The Spy Who Was Left Behind

by Michael Pullara

  Moscow had equipped and funded this counterrevolution, and it was an apparent success. They had ejected an uncooperative nationalist irritant and replaced him with an obliging mafia godfather. And they had done it without the United States raising even the hint of an objection. The ruling junta made overtures to the international community, but no one was willing to bestow recognition on the thinly veiled military dictatorship. Fortunately, there was a recently unemployed Georgian with impeccable diplomatic credentials. Eduard Shevardnadze had been out of a job ever since resigning as Soviet foreign minister. Nevertheless, this shrewd political operator—a man Gamsakhurdia had called “an international spider”—was already preparing himself for the next call to service: The lifelong atheist had been baptized into the Georgian Orthodox Church.

  Ioseliani and Kitovani needed legitimacy; the West needed a reliable interlocutor; and Shevardnadze needed rescue from political oblivion. It was a compromise of mutual convenience: If the warlords would bring Shevardnadze into their government, the West would recognize Georgia as a sovereign nation. The perceived benefits appeared to outweigh the apparent risks.

  The heads of Mkhedrioni and the national guard ordered their soldiers to sign petitions begging Shevardnadze to return to Tbilisi. The former first secretary of Georgia’s Communist Party wept at this sincere display of political theater. After suitable protestations and delay, Shevardnadze humbly accepted appointment as acting chairman of the Georgian State Council. International recognition of the unelected government quickly followed.

  However, there were some critics of this Faustian bargain. A reporter from the Moscow News challenged Shevardnadze to explain his alliance with gangsters.

  “Discussing the criminal records of certain people who are now my partners is embarrassing to me,” he said. “One should not be reminded of sins committed in youth. On the contrary, I admire these people who’ve had enough strength, willpower, and courage to overcome all and make a new start in life. Now they are great statesmen.”

  Shevardnadze arrived in Tbilisi on March 2, 1992. He was met at the airport by the warlords. The rivals had already divided the “power ministries” between them: Kitovani would run the Ministry of Defense (and the illegal arms trade) and Ioseliani would control both the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of State Security (and have a monopoly on distribution of fuel). They assigned Shevardnadze a largely ceremonial portfolio. After all, he was the only one of the three who didn’t have his own private army.

  However, Freddie Woodruff was coming to Georgia and all that was about to change. Prior to returning to Tbilisi, Shevardnadze had called former Secretary of State James Baker with an intriguing inquiry: If he accepted the warlords’ invitation and became the junior member of the Georgian State Council, would the United States train and equip his bodyguards? It was a practical question from an astute political survivor. Shevardnadze knew that whoever controlled his personal security held his life in their hands. Throughout his career as a Soviet functionary he had entrusted himself to the care of the KGB’s mighty Ninth Directorate, the section of the civilian spy agency responsible for providing bodyguards to the apparatchik. However, the post-Soviet intelligence services were not necessarily a trustworthy guarantor of Georgian independence.

  So the Silver Fox turned to America. It was a triumph of irony: Gorbachev’s foreign minister had ushered in a new era in which his most trustworthy ally was his former principal adversary.

  Baker and Shevardnadze had been well matched as their nations’ chief negotiators—they were two wily horse traders accustomed to using power and people, but they trusted each other. And in this case they both wanted the same thing: an independent Georgia free of Russian domination.

  Shevardnadze’s question presented breathtaking possibilities, and Baker knew just who to call. In his mind, the mission to train and equip Shevardnadze’s personal security force was an ideal assignment for America’s elite Delta Force. Pursuant to a 1979 agreement, Delta operators were already providing bodyguard training at the State Department’s most threatened embassies. But this operation would be different: 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta was a Tier One national security asset and its deployment inside the former Soviet Union required and received written approval by President Clinton.

  Shevardnadze’s request and America’s response were observed in Moscow with interest and concern. An editorial in Izvestia complained about the implicit insult to the KGB Ninth Directorate. “Was the previous protection really so bad?” it asked ironically.

  In addition to provoking Russian discomfort, the operation also served the broader interests of the new CIA. Since its founding in 1947 the Agency had existed primarily to monitor and frustrate Soviet ambitions. As a result, the implosion of the Evil Empire represented a mortal threat to the CIA. It had lost its raison d’être. Overnight the Agency had become an anachronism: a huge bureaucracy in search of an enemy big enough to justify its budget. The Company was in crisis. How would it re-task its enormous resources in order to convince Congress to continue its $40-billion-a-year appropriation? In order to accomplish this goal, it would need to present itself as the solution to a critical national security problem. Among the issues considered for pride of place were nuclear proliferation, global terrorism, narcotics production and trafficking, illegal arms sales, money laundering, and economic espionage.

  With the possible exception of economic espionage, the nascent Republic of Georgia stood at a crossroads of all these threats. The Georgia operation was a working partnership with a Machiavellian genius who could influence events far outside the borders of his own small country. Shevardnadze was a person of extraordinary accomplishment and his stature demanded an Agency liaison of equally high status. Accordingly, the CIA assigned Freddie Woodruff to interface with the Great Man. The Agency’s assignment of such a senior officer was a compliment to Shevardnadze and a warning to Ioseliani and Kitovani.

  Working together with Delta operators, Woodruff began the process of building a protection force for Shevardnadze. In addition to a bodyguard service, the CIA branch chief created an elite stand-alone special operations force. With a nod to Group Alpha (the KGB’s premier antiterrorist battalion) Woodruff called his company-sized unit “Group Omega.” It was trained, equipped, and intended to give Shevardnadze a military option that he alone could control.

  However, both Shevardnadze’s and Woodruff’s authority over the force was initially limited. Normally, bodyguard services for Georgian officials were provided by a division of the Ministry of State Security, the secretive organization tasked with protecting Georgia from both internal and external threats. But the traditional structure of that ministry had disintegrated when (pursuant to his power sharing agreement with Kitovani) Ioseliani attempted to seize control. Roughly half the professional personnel at the ministry had refused to work under the Mkhedrioni warlord. And so—led by one Igor Giorgadze—they had decamped en masse to Kitovani’s Ministry of Defense.

  The fragmented ministry remained under Ioseliani’s control. However, Ioseliani (unlike Kitovani) did not officially designate himself as head of this agency. His acceptance of such a job would have been a violation of the fourth law in the Thieves’ Code: “A thief must never under any circumstances have a legitimate job.”

  Accordingly, Ioseliani named Irakli Batiashvili—a lieutenant in Mkhedrioni—as chief of the remaining intelligence and information services. In addition, Ioseliani appointed two deputy chiefs under Batiashvili: Shota Kviraya (a former KGB general and Mkhedrioni’s partner in the drug cartel) and the unrelated Avtandil Ioseliani (a longtime security professional).

  Finally, the mafia chief promoted a little-known detective from a minor police substation to be head of Shevardnadze’s personal protection force. As a result, Eldar Gogoladze was not beholden to Shevardnadze for his job. Instead, he belonged to Jaba Ioseliani or to whoever had imposed their will on the mafia godfather.

  Although he was titular hea
d of an operational unit, Gogoladze was not an operator. He was more in the nature of commissar—a political functionary in a military unit. He was there to assure the loyalty of the officers and the obedience of the troops.

  Woodruff brought Gogoladze and Group Omega to the United States for training. The CIA operations officer and the former KGB colonel appeared to be close friends. They worked together during the week and played together during the weekends. The unpopular commissar’s Georgian colleagues generally assumed that Gogoladze was being recruited as an American spy.

  Around that same time, supporters of Gamsakhurdia kidnapped some high-ranking government officials and were holding them in the western Georgian province of Abkhazia. Kitovani and Ioseliani responded by sending national guard and Mkhedrioni troops to (allegedly) rescue the officials. However, after the hostages had been released, the warlords turned their attention to violent suppression of the Abkhaz independence movement. One of the volunteers who went to Abkhazia was a twenty-year-old Georgian named Anzor Sharmaidze.

  After a month of fratricidal fighting, ethnic cleansing, and appalling atrocities by all combatants, the Georgians seized control of most of the restive region. But in the process of reasserting central government authority, Kitovani and Ioseliani threatened Russian interests in Abkhazia. The Black Sea province was home to Russian military bases and (perhaps more importantly) beachside spas, sanatoriums, hotels, and vacation homes owned by the Russian army and Russian intelligence services.

  A ceasefire was negotiated in Moscow but soon violated by the Abkhaz. Foreign fighters (including Russian military and Chechen special forces) entered the fray on the side of the separatists and—over a period of eight months—swept both the Georgian irregulars and the resident Georgian population out of Abkhazia.

  It was an unmitigated disaster. And Shevardnadze used it to consolidate his power.

  In the aftermath of the Abkhaz debacle, Shevardnadze forced Ioseliani’s minister of internal affairs to resign and took direct control of the security portfolio. A conveniently timed parliamentary election allowed him to mobilize popular hatred of the paramilitaries and to force Kitovani to resign as minister of defense.

  Shevardnadze publicly blamed the warlords for the loss in Abkhazia and demanded that both Mkhedrioni and the national guard surrender their weapons. When Ioseliani responded with a fusillade of vulgar insults, Shevardnadze tendered his resignation. Thousands of Georgians poured into the streets and demanded that the government support the chairman. In response, the newly elected parliament formed a unity government, declared a state of emergency, and granted the sly Silver Fox authority to rule by decree.

  He immediately made private militias illegal.

  Kitovani fled to Moscow and his national guard began to disintegrate. Some parts of the organization were folded into official state agencies and other parts simply faded away. Mkhedrioni, meanwhile, attempted to exploit a loophole in the law and rechartered itself as a heavily armed charitable organization. Nevertheless, Ioseliani was becoming isolated. He had originally taken the suite of offices above Shevardnadze to symbolize his dominance over the chairman. But the metaphor had changed: Now the mafia warlord was trapped between Shevardnadze and the sky.

  Under Shevardnadze, the Ministry of Internal Affairs was getting stronger by the day. It controlled remnants of the national guard and welcomed any Mkhedrioni soldier willing to swear loyalty to Shevardnadze. Using Group Omega and a newly trained police force, the government began targeting smaller, more localized paramilitaries. By early 1995 (a year and a half after Woodruff’s murder) the balance of power had swung enough in the government’s favor that the ministry could move directly against Mkhedrioni. Police in eastern Georgia arrested forty-five Horsemen and confiscated a large quantity of automatic rifles.

  On the same day, Shevardnadze issued a decree ordering Mkhedrioni soldiers to hand in their weapons. Ioseliani reluctantly instructed his troops to surrender their guns to the government as a “gesture of good will.” However, he did so only after extensive consultations with Igor Giorgadze—the man who had transferred out of the Ministry of State Security (allegedly) because he refused to work under the mafia chief.

  Meanwhile, Shevardnadze was driving the Russians to distraction by his on-again, off-again commitment to their Commonwealth of Independent States. The Kremlin had conceived the CIS as an economic and security bloc of former Soviet republics—a kind of USSR-lite. But Shevardnadze’s closeness with America threatened that dream of empire redux.

  The Russians attempted to cow him into submission by creating an energy crisis and by provoking two separatist conflicts (i.e., Abkhazia and South Ossetia). But instead of bending Shevardnadze to their will, Moscow’s decision to turn off the flow of Russian oil and gas had an opposite (and wholly unexpected) effect.

  Disintegration of the Soviet Union had created several new oil-rich countries. One of these—landlocked Azerbaijan—had been producing oil in commercial quantities since the ninth century. Its reserves represented a strategically important alternative to Russian and Middle Eastern production. However, at the time of the Georgian energy crisis, the only practical way to access that Azerbaijani oil was via Russian or Iranian railroads or pipelines. In order to break this chokehold, a consortium of Western oil companies undertook to build two pipelines (one oil and one gas) from Baku, Azerbaijan (on the west coast of the Caspian Sea), to Ceyhan, Turkey (on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea).

  The easiest and most efficient route for these pipelines was due west from Baku through Armenia and the Kurdish region of Turkey. But this was a political impossibility: The Azerbaijanis hated and distrusted the Armenians, and the Turks hated and distrusted the Kurds. Thus, as a practical matter, the only available route (that didn’t pass through any of the politically disqualified geography) looped northwest through Georgia and then southwest through Turkey.

  Planning for the Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline began in 1992. Two years later, Shevardnadze negotiated construction of a third line—a pipeline to carry oil from Baku to the Georgian port city of Supsa on the Black Sea.

  The Baku-Ceyhan and Baku-Supsa pipeline projects assured the destitute Republic of Georgia $71.5 million per year in oil transit fees and the right to take in kind up to 5 percent of the pipelines’ annual natural gas throughput. Thanks to Shevardnadze’s political finesse and America’s diplomatic muscle, the little country was obtaining both a secure revenue stream and energy independence from Moscow. This energy alliance with the West was a threat to Russia’s control of its near abroad. And that threat became palpable when (on March 23, 1994) the former Soviet republic joined the NATO-run Partnership for Peace.

  It was a stinging repudiation of the Soviet colonial system and it did not go unnoticed in the Kremlin. Shevardnadze was moving quickly to create the formal institutions of government. He drafted and the parliament approved a new constitution—a compact that among other things restored the office of president and invested it with strong executive powers. Both Ioseliani and Shevardnadze announced their intention to run for this new office.

  Five days later—on August 29, 1995—someone tried to assassinate Eduard Shevardnadze. It happened just as he was leaving the parliament building. The sixty-seven-year-old chairman was on his way to the formal signing of the new constitution when a platter charge was detonated near his limousine. But on this occasion, the chairman’s driver had made an uncharacteristically wide right turn and driven Shevardnadze’s vehicle closer to the horizontally mounted explosive device than the assassins had anticipated. As a result, when the directional mine was command-detonated, the cone of shrapnel was narrower than it would have been if the car had been farther away from the device. Ballistic projectiles ripped the trunk off the car but did not penetrate the passenger cabin. The evening news carried video of Shevardnadze sitting on a hospital chair in his undershirt and looking slightly dazed. His hands, face, and eyelids were cut and spotted with blood. And he was angry.

  “They
are cowards,” he said. “They want to turn Georgia into a country where the mafia rules. But I won’t allow it as long as I’m alive.”

  The day after the bombing the police arrested two of Ioseliani’s lieutenants for attempting to assassinate the chairman. Three weeks later the prosecutor general announced that the two Horsemen had confessed their involvement.

  Shevardnadze immediately declared Mkhedrioni to be an illegal mafia organization. Its membership was decimated by arrest and prosecution. And (according to Igor Giorgadze) after Mkhedrioni was eliminated, its former partner in the drug cartel (Shota Kviraya) doubled his profit-sharing payments to the Shevardnadze family.

  Ioseliani withdrew as a candidate for president to protest what he called Shevardnadze’s rule of terror. He announced that he would, instead, run for parliament. The prosecutor general issued a warrant for his arrest, but did not execute it until after the mafia chief had been defeated in the October election. Ioseliani was found guilty of terrorism and sentenced to eleven years in prison. He was seventy-two years old.

  As with almost everything of importance that happened in Tbilisi, suspicion quickly focused on Russia as the prime mover behind the attack. At a press conference, Shevardnadze was asked if he thought the assassination attempt might be related to the pipeline projects.

  “Now you’re asking the right question!” he said.

  Suspicions about Russian involvement were fueled in part by the fact that Igor Giorgadze—the man that Shevardnadze had appointed minister of information and intelligence after the resignation of Irakli Batiashvili—had made a secret trip to Moscow immediately before the attack. When he refused to explain the purpose of this trip, Shevardnadze removed him from his post. Three days later, at a hastily called press conference, Giorgadze denounced the Shevardnadze regime as a “Mafia State” and announced his intention to move to Moscow. A warrant was quickly issued for his arrest, but he’d already fled the country in a Russian military plane.