Misha, I had a reasonable excuse for not carrying my evidence of Sharmaidze’s innocence to the Georgian judicial system: The country was too chaotic and the government was too corrupt. After Misha, this no longer seemed to be a credible excuse for inaction.

  But in the end it was the professional challenge that seduced me: Could I use my knowledge, skill, training, and experience to minimize the probability of danger while maximizing the possibility of success? I’d never done such a thing and was eager to find out if I could.

  But if I was going to try, I would need a client—and the Woodruff family still lived in Searcy, Arkansas. It made me nervous to think of returning to the little town where I’d grown up. I’d done my best to get as far away from it as I could. The irony was almost comic. I was more reluctant to confront Bible-quoting zealots than gun-toting spies.

  CHAPTER 6

  * * *

  HOMETOWN OF A SPY

  When I was a little boy we would drive through towns like Searcy, Arkansas, and my mother would say, “My God, how can anyone live here?” But then came February 16, 1967, and a doorbell in the middle of the night. Three men in uniform standing on the porch looking embarrassed and saying they were sorry. I was ten years old and my father had just died trying to rescue a fighter pilot shot down over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  After we’d buried him, my mother announced her intention to move our little family away from Lubbock, Texas. A leader in the local church counseled her to choose a city that was home to one of the Bible colleges associated with our fundamentalist sect. She could get her degree while my sister and I attended the affiliated parochial academy.

  That’s how the three of us came to find ourselves in Searcy, a little Arkansas town on the road between St.
Louis and Texarkana. It was hot and humid when we arrived and there seemed to be a wind blowing in from a prior decade. We turned left off the incongruously named Main Street and circled the town square, past a granite Confederate soldier standing perpetual guard outside the antebellum courthouse—a stony reminder that we’d arrived in the Old South, where things changed very slowly.

  A drugstore, a department store, a Sears Roebuck catalogue store—Searcy boasted all the products of American prosperity. There was a pool hall for the men, a baseball field for the children, and a fabric store for the women. A one-screen movie theater offered family entertainment in air-conditioned and racially segregated comfort. There was no place you could buy a beer but lots of places you could save your soul.

  And that was exactly why we’d come. Searcy was home to Harding College—a four-year liberal arts institution associated with the Churches of Christ. The school was proudly fundamentalist and passionately anticommunist. It was a Mecca for innocent, earnest, sincere believers who wanted to change the world. They gladly embraced its regimen of self-discipline, self-denial, deferred gratification, and personal responsibility. They viewed themselves as a small army of holy warriors in the titanic battle of Good against Evil.

  The quality of education was by any measure used in Arkansas academically superior. The disciplines of the academy were rigorously applied in a word-by-word study of the Bible. Students were taught to debate obscure nuances of Greek and Hebrew. Victory depended on careful analysis and a chapter-and-verse knowledge of the holy text.

  The same intellectual diligence employed in study of the sacred was applied in study of the secular. Harding emphasized a Christian duty to do your best in all endeavors—to master a subject, to examine it honestly and thoroughly, to make a judgment about it, and to be prepared to defend that judgment. This made for detail-oriented, highly verbal, stubbornly opinionated people. Students were trained in a cunning (and manipulative) form of persuasion: to identify a person’s core values and to reframe the gospel message in a way that was consistent with those core values. Success was defined in terms of conversion—and conversion was evidenced by immersion baptism.