Russia refused to extradite Giorgadze and his name was added to the list of Interpol’s most wanted fugitives. During his tenure as minister, Giorgadze had worked to dismantle Group Omega. He delivered much of their American high-tech gear to Georgian Group Alpha—a pro-Russian antiterrorist unit he had formed around a nucleus of Georgian veterans of Soviet Group Alpha.
Notwithstanding the obvious rivalry between the two units, Shevardnadze accused Group Alpha and Group Omega of having conspired together in the assassination plot. Government police arrested operators from both units and government courts imprisoned them. By the time he was finished, Shevardnadze had used the defeat in Abkhazia, the Russian energy embargo, and his own attempted assassination to eliminate all of his principal rivals. The anarchy of paramilitaries had been checked by legitimate police power. The dictatorship of warlords had been toppled by democratic elections. And Georgia’s vulnerability to Russian domination had been offset by new alliances and new pipelines.
Shevardnadze had done the impossible: In less than four years, he had built a government.
By 1999, that government’s monopoly on violence was sufficiently secure that Shevardnadze was able to be magnanimous. He pardoned hundreds of people convicted of offenses related to the civil war and the assassination attempt—including the sculptor Tengiz Kitovani and the mafia chief Jaba Ioseliani.
But Anzor Sharmaidze was still in jail.
CHAPTER 8
* * *
“THE AMERICANS KNEW EVERYTHING”
Early on in any representation a lawyer must identify the various outcomes that will constitute victory or defeat for his or her cause. This process will form the foundation of the lawyer’s strategy and the measure of his or her success.
My client had given me a general statement of her objective—to get Anzor Sharmaidze out of jail. To accomplish this goal I would need to file a legal proceeding in Georgia alleging the existence of new evidence, which could be proof that Anzor was innocent or proof that someone else was guilty.
Both of these were dangerous claims. A lot of people had invested a lot of effort to make sure that Anzor went to prison, and I was fairly sure they would not take kindly to being called torturers and perjurers. At the same time there was a very real murderer on the loose who would most likely take umbrage at the prospect of being publicly accused.
I concluded that the single-minded pursuit of either claim could end with Anzor or me being killed. Such an outcome would indeed be a strategic defeat for my cause.
Accordingly, I would argue that new evidence proved Anzor’s innocence. But I would demand on behalf of the Woodruff family that no additional prosecutions be undertaken—either for Freddie’s murder or for Anzor’s wrongful incarceration. In this way, I hoped to diminish the sting of Anzor’s eventual exoneration and to placate the guilty parties’ legitimate fears of impending retribution.
It was a tenable game plan; nevertheless, when I was making arrangements to return to Tbilisi I asked Lali if I could sleep on the couch in her spare room. Strategy is one thing, but physical safety is something else altogether. I hoped that the stringent obligations of Georgian hospitality would provide me with some small measure of protection.
But it was, at best, a token gesture. The mystery I was trying to unravel was important enough to someone that they’d murdered Freddie Woodruff to keep it secret. I would need to tread very carefully if I did not want to be that person’s next victim.
I arrived to find the Rose Revolution in full bloom. President Saakashvili was doing everything he could to show that the old regime had been completely demolished. Every day commandos dressed in black fatigues raced around the city arresting corrupt former ministers. Every night the local news broadcast video of soldiers with automatic weapons bravely subduing potbellied middle-aged men. The downtrodden cheered to see the elite face swift and certain justice. It was political theater of the first order.
However, the principal objective appeared to be practical. The venal former ministers were able to secure their release in exchange for forfeiture of ill-gotten gains. The government—which did not have any effective taxation system—was accumulating much-needed capital while trying to teach a civics lesson.
I was encouraged by the young president’s pragmatism, but could not help wondering how Georgia funded its government operations without any tax revenues. How Saakashvili was running a government with no visible means of support presented an intriguing question; however, my immediate concerns were more pedestrian. I needed to interview the witnesses whose testimony had convicted Anzor of murder.
The US embassy’s twenty-page summary of the trial provided a road map of the evidence linking Anzor to the crime. The proof described in the memo fell into three broad categories: eyewitness testimony, forensic evidence, and Anzor’s confession.
Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. They misperceive, misremember, misreport, and lie. By contrast, forensic evidence is objective and verifiable. It is derived using scientific methods and unlike a human witness cannot be bribed or bullied.
Because of this, I wanted to start my examination with the autopsy and ballistics.
Lali arranged a meeting with medical examiner Levan Chachuria and translated our conversation. Chachuria had testified that Freddie was shot in the forehead just above the right eyebrow and that the bullet had exited the back of his skull above and behind the right ear. I was curious to know how this man of science had arrived at a conclusion directly opposite from that reached by the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.
We met in the morgue at the Kamo Street Hospital—the same facility to which Gogoladze had delivered Freddie’s body. Chachuria was having morning tea with two colleagues. He introduced them as doctors who had assisted him in the autopsy. And he made a point to tell me how many decades each of them had been practicing.
I looked around the lab and noted a distinct absence of sophisticated scientific equipment. There was a microscope, a scale, a few surgical instruments—but none of the technology that defines modern pathology. I asked about the protocols for conducting an autopsy in Georgia.
“It’s the same as in the US,” Chachuria said. “But in this case we did not examine the thorax or abdomen. At the specific request of the Americans, we limited our procedures to the head.”
This contradicted completely FBI reports confirming American requests that no autopsy be performed on the victim’s head. However, Chachuria assured me that he had been given unfettered discretion to dissect Freddie’s brain.
He opened the file on his desk and began reciting the principal findings from the autopsy. There was a 1.2 × 0.4 cm puncture wound above the right eye and a gaping 15 × 9 cm compound wound above and behind the right ear.
“I remember I could see bone fragments and brain matter through the larger wound,” he said. “But I never found the bullet. It wasn’t in the body and wasn’t in the car.”
Based on this visual examination Chachuria had concluded that a projectile entered Woodruff’s skull in the front and exited from the rear.
“I saw a thousand of these during the war in Abkhazia,” he said. “There is no doubt.”
He was absolutely certain. And absolutely wrong.
This was the expert opinion he had offered at Anzor’s trial—and it appeared to have the credibility of scientific method; however, it was nothing more than the subjective observations of an unreliable eyewitness. Chachuria had misperceived and therefore had misreported. This was not forensic evidence at all.
I told him that American pathologists had examined the bone fragments using a scanning electron microscope and that (based on the beveling of the fractures) they had concluded with 100 percent certainty that Freddie was shot in the back of the head.
He laughed. “These Americans depend too much on their toys,” he said. “Even a beginner could tell that this man was shot from the front.”
I asked him if he had measured the diameter of the bullets used in Sharma
idze’s rifle to determine whether they would make a hole the size of the alleged entry wound. He dismissed the question as irrelevant.
“The bullet began to break up as soon as it struck the car,” he said. “Only a fragment of the bullet struck the victim. The remaining parts of the bullet did not enter the victim’s body.”
Several seconds passed before I grasped the significance of what I’d just heard. At Sharmaidze’s trial the ballistics expert had testified that the blunted bullet had passed intact through a rubber gasket and fragmented upon impact with Freddie’s skull. However, Chachuria had now opined that the bullet had fragmented before impacting Freddie’s skull. The two prosecution experts did not agree about a fundamental fact in the government’s case.
I wondered aloud whether Chachuria was unfamiliar with the design details of the Niva 1600 or unaware of the location of alleged penetration. He grunted and led me to the parking lot where we inspected his own Niva 1600. He told me that he had seen Gogoladze’s identical vehicle a few days after the murder and that he had actually put his finger in the bullet hole.
He showed me the exact location: the upper right-hand corner of the hatch, just above and behind the gasket that ringed the window. I pulled back the black rubber strip and saw that the glass overlapped the metal frame by a few centimeters and that the rubber gasket extended beyond the upper edge of the glass. I knew from the FBI investigation that none of the glass in the Niva had been cracked or broken by bullet penetration. That meant that if the murder occurred in the manner alleged by the prosecutor the bullet had to have penetrated both rubber and metal before striking Freddie. Thus, the ballistics expert was wrong when he said that Freddie’s head was the first hard thing that the bullet hit.
This was no mere academic exercise. If the bullet fragmented upon impact with Freddie’s skull, then the shrapnel would have been (at least initially) contained in his body. If the bullet fragmented upon impact with the car, and only a single fragment struck Freddie’s skull, then there had been unaccounted-for fragments flying around the passenger compartment at supersonic speeds. What happened to that shrapnel? And why was there no other evidence of injury or damage?
I had always assumed that if a prosecutor was going to invent a story to frame an innocent man, good manners and professionalism required that the invented story be at the very least consistent. But this one wasn’t. The more I pulled at it, the more it unraveled.
We left the hospital (and the resolutely amiable Chachuria) and drove to the offices of a local magazine that had published an exposé on Freddie’s murder—the same article that Georgia Woodruff Alexander had found and given to me. I was eager to meet the authors because they clearly had access to evidence I’d never seen.
Sopiko Chkhaidze and Inga Alavidze were among a handful of reporters who were inventing journalism in post-Soviet Georgia. Their youthful appearance belied their serious professional competence. With help from a Western NGO the pair had submitted a FOIA request to the FBI. I thumbed through their stack of documents and quickly realized that they were not identical to the ones that I had received from the Bureau: There were subtle and not-so-subtle differences in the redactions. I could not tell if the variations were intentional or accidental; nevertheless, they did provide an insight into the censor’s agenda: In its production to me the FBI had been careful to delete any reference to the political implications of either Freddie’s murder or the subsequent investigations. The Bureau had been less scrupulous about these things in its production to Sopiko and Inga.
Of far more interest were documents the journalists had obtained directly from Georgian government files. One was a thirty-page report prepared by Woodruff regarding narcotics trafficking in the Caucasus. It had been written in English for submission to the CIA, but somehow a copy had ended up in the files of the Georgian intelligence service. In the report Woodruff described two routes used by an Iranian drug baron to truck Afghan heroin from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea. One route began in Baku, transited near the Pankisi Gorge, and ended at Sarpi, a Georgian village on the border with Turkey. The other route began in Iran, passed through the Georgian port of Poti, and disappeared in the chaos of Abkhazia. The report identified by name the Georgian officials and Russian generals who were providing protection to this multimillion-dollar illicit enterprise.
I wondered if this was one of the Agency papers that Aldrich Ames had delivered to his Russian masters. It was very dangerous information. And knowing it could get a man killed.
Sopiko and Inga peppered me with questions: What was the Woodruff family’s goal? Why were they motivated to help a Georgian man they’d never met? Who was paying for all this? I answered as best I could—but no matter what I said or did, I wasn’t going to be able to explain it to them. For the average Georgian, it was impossible to imagine the family of the victim wanting justice for the alleged perpetrator.
On the way home we stopped at a neighbor’s kitchen for Georgian takeout—chicken salad with walnuts and pomegranates. This was embryonic capitalism: a woman making a business using her stove, a scrawny bird, and a half-dozen recycled plastic trays. Lali promised to return our tray when we came for the next day’s meal.
In the morning I unfolded my six-foot-one-inch body from Lali’s five-foot-ten-inch couch. There was a shower stall made of cinder blocks at the far end of the kitchen. Following instructions given the night before, I opened the water shut-off valve, turned on the gas flow, and lit the pilot in the tankless water heater. I climbed inside the circular shower curtain and tried to figure out how I was going to wash my feet in a space that was too small to bend over. It required both flexibility and a certain amount of shameless daring.
Lali sent me to the corner bakery for tonis puri—a canoe-shaped Georgian bread baked on the inner wall of a tandoor oven. I bought two loaves for about four cents. We ate it with butter and leftover chicken salad as she planned our day.
Our first stop was the ballistics expert. We met at his office in a police substation. Zaza Altunashvili had an open smile, a firm handshake, a blue button-down shirt, and khaki pants. He had attended an international program at the FBI Academy and returned to Tbilisi affecting the mien and manner of a special agent—like a college student who spends a year studying at Oxford and returns to West Texas wearing a tweed jacket and drinking tea with milk. Altunashvili was eager to talk about the Woodruff case. It was, he said, one of his proudest moments.
In 1993 he was young, enthusiastic, and inexperienced—but had been singled out to work on the murder of the American diplomat. The chief of police had asked him to reinspect the Niva. It was his first important assignment; the first time he’d been asked for by name; and the first time he’d been invited to participate on a high-profile case.
The older investigators thought the assignment was both an insult and a waste of time. They had gone over the Niva carefully and had reached a unanimous conclusion: There was no bullet hole in that car. They were convinced that the fatal bullet had come in through the open front passenger window. And they were annoyed that the chief had sent an unseasoned boy to check their work.
Gogoladze’s car was parked inside the fence that surrounded the old Parliament Building. The minister of internal affairs had moved it there for safekeeping on the night of the murder, and it had been there ever since—doors and windows shut, baking in the August sun.
Altunashvili walked out of the ministry offices to begin his reexamination just after lunch, he told us. He pressed the button on the Niva tailgate, lifted the hatch, and was immediately drenched in the putrid smell of decayed human flesh. Superheated air belched out of the open car and into his lungs. His head spun, his knees buckled, he almost fainted. He stumbled blindly to a nearby tree and vomited.
“I could hear the older investigators laughing inside the office,” he said. It was an inauspicious beginning.
After several minutes he steeled himself and returned to the car. The back seat and floorboard were painted in blood, a mod
ern-art spatter on the ceiling and front seats. The pattern suggested that the bullet had come from behind the victim. A tear in the headliner—tracing from the back right toward the left front—seemed to confirm this observation. Altunashvili then turned his attention to the section of the hatch that aligned with the tear. There, in the upper corner just behind the victim’s head, was a bullet hole. He followed it through to the external ply of metal and found a corresponding entry hole.
“The holes were close to the rubber gasket that ringed the hatchback window,” he said, “but they were clearly visible to the naked eye.”
He measured the diameter of the holes and calculated the caliber of weapon that had made them. He plotted the trajectory of the bullet and searched for the lead slug. He didn’t find it—it wasn’t in the corpse and it wasn’t in the car—and he had no real idea where it had gone.
“It probably flew out the open passenger window,” he said.
When he had finished, Altunashvili closed up the Niva and walked into the ministry offices to announce his discovery. The older investigators were incredulous. “Little boy, little boy,” they said. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
He could feel the wet heat of embarrassment climbing up his neck—but he persisted.
“There is a bullet hole,” he said. “And I found it.”
Determined to put down the insolent upstart, the older investigators trooped en masse out the door and across the gravel parking lot.
“I will never forget the feeling I had when the laughter suddenly stopped,” he said.
Later that day he was given the honor of reporting his findings directly to the deputy chief investigator. “The bullet hole had a diameter of approximately 5.62 millimeters,” he said. “The same diameter as the bullet fired by the defendant’s AK-74 assault rifle.”
“What about fragmentation?” I asked. “Did you do any studies to determine what happened to the bullet on impact?”
The Spy Who Was Left Behind Page 13
