The Spy Who Was Left Behind

by Michael Pullara

  “We want you to review the new evidence,” I said, “to reopen the criminal case, reverse the conviction, and let Anzor out of prison.”

  Irakli looked perplexed. And suspicious.

  “But why?” he asked. “Are you from the US government?”

  “No,” I said, “my government is not involved in this effort. I represent Freddie Woodruff’s sister.”

  “But . . . why do you care?” he asked. “Does the family get money if Woodruff was killed by someone other than Anzor?”

  It had never occurred to me that I would be called upon to justify my client’s kindness. I had never thought to characterize her motivations or quantify her stake in the outcome. She and I shared a common heritage in which the justification was obvious—sometimes you do a thing simply because it is the right thing to do.

  “No,” I said, “there is no profit for the Woodruff family.”

  The prosecutor general remained incredulous. His silence was pregnant with skepticism. He wanted more.

  “The Woodruffs are religious people,” I said. “They believe it is a sin for them to allow an innocent man to languish in prison if they have the power to set him free.”

  Irakli began to fidget impatiently. Obviously, my client’s true motivation was not in his mind a sufficient basis for her extraordinary request. I needed to think like a Georgian.

  “Freddie had children,” I said, “and the truth of his death matters to them. It is one thing if their father was killed by a drunk on the side of the road. It is another thing altogether if he died in combat with the enemy. So long as Anzor’s conviction stands, they cannot claim their father was a hero.”

  Both the prosecutor general and his chief investigator nodded their heads in approval. This was an explanation they could understand: family pride in the courage of their honored dead.

  “Good,” said Irakli, “very good. Now tell me—what is your new evidence?”

  I told him about the AFIP autopsy and the microscopic reconstruction of Freddie’s skull fragments. “According to the American pathologists,” I said, “this reconstruction proved with a hundred percent certainty that Freddie was shot in the back of the head. This means that the prosecution’s theory of what happened—that Anzor killed Freddie by shooting him in the forehead—is demonstrably false.”

  I told him about the US embassy official who’d observed that Freddie’s body was in an advanced state of rigor when it was delivered to the hospital. “But rigor mortis does not begin until at least two hours after death,” I said. “This means that the prosecution’s time line—their theory of when the murder occurred—is wrong. And that means that Anzor has an alibi for the actual time of the murder.”

  I told him about the Batiashvili affidavit and the FBI memo regarding the Bureau’s first inspection of Eldar’s Niva. “The former head of Georgia’s intelligence service swears that the police planted a shell casing from Anzor’s rifle so they could tie him to the scene,” I said. “And an FBI special agent reported that when he examined the car on the day after the murder there was no bullet hole in either the glass or the metal skin. This suggests that at the time of the shooting the car was stopped and the rear hatch was open—and that contradicts the prosecution’s theory of how the murder occurred.”

  And I told him about the US Naval Observatory and the exact time of sunset in Natakhtari on August 8, 1993. “The eyewitnesses all testified that it was very dark when Freddie was shot. And the prosecution claimed that one of the reasons that Anzor fired his rifle was because Eldar had failed to dim his high-beams. But it is an objective fact that—even if the murder occurred as late as nine p.m.—it was not dark. This fact impeaches the witnesses and discredits the prosecution’s theory of why the murder occurred.”

  The prosecutor general was taking notes. He asked a few more polite questions, told me to deliver copies of the relevant documents to the chief investigator, and promised to respond promptly. It was businesslike and mildly anticlimactic.

  As he ushered us out of his office, I had the distinct impression that none of my so-called new evidence was particularly new to the prosecutor general. And if that was true, then simply telling him things that he already knew wasn’t going to have much effect. I needed to re-engineer the process: to present my request in a way that made the government believe it was in their best interest to release Anzor.

  In a complicated lawsuit it is often necessary for a lawyer to gain a deep understanding of the other party’s interests: what they want and what they fear. With such detailed knowledge it is sometimes possible to formulate a settlement agreement that allows the parties—both plaintiff and defendant—to benefit from a resolution of their dispute. This is what I hoped to accomplish in my negotiation with the Georgian government.

  But I had absolutely no idea where to start. I had a tourist’s knowledge of Georgia, and I was never going to develop the kind of deep understanding that would allow me to efficiently empathize with the Georgian people. But I’d seen enough of the world to know that every society maintains a repository of its core cultural values and uses that chronicle to indoctrinate new arrivals. It occurred to me that if I could access that record I could learn (in broad concepts) the nuances of the Georgian psyche.

  “Lali,” I asked, “what’s your favorite Georgian fairy tale?”

  As it turned out, the answer was easy: The Knight in the Panther’s Skin. It was every Georgian’s favorite fairy tale. I spent the next week studying Shota Rustaveli’s nine-hundred-year-old epic and extending my departure date. It gave me something to do as I waited for a reply from the prosecutor general. The FBI documents had forewarned me about the Georgian tendency to regretfully offer a critical meeting or interview for a day after the agents were scheduled to leave. It was a deft exploitation of our Western devotion to timetables. The Georgians could appear to be cooperative without actually having to cooperate. But I had read Rudyard Kipling and knew that only a fool tries to hustle the East. So I resolved to be patient and to always buy a ticket that could be changed without additional fees.

  I marked the eleventh anniversary of Freddie’s murder standing on the side of the Old Military Road three hundred meters north of the turnoff to the Natakhtari Drain. This respectful observance proved to be a useful experience: At 10 p.m. on August 8—an hour after the time when Woodruff was allegedly shot—there was still sufficient sunlight that I could read a book without difficulty. Clearly, the witnesses who swore to the presence of total darkness were being less than candid.

  After a few days I called my client to report my general lack of progress. I was beginning to worry that the prosecutor general might be ignoring my request. But Georgia Woodruff Alexander dispelled that concern completely.

  “Damn, Michael. What have you done?” she said.

  She’d gotten an unannounced visit from Freddie’s widow. Meredith’s superiors at the CIA had questioned her about my activities in Tbilisi. Had she hired a lawyer? Was she trying to reinvestigate the murder? Did she ask for the case to be reopened?

  “She was upset, Michael,” said Georgia. “She told them she didn’t have anything to do with it. And then she got on a plane and flew down here to Arkansas to talk to me.”

  According to Meredith, the prosecutor general had contacted the Americans to find out if I was acting on behalf of the CIA. The Agency had denied any association with me and said that they were completely satisfied with the outcome of the Georgian legal process.

  “She said you were wasting your time, Michael—that there are a lot of prisoners in American jails that deserve your help more than Anzor does.”

  It was a sobering conversation. A covert agency that normally refuses to “confirm or deny” the identity of alleged associates had explicitly disavowed me. What little protection I had derived from ambiguity was now gone. In addition, the American government had expressed an opinion regarding an American citizen’s application to reopen Anzor’s prosecution: They were satisfied with the status quo.


  This was a heavy and disappointing thumb on the scales of Georgian justice. My country had effectively vetoed the Woodruff family’s request to free an innocent man.

  I felt moderately queasy and immoderately disgusted. I needed a counterweight—something to offset this bureaucratic amorality. I needed a pugnacious ally who took pleasure in exposing duplicity and corruption. I needed narcissistic egoists with access to every home and office in Tbilisi. I needed the press.

  Lali arranged the interviews. She had once again found the necessary names and telephone numbers in her oversized purse. But for her these weren’t journalists; they were just current and former students to whom she had taught English.

  I had meetings with several newspaper reporters over the following days—sitting in Lali’s parlor wearing a suit and trying to explain the details of the FBI investigation. The journalists were young, earnest, and overwhelmingly female. They had studied the story and struggled to understand its broader implications. But their first question was always about me. Why was I doing this? After a while, the inquiry began to embarrass me. These young journalists simply didn’t accept that curiosity and idealism were sufficient explanations for my quest. I worked hard to stay on message, to allow the evidence to speak for itself, to avoid speculation and criticism. I wanted to inform the public without inflaming their political masters.

  “Michael Pullara is a soft-spoken man in lawyer shirt-and-tie and small specs,” said one article. “He speaks slowly, answering questions unhurriedly and often via much back-ground. I should think this is how he gets answers—by quiet tenacity, rather than the bulldog approach. In Georgia he employs ‘humility’ to investigate rather than harsh noise. And he says he’s ‘insatiably curious’ enough to listen to anyone who’ll talk to him.”

  But the reporters were persistent in trying to assign both responsibility and blame. Who did this to Anzor? And should they be punished?

  It was a dangerous line of inquiry with potentially lethal consequences. I answered very carefully. “The closest Pullara will go to apportioning blame is to make the Time culpable. ‘It was a very fragile state. The consequences . . . could have resulted in the collapse of the state of Georgia or the US-Georgian relations or of Shevardnadze.’ He thinks Anzor Sharmaidze may have been the necessary scapegoat of that Time; the sacrificial lamb of that lawless, chaotic, post–civil war period, which demanded ‘hard decisions to save Georgia in 1993.’ ”

  But the reporters were unsatisfied. To them, it was naive to suggest that law enforcement officials had arrested a possibly innocent man on the basis of some higher national ideals.

  “Usually,” said one reporter, “it’s about saving their own skin.”

  And in this case the law enforcement official who had arrested a possibly innocent man was Eldar Gogoladze.

  What did I think of him? Had he acted on the basis of a higher national ideal or to save his own skin?

  The answer to this question was my Rubicon. If I publicly identified the former KGB colonel as a perpetrator, then he would become my blood enemy. And Eldar Gogoladze was a very dangerous man. I had known this day was coming since I interviewed him in his opulent office atop the Cartu building. I had examined the evidence from every perspective and come away with a single inescapable conclusion: Eldar was an unreliable witness.

  And it was time that I said so.

  “Gogoladze saw how it happened,” I answered. “The level of his error suggests that he knows he is mistaken.”

  As I had hoped, this sent the reporters scurrying off to interview the man.

  And in the meantime, I was going to be on TV.

  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a frenetic explosion of independent television stations in the newly emerging democracies. Western technological innovation had put the cost of creating a rudimentary TV channel within the easy reach of many people.

  These stations became a rallying point for opposition political parties. They gleefully and effectively revealed official caprice, cupidity, and crime. The government would eventually take steps to corral these experiments in unrestricted free speech. But for the moment, the independent broadcasters could talk about anything they wanted to—and they wanted to talk about Anzor Sharmaidze.

  ZTV operated out of a repurposed office building in the central business district. I arrived an hour early for the late-night news program and was ushered into the makeup suite (a cramped windowless room with lighted mirrors and three barber chairs).

  There was a thirty-something man sitting in the third chair and having foundation rubbed on his face. Lali introduced him as Giga Bokeria—the son of her best friend and (incidentally) a close advisor to President Saakashvili.

  Giga was a big man with a big head. He had penetrating dark eyes and restless energy. He looked at me with an open mouth and grunted as he got out of the chair.

  “I know about this case,” he said. “You should skip the lawsuit and apply to the president for a pardon.”

  And with that he was gone—off to an interview regarding some new European Union initiative in Georgia.

  I was intrigued that someone in the president’s inner circle knew enough about my project to offer a suggested solution. But there was a big problem with Giga’s proposal: In order to be considered for a pardon, Anzor had to confess to a crime he didn’t commit.

  And that wasn’t something he was eager to do.

  The makeup artist rubbed foundation on my face. When she finished, I went outside to escape the heat and the acrid smell of perspiration. I walked slowly down the concrete stairs toward the cobblestone plaza. At the foot of the steps there was a gaggle of Georgian men having an animated conversation. I sidled up to this group and was immediately spotted by the man in the center. He barked something in Georgian and I apologized in English.

  “You’re American,” he said, switching to my language. “Why are you here?”

  I said something about Anzor and the man turned to face me.

  “I remember the case,” he said. “I was mayor of Tbilisi when Woodruff was murdered. I went to the jail to see the prisoner Sharmaidze.”

  He paused as if remembering. His eyes seemed to change focus as he looked more at his memory than at me. Then he whispered something, almost a sigh.

  “Oh, how they beat that boy,” he said.

  The night was warm, but I felt a sudden chill. Just then Lali came to the front door of the building. It was time for the interview.

  The manager at ZTV was one of Lali’s former colleagues from Shevardnadze’s office. He had handled public relations for the president and met her as an old friend. Once again, her stature gave me status.

  He guided me into the studio—an oversized office made small by too much furniture and equipment. Tamaz Inashvili was sitting on a dais at the far end of the room. I took a seat next to him as someone gave me a microphone and earbud. I could hear Lali’s voice through the earpiece. She had taken a place in the control room and was prepared to simultaneously translate everything that was said during the program.

  The host and main interrogator was a skinny kid who could not have been more than five years out of university. He wore an electric-blue suit and rainbow suspenders. Seeing him reminded me of a fundamental fact about the Rose Revolution: It was as much intergenerational as it was political. The young had thrown out the old and taken their place at the table.

  The man in rainbow suspenders was supported by a cast of four equally youthful correspondents. Each sat at a small desk with a large computer. I think the staging was intended to give the impression that the news team was using the Internet to fact-check every statement. But—as is often the case with manipulated impressions—this one was false. The computers weren’t even turned on.

  There was a prerecorded background video about the murder and the trial—images of Anzor standing in a courtroom cage wearing a heavy winter coat. Lali translated every word into my right ear. It was hard to concentrate on what I was seein
g and at the same time on what she was saying. It only got worse when I talked and she translated my words into Georgian.

  The moderator started slowly—who was my client?

  I identified Freddie’s sister, Georgia Woodruff Alexander. I wasn’t worried that the audience would confuse her name with the name of their country. To a Georgian, I wasn’t in Georgia; I was in Sak’art’velo.

  I talked a little about my new evidence and the status of my application to the prosecutor general.

  The host listened to the translation, smiled, and spat out a question. Even before I heard the translation, I knew it was aggressive: Wasn’t this just an attempt to prove that Freddie died “in the line of duty” so that the family could get more money?

  I took a breath. The question felt like bait—as though the host was trying to provoke a defensive reaction.

  “No,” I said softly. “There is no way for my client to profit from this. And Freddie’s widow and children have already received all the benefits they can from the US government.”

  “Then why is she doing it?” he asked. “And why do we need an American lawyer to come to Georgia?”

  “I’ve come because my client asked me to come,” I said. “And my client asked me to come because she’s discovered evidence that Anzor Sharmaidze is innocent. The Woodruffs are pious people, Christian believers. And they believe it is their obligation to help free the innocent.”

  “So you’re some sort of hero?” he asked.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “The only hero here is Tamaz Inashvili. He has stood by his client at great personal risk. He has continued to fight for Anzor’s freedom against almost impossible odds. He has demonstrated himself to be everything that a lawyer should be.”

  “So it’s all for Anzor?” he asked. “You want him to get money?”

  “Anzor was a soldier,” I said. “And the murder of Freddie Woodruff was a dagger pointed at the heart of the new republic. The country called on Anzor to make a sacrifice for the people—and he answered the call. He gave Georgia the very best years of his life. But the need for sacrifice has passed; the war is over. And when a war is over, the prisoners get to go home. It is time for Anzor to go home.”