The Spy Who Was Left Behind

by Michael Pullara

  “But do you think he should get money?” asked one of the junior journalists.

  “This is not a question for me,” I said. “This is a question for Georgia and her people: Do you think he should get money? My only observation is that you or I would probably want a lot of money if we were wrongly forced to spend a dozen years in prison for a crime we did not commit. And—as the poet Rustaveli said a long time ago—the justice you give is the justice you will get.”

  A woman sitting at the second row of tables had stopped the pretense of computer use and was just listening. She and the host started asking a question at the same time, but she talked over him.

  “Who did it?” she asked. “Who murdered Freddie Woodruff and framed Anzor Sharmaidze? And what do you think should happen to them?”

  It was the most dangerous part of the interview. I checked my attitude and doubled down on humility.

  “My client does not care who killed Freddie,” I said. “Punishing the guilty will not make Freddie any less dead. We are only concerned about the wrongful incarceration of an innocent man. We’re not asking the government to prosecute the real murderer or the people who framed Anzor. But if something happens to Anzor in prison, we will know that the people who framed him still have power in government. His continued safety will be evidence of the current government’s innocence.”

  The producer gave a signal, the camera zoomed in on the host as he described the next night’s program, and it was over. I was exhausted. I had no idea how long it had lasted.

  Tamaz wanted to ask me a question, but we had to wait until Lali arrived to translate. Finally she did.

  “How did you know?” he asked. “How did you know about the call?”

  “What call?” I said.

  According to Tamaz, the recent spate of activity had frightened someone involved in either the murder or the cover-up. They had found out that Anzor had a contraband cellphone, gotten the telephone number, and called him. They had told him that if he didn’t drop the application to reopen his case, they would kill him in prison.

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “I really didn’t know. I was only trying to encourage the government to keep him safe.”

  The reality of the situation kept me awake most of the night. People were willing to kill to keep these secrets. And they’d already killed one American. What was one more?

  A few days later Lali took me to a reception at the Sheraton Metechi Palace—EU diplomats celebrating EU diplomats for publishing a Georgian model commercial code. Several of the ambassadors recognized me from my recent appearance on television. One of them—an angular Italian in a gorgeous suit and red glasses—was particularly enthusiastic. He congratulated me with a gusto that suggested I had actually accomplished something.

  The accolades seemed odd to me: I had been on TV, but Anzor was still in prison.

  Just then I saw a man across the room with a long-lens camera. It appeared that I was a principal focus of his photographic interest. I moved several times in order to test this impression. I positioned obstacles between us, and (each time) he moved to clear the view. Click-click-click-click-click. I could hear the camera. And his voice as he excused himself through the crowd. He was American.

  Apparently, the embassy had noticed me and wanted to build a file.

  The call from the prosecutor general came first thing the next morning. We were invited to visit his office to discuss the Woodruff family request.

  Lali and I arrived as scheduled and were processed through the front gate quickly. This time, we had an armed escort to the prosecutor general’s office. The three of us and a rifle all rode together to the top floor. No one spoke.

  The elevator opened to reveal a grim-looking secretary sitting stiffly at his desk. The television was off and the room was silent. The secretary walked across the room and opened the inner office doors—all without taking his eyes off me.

  The prosecutor general did not rise to greet us. There were no handshakes or kisses on the cheek. He did not offer coffee and cognac or introduce the two other men sitting against the wall.

  This was all business. And there was no room for effusive Georgian hospitality.

  “We’ve considered your request relating to the prisoner Anzor Sharmaidze,” he said. “You have not provided sufficient new evidence to justify reopening the case. The request is denied.”

  We’d just sat down and the meeting was already over. The look on the prosecutor general’s face was clear—the matter was not open for discussion; we were expected to leave. Our escort was waiting for us in the anteroom. We rode the elevator in silence, but my mind was noisy. The difference between this and our first visit was unsettling. The charming Irakli Okruashvili had become the terrifying prosecutor general. And I had become the enemy.

  “Why was he so angry?” I wondered to myself.

  We drove across town for a prearranged meeting with Lali’s best friend. She had invited us to visit her at the Tbilisi Chess Club. It was an unimpressive facility: a chalkboard, a few shelves of well-worn books, a dozen small tables with facing chairs, framed photographs, certificates. The clubhouse projected a plainness that belied its reputation as an epicenter of excellence.

  There was a woman standing at one table arranging plastic chess pieces. She greeted Lali with a warm smile and surveyed me with dark dispassionate eyes.

  Nana Alexandria was a genteel beauty with a ferocious intellect. A woman grandmaster, she had on two separate occasions competed for woman’s world chess champion. As a youth she had represented the Soviet Union in chess tournaments throughout the world and, according to Lali, kept her close friends well supplied in Western fashions.

  Lali made brief introductions and confided about our meeting with the prosecutor general. Nana sensed my disappointment and offered to distract me.

  “Would you like to play a game of chess?” she asked.

  I demurred. I’d already had more than enough crushing defeat for one day. Nevertheless, she persisted in trying to cheer me up as only a grandmaster can.

  “The government controls all the formal levers of power,” she said. “And as we all know the government doesn’t play fair.”

  She was stating the obvious. But it was an unexpected admission coming from the mother of Giga Bokeria. Her son—the man I’d met in the makeup suite at ZTV—was one of Misha Saakashvili’s key lieutenants and a central pillar of the government that she had just criticized.

  I could feel her brain working, processing, formulating. After a moment of silence her eyes softened and she smiled.

  “You need to expand the chessboard,” she said. “You need to find an informal lever that will move the government.”

  It was cryptic advice from a world-class tactician—and as inscrutable as a fortune cookie. I sat in Lali’s parlor all evening thinking about it. And then the electricity failed.

  “Perfect,” I thought. As I stewed in the darkness, I could hear Lali bustling in the other room. She carried a chair out on the front stoop, climbed up, fumbled with a few switches, and turned on the lights. She came into the parlor, beaming more brightly than the lamps.

  “I had the house wired into two different electricity grids,” she said. “It’s how we do things in Georgia. If one way fails, we find another way.”

  I was too self-absorbed to take the hint.

  It would take several months before I began to understand. In the meantime, I was going to have to file a lawsuit that I didn’t want to file.

  CHAPTER 10

  * * *

  “NO ONE INTERVIEWS MARINA”

  Twenty-five years of law practice had taught me a simple truth: To a hammer, everything is a nail; and to some lawyers, everything is a lawsuit. Courtrooms are full of disputes that could have (and should have) been resolved by means other than litigation. Blinkered professionals use the blunt instrument of formal process even when a scalpel-like informal process would be more effective and efficient.

  Now—because I could
see no alternative but to lodge a formal appeal of the prosecutor general’s ruling—I was about to join the ranks of these ineffectual advocates.

  I would appear before a regional judge, be showered with accolades for my humanity, receive a respectful and deferential hearing, and lose. It would be an exercise in frustration leading inexorably to failure. The futility made my stomach hurt.

  I wasn’t used to being impotent. I was after all a lawyer—a priest of America’s one true religion. I had studied the divine mysteries of the Constitution and been invested with the sacrament of due process. I could invoke the arcana of Law and perform the miracle of Justice.

  But my religion wasn’t practiced in Georgia. The authorities in Tbilisi didn’t believe in an independent judiciary, the presumption of innocence, or reasonable doubt. As far as I could tell, they worshipped the arbitrary gods of Expedience and Self-Interest.

  All this made it very hard to generate enthusiasm.

  I sat in my office in Houston writing the petition. I sent each successive draft to Lali for translation and delivery to Tamaz Inashvili. He had agreed (on behalf of Anzor) to make a joint submission with the Woodruff family. Notwithstanding all our obvious deficiencies, we were, as far as Tamaz could see, the prisoner’s only hope.

  The more I worked on the petition, the more I realized that my evidence was inadequate to achieve my goal. I could prove that Anzor was innocent, but I could not prove who was actually guilty. I needed a stick to go with my carrot—a credible threat to expose the perpetrators. Without it, the government would never let Anzor out of prison.

  A quest to identify the perpetrators was a huge expansion of both my portfolio and risk. My weapons were motions and subpoenas; I was ill-equipped to confront men with guns.

  These thoughts were still in the formative stage when I called Lali to discuss other sources of information about the murder.

  “Have you talked to Thomas Goltz?” she asked. “He was an American journalist in Georgia around the time Freddie Woodruff died.”

  I had never heard of Thomas Goltz. Ten minutes later I was talking to him.

  “Freddie Woodruff was my friend,” he said. “I used to bounce his daughter, Michal, on my knee. I published the first article about his murder, you know. It was in the Washington Post. I never thought that kid Anzor did it. What are you doing in Georgia? And who do you represent?”

  It was a lot to absorb. But the man had asked a question and I needed to answer. I proffered my now-familiar explanation: I represented Freddie’s oldest sister; we had new evidence of Anzor’s innocence; we were trying to compel the prosecutor general to reopen his case and set him free.

  The voice on the phone had no patience with these vagaries. What was the evidence? Where did it come from? And why did the Woodruff family care? He ticked through the important issues of my case with ruthless professional efficiency.

  This was Thomas Goltz: intelligent, informed, audacious, opinionated. He was alternately gruff and charming, prickly and self-effacing. An intrepid adventurer with a knack for storytelling, he was widely connected and widely respected.

  Each time I made a disclosure, he asked another incisive question. Thomas was forcing me to express for the first time my real view of the murder, the prosecution, and the various interests implicated by my client’s application. He was forcing me to articulate the significance of my case in a wider geopolitical context.

  “Freddie’s murder created an existential crisis for Georgia,” I said. “If they didn’t fully investigate the murder, they might offend the Americans and lose crucial US support. But if they did fully investigate—and the evidence led back to Moscow—they might offend the Russians and lose their independence. The murder put the Georgians in such an elegant predicament that it’s hard to believe it happened by accident.”

  Thomas shifted his inquiry from geopolitics to criminal culpability. If Anzor was innocent, then a lot of very powerful people were guilty of framing him. Did the Woodruff family want to see them punished?

  I began to feel uncomfortable. “We’re not interested in punishing anyone,” I said. “Sharmaidze’s conviction was an expedient and perhaps necessary political decision to protect the integrity of the republic in 1993. But the crisis has passed. Perhaps the time is ripe for Georgia to deal with these questions in a more direct fashion.”

  I was prattling on about the commitment to justice made during the Rose Revolution when a terrifying thought intruded: Thomas Goltz was a reporter and this was an interview. It was one thing to deal with neophyte Georgian journalists; it was quite another to share my unfiltered thoughts with an American reporter. I hadn’t analyzed the implications of such a move. My mind frantically turned to my most secret fear—that the Georgian government would dispose of the inconvenience of international exposure by killing Anzor.

  I began trying to control how Thomas would use the information I’d given to him. I talked about how dangerous this process was, how I needed to act with discretion, how publicity might anger the government and lead to unforeseen consequences.

  Thomas responded to my clumsy manipulations with suspicion and professional pique. What was I playing at? This was an important story and he intended to tell it.

  And that was the end of our call.

  I have always been afraid of the US press corps. I grew up in the Age of Assassination and even as a child perceived a connection between notoriety and violence. And now I had inadvertently entrusted my case and Anzor’s life to the American media machine. What I did not know was that I had also unwittingly touched Nana’s “informal lever” that would ultimately move the Georgian government.

  By the time I returned to Georgia, Thomas Goltz had published his article on an NGO website, and the Georgian news media had taken notice. One journalist—an intrepid young woman named Eliso Chapidze—had gone so far as to interrogate the prosecutor general regarding his reasons for rejecting the Woodruff application. She printed a transcript of the interview in a local news magazine and I read Lali’s translation as I hopscotched from Houston to Paris to Prague to Tbilisi.

  Eliso asked simple questions and the prosecutor general provided direct answers. He gave her, and in the process gave me, a point-by-point explanation of his decision and a turn-by-turn road map of his analysis. According to the article, the prosecutor general justified rejection of the Woodruff application on the basis of alleged procedural defects. The proffered list of objections was to me both unimpressive and unpersuasive.

  But the poverty of his response was good news: The government’s objections were more political than substantive. If the winds of politics blew a different direction, then Anzor might be set free. I lay awake on the plane trying to figure out how to make Eliso my ally. Clearly, she could obtain access and information that I could not. My mind and stomach churned as I struggled to invent a good argument that would persuade her to help me.

  But it was all a waste of time. She was waiting for me at Lali’s when I arrived.

  Eliso Chapidze was not at all what I had expected. By the look of things, she was more schoolgirl than superhero. Brown hair, tan skirt, sensible shoes: She could easily fade into the background of any room. Except for her eyes—her eyes were alive with intelligence, vitality, curiosity, and zeal. They seemed to suck up every detail of my face and to draw words out of me.

  Her greeting was warm but skeptical—the hopeful incredulity of a long-suffering disciple.

  “Eliso is one of my students,” said Lali. “She investigates political corruption—and she’s very good at it. Last year they murdered her colleague and put Eliso in the hospital.”

  A wave of embarrassment washed over me. I felt like a trespasser, a tourist in someone else’s war zone.

  Eliso must have seen me blush, because she smiled. Then in broken English she said, “I will help you.”

  It was a simple promise but it made me feel a twinge of shame: No matter what I said, my words would never cost near so much as hers.


  She told me about herself over tiny cups of sweet black tea. A graduate of Tbilisi State University, Eliso was an editor of Resonance Daily. She was thirty years old, unmarried, and childless. She spent her days and nights trying to expose other people’s secrets: their bribery, extortion, torture, and murder. Armed with nothing more than native intelligence and a tape recorder, she investigated how rich and powerful Georgians were betraying the ideals of the Rose Revolution.

  It was dangerous work. And to the elite of post-Soviet Georgia it sounded a whole lot like spying. In the West, a reporter represents the public’s right to know. But in Georgia, the societal benefits of journalistic scrutiny are totally irrelevant. The scrutiny itself is a threat. And in the macho culture of the Caucasus if you threaten a man, he will respond with violence.

  Later that evening, after Eliso had left, Lali continued to talk about this extraordinary young woman. She had interviewed Eldar Gogoladze for one of her stories. When she published an unflattering report about the former chief bodyguard, he called the magazine and threatened to kill her. In response, Eliso published a second equally unsympathetic article.

  I made a silly joke that perhaps I shouldn’t stand too close to Eliso—but Lali didn’t laugh. She got up from the sofa and headed toward the kitchen.

  “It looks to me that you’re doing the same sort of thing that Eliso does,” she said over her shoulder. “Perhaps it is I who shouldn’t stand too close to you.”

  I had returned to Georgia to file the formal petition to reopen Anzor’s criminal case. As grounds for this extraordinary remedy I relied on my so-called newly discovered evidence. I claimed that the FBI documents and the Batiashvili affidavit proved that the murder of Freddie Woodruff did not happen in the manner alleged by the prosecutor general. The government’s case was, I said, predicated on expert and eyewitness testimony that was demonstrably false. As a result, Anzor could not have committed the crime for which he was in prison.