The Spy Who Was Left Behind

by Michael Pullara

  Fifteen hundred students marching to heaven in lockstep. Young men with hair above the ears, collar, and eyebrows. Young women with skirts not more than two inches above the knee. No smoking, no drinking, no dancing, no sex. Chapel and Bible class five days a week. Church twice on Sunday and again on Wednesday. A Thursday-evening devotional by the lily pond. A persistent and pervasive social pressure to conform to the appearances of piety.

  Of course, enrollment at Harding did not repeal the rules of human nature. Some students became adept at surreptitiously feeding their animal appetites while maintaining the appearance of moral propriety. Others used the newly acquired tools of logic and analysis to deconstruct the assumptions of faith, all the while demonstrating their rhetorical skills in the pulpit. In order to survive in the dominant culture, these dissenters were required to master the delicate art of living multiple lives.

  All in all it was an ideal education for would-be preachers, lawyers, and spies.

  It was around that time that I first met Jill Woodruff. She was a fifth-grader, in the class behind mine, and the youngest of the three Woodruff sisters. Quiet, watchful, unpretentious, she seemed to glide outside the normal cliquish social circles. Somewhere around the eleventh grade Jill became a full-fledged member of my Class of ’74. We were twenty-eight souls. The middle sister, Chery, was frumpy and cheerful. Although I was five years younger than her, we spent an entire semester together in study hall. I’d been banished from eighth-grade math class for impertinent questions and told to finish the textbook on my own. Chery was good-natured and gracious and seemed to take a special pleasure in calling me impudent. She was, I think, a good judge of character.

  There were two other Woodruff siblings: Freddie and Georgia. They were older and outside the modest social network of a junior high student. I remember seeing Freddie play football for the college team but have no recollection of meeting Georgia. I knew only one thing about her: She’d been named after her father.

  George Woodruff was a fireplug of a man with a thick neck and a bowling ball head. A bald, ruddy-complected, energetic biologist, he was an object of admiration in my provincial universe—an honest-to-goodness man of science who believed the Biblical account of creation. Dr. Woodruff was living proof of Harding’s academic credibility, and as such, he was called upon regularly to teach young believers how to resolve the dissonance between ecclesiastical faith and evolutionary fact.

  I used to sit in on those classes. A tie knotted around his too-small collar, his shirtsleeves rolled up—he was animated, inquisitive, clever, and infectiously positive. He delighted in unanswerable questions and prayed as though he was talking to someone he knew well. He was equal parts preacher, teacher, and coach. He had an impish sense of humor and an obviously unstinting love for his family.

  George was the only boyfriend that his wife Dorothy ever had. Sweet-hearted, fun-loving, and playful, the homemaker was a lifelong participant in children’s games. She rode bikes and jumped on pogo sticks well into her seventies. More obsessively religious than her husband, it was she who had pressed Freddie to become a preacher.

  I lost touch with the Woodruff family when I left Searcy for law school and the big city. But I had been to Tbilisi and wanted to share the results of my investigation. The year was 2004.

  I tracked down Chery Woodruff’s telephone number. She was living in a clapboard house two blocks from the Harding campus. In the thirty years since our last conversation she had married, raised a family, and developed inoperable brain cancer. She lived just long enough to connect me with her older sister.

  “You don’t want me,” she said. “You want to talk to Georgia. She’s always been interested in that stuff.”

  Georgia answered my call on the first ring. Her pronounced Arkansas twang belied her education as a registered nurse. She seemed unpretentious, guileless, and emotionally brittle.

  “Oh, my goodness,” she said. “I want to see everything you’ve got. When can you come to Searcy? Meredith won’t like it, but I don’t care. When can you come?”

  I didn’t know who Meredith was or why she wouldn’t like my visit; nevertheless, I made arrangements and rang off. Two weeks later I flew to Little Rock, rented a car, and drove fifty miles north to Searcy. I was headed for a two-bedroom house just outside of town. The door swung open as I reached the top step.

  “Come in! Come in!” said a slightly disheveled fifty-year-old woman. “I want to know everything. Oh, I wish Daddy could see this.”

  This was Georgia Woodruff Alexander. Bubbling with energy and opinions, she was a bespectacled crusader in search of a next cause. She would prove to be the perfect partner in my quest.

  “Did you know Freddie?” she asked. “Freddie was mean. He had this amazing ability to see your weaknesses and deepest desires—what you wanted and what you feared. And it gave him pleasure to torment you with them. He made my life miserable.”

  It occurred to me that she was unwittingly describing the ideal CIA case officer: someone with the sensitivity of a psychotherapist and the morals of a pimp. A valuable national security asset and an interpersonal train wreck. For the first time I began to comprehend the heartbreaking sacrifices made by spies and their families. The job cultivates behaviors that make normal relationships impossible.

  I showed her my documents, described my analysis, and recounted my interviews. I walked her through my time line and demonstrated the improbability of Sharmaidze’s guilt. I listed the unanswered questions and offered the seemingly obvious conclusion—that Freddie was a hero who had been assassinated in the line of duty.

  This was what I had set out to do, to report to the family and provide the comfort of detailed information. And I was pretty pleased with myself. But only for a minute.

  “This is terrible!” said Georgia. “Daddy worried about this to the day he died. Every night he would get on his knees and pray for that boy in prison. He was so afraid that Sharmaidze was innocent—and now you tell me that he is! What are we gonna do, Michael?”

  It was not the response I had anticipated. The sister of the victim wanted to rescue the man who had confessed to murdering her brother. I looked at this rumpled redhead sitting at the kitchen table and realized that I was in the presence of greatness.

  After a moment’s hesitation I told her what Sharmaidze’s court-appointed lawyer had told me—that the family of the victim could intervene in the criminal case to present new evidence.

  “Well, are you gonna do that for me?” she asked. “I can’t pay you, but we’ve got to do what we can.”

  I felt like a deer caught in headlights. I had come to offer solace and had instead sown disquiet. I had committed the sin of the busybody and was responsible for the mess I’d made. She was calling on me to deliver the comfort I had intended.

  “I’ll try,” I answered. “It won’t be easy, but I’ll try.”

  “Do you think Freddie’s murder had anything to do with Aldrich Ames?” she asked, making a sudden transition to a surprising question. I had mentioned Ames in my narrative but hadn’t emphasized his role. He was one of those questions that had not yet been answered.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “He was in Tbilisi just before the murder—and that does seem oddly coincidental.”

  “I met him the day of Freddie’s memorial service,” she said. “We had a reception at the house and Ames came over. He sat at Meredith’s kitchen table laughing and telling stories all afternoon. I kept thinking how close they must have been—because Ames was really touched by Freddie’s death.”

  It was the second time she’d mentioned Meredith.

  “Yeah, Meredith was Freddie’s second wife,” she said. “His widow. She’s in the CIA too. With all the publicity around Freddie’s death, she had to stop being a covert operative. But she still works for the Agency.”

  Georgia paused. She seemed to be wrestling with an unseen opponent. I waited quietly to see who would win. Finally, she spoke—softly, almost a whisper.

&
nbsp; “Meredith’s not going to like this,” she said. “After the funeral she got the family together and told us that we must never talk about Freddie—not to the press, not to a lawyer, not to anyone. If we do this it’s gonna cause trouble . . . but it’s the right thing to do.”

  There was steel in this woman from Arkansas. She was willing to risk a rupture in her family to save a man she did not know. Such generosity of spirit would require my very best efforts.

  As I prepared to leave, she went into her bedroom and returned with a cardboard box of treasures. “This is my Freddie file,” she said. “The DVD is an interview he gave at Harding. The cassette is his speech at the 1993 Stillwater high school graduation. And that stack of papers—that’s an article published in a Georgian magazine a few months ago. I found it online and had it translated.”

  Georgia had given me a gold mine of context and clues. She let me take it home in my briefcase. The whole file was valuable, but the thing that made my heart race was the videos. In 2004—a decade after his death—I was about to meet Freddie Woodruff.

  The DVD was a part of a series: “Is There Life After a Major in . . . ?” A representative of the alumni association interviewed graduates whose careers were considered interesting or impressive. The focus was on how education at a provincial faith-based college had prepared them for vocational success.

  The interviewer was a diffident mathematics professor, Dean Priest. I recognized him from my time at Harding. He had copious notes, good intentions, and a naive expectation of candor. He was completely unprepared to deal with someone who lied for a living.

  “With us today is Mr. Freddie Woodruff, a 1969 Bible major at Harding,” said Priest. “We all know that there is definitely a great life after a major in Bible—eternal life! But we’ve asked Mr. Woodruff to talk about the secular life he’s had since graduation. He’s a foreign service officer with the Department of State and has been stationed all over the world.”

  Freddie showed no reaction as Priest proclaimed him to be someone that he was not: no tension in his body, no shifting in his seat, no fleeting micro expression on his face. He sat perfectly still, his legs crossed, his hands folded in his lap. A relaxed posture that suggested confidence bordering on arrogance.

  He was bald and wore a mustache—a bushy extravagance that had been forbidden at Harding when he attended. He had a square chin and gray eyes. The lines of his charcoal-gray suit testified to an athletic physique and the potential for physical power. The massive chronometer on his wrist and the oversized ring on his finger bespoke a certain tendency to flamboyance.

  He was a man that women would want and that men would want to be.

  “I always enjoy coming back here,” he said. “Harding deserves a great deal of credit for what I am and where I am.”

  I smiled at the cryptic joke. Freddie was actually telling the truth—but not a truth that the interviewer could comprehend.

  “My parents raised me in such a way that I probably knew the Bible better than anything else,” he said. “When I was young I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life—except for one thing: I wanted to play football. So I chose to come to Harding because here I could do the two things I knew best: football and Bible.”

  I had a vague recollection of seeing him on the field. He was smaller then and played flanker. His first year he caught enough passes to earn an athletic scholarship. But after his second year he married Jacqueline Suella Braddock and was forced to give up both football and his dream of playing for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

  In deference to Harding’s religious objection to divorce, Freddie didn’t mention either the making or the dissolving of this ill-fated union.

  “I had no qualms about majoring in Bible,” he said. “I had an idea that I might become a preacher.”

  Like all Bible majors at Harding, Freddie was required to study Koine Greek—the language in which the New Testament was written. “I did quite well in Greek,” he said. “I don’t know that one is necessarily born with a talent in languages, but that was something I discovered I could do.”

  The other ancient language offered at Harding was Hebrew, and Freddie’s comments about it gave a subtle hint about a professional relationship with the Israeli Mossad. “I didn’t study Hebrew—to my constant regret. I deal with Israeli diplomats quite frequently in my life and it would be fun to have some Hebrew.”

  Freddie’s other academic passion was English literature. “I had enough hours for a major in English except I didn’t have the required modern foreign language credits,” he said. Years later, at its 2012 ceremony to honor fallen colleagues, the CIA memorialized Freddie as “a gifted linguist who had mastered German, Turkish, Greek, and Russian.” But he never got enough modern foreign language credits for a degree in English literature.

  “One of the best things that happened to me is that I enrolled in a course called art appreciation,” he said. “My instructor was Elizabeth Mason.”

  I laughed out loud at the symmetry. Mrs. Mason had been a Bohemian among Puritans, a splash of wild color in a world of monotonous gray. And she had been married to an officer in Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS (the predecessor of the CIA).

  It seemed ironic, and almost portentous, that this would be the person who most profoundly affected young Freddie. The future is always built on the past.

  “I’ll tell you a story,” he said. “I used to live just down the street from the Hermitage in Leningrad. It is perhaps the grandest museum in the world. I had a Russian friend who worked there. One day he said he wanted to show me something but we had to be very careful. He took me down to the basement—quite literally the dungeon of an old castle—and opened a door. The room was damp and smelled of mildew. Inside there were several hundred paintings by the masters: Picasso and Chagall, Malevich and Klee. And they were all rotting. Mrs. Mason taught me to have a feeling about art—and that day in Leningrad I did: I felt just awful.”

  In the chaos that prevailed after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Hermitage disclosed that it had a trove of priceless art that had been stolen from the Nazis during World War II. I wondered if Freddie had been invited to a private showing of this booty. But more than that, I was curious why an American spy had cultivated a relationship with a Russian museum curator.

  His first year after graduation Freddie took a job teaching Bible and English at Great Lakes Christian College. And he continued preaching on the weekends. “Eventually, for personal reasons, I decided that preaching was not the career for me,” he said. “I wanted to go to graduate school and find a job in which I felt more comfortable.”

  But that didn’t happen. Fate was about to intervene.

  In December 1969 the Selective Service System conducted a lottery to determine the order in which men would be drafted for military service during the Vietnam War. The days of the year were represented by numbers and written on small slips of paper. The slips were placed in separate plastic capsules that were mixed in a shoebox and dumped into a deep glass jar. The capsules were then drawn from the jar one at a time. The first number drawn was 258, corresponding to September 14—Freddie Woodruff’s birthday.

  “To this day it’s still the only thing I’ve won in my life,” he said. “It was purely a question of fate.”

  The army gave him an aptitude test and assigned him to language school. “I did well in the Russian language,” he said. “I was sent to West Berlin and worked there as a Russian interpreter for three years.”

  It was in Germany that Freddie was recruited by the CIA. “I met people who were involved in foreign policy and various aspects of international relations,” he said. “I was able to talk to them about a lot of different things. I had an interesting story to tell and frankly they liked me.”

  By the time his tour of duty was over, he had earned a masters in psychology. “I’ve never practiced psychology as a professional discipline,” he said, “but I think I probably use it every day in my job.”

  I was pretty sure
that was true.

  After discharge from the army he went home to Oklahoma, and again enrolled in graduate school, and waited for a call from the Agency. He took courses in international relations, international agricultural economics, and petroleum marketing.

  Finally the call came—but Freddie couldn’t tell the truth about who had actually placed it. “I was close to thirty years old before I became a career foreign service officer with the Department of State,” he said. “My specialty is the Soviet Union. I deal with Soviets on a daily basis. I’ve had dinner in the Kremlin and talked to Leonid Brezhnev in his own language. I have a lot of pride in what’s happened to me. And I wouldn’t do it differently.”

  At the time of the interview Freddie was stationed in Turkey. “I’m living right in the middle of my freshman Western civilization course,” he said, “right in the heart of the Apostle Paul’s missionary journeys. Western Civ was probably the last history course I took, but somehow I was instilled with a hunger to keep learning—hopefully for the rest of my life.”

  In a subtle hint about the focus of Cold War espionage, he admitted two specific weaknesses in his formal education. “My life, my profession revolve around technology and economics,” he said, “and I wish I had a little better understanding of them. Technology transfers, wealth transfers—these are matters of great interest to everybody. I probably should have paid a little more attention to my science and economics courses. I’m trying to teach myself, but I wish I’d started earlier.”

  The DVD had been made before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The VHS cassette had been recorded after. Freddie was giving the commencement address at his high school alma mater. It was May 1993.