The Spy Who Was Left Behind

by Michael Pullara

  In addition, I submitted a personal letter from my client, the sister of the man Anzor was accused of killing. “I believe there are two tragedies here,” she said. “Freddie’s murder and the imprisonment of an innocent man. . . . Freddie loved Georgia. He would not want an innocent Georgian man punished for a crime he did not commit. Freddie would not want his death to result in an unjust punishment. Instead, he would want Georgia to use his sacrifice in a way that would improve the lives of all Georgians and increase the world’s respect for Georgia.”

  She concluded her letter by explicitly declaring that—if the court reopened the case and released Anzor—the Woodruff family would not insist on a new investigation to find the real killer. “Please be assured that if Georgia acts with justice and mercy, we will be satisfied with whatever the government chooses to do.”

  Offering absolution to the perpetrators was in equal parts both gracious and calculated. It accurately reflected the character of Georgia Woodruff Alexander and at the same time assured the guilty parties that we had no intention of pursuing their punishment. I hoped in this way to diminish opposition to Anzor’s release by those who would quite naturally be afraid if he were declared innocent.

  Lali translated the petition and we filed it with the Supreme Court. I was as of that moment officially adverse to the Georgian government—a thought that made me feel small and vulnerable.

  A few days after we filed, we collected Tamaz Inashvili from his office and headed for the Old Military Road. Anzor’s lawyer had been searching for an alleged eyewitness who, according to rumor, had been present at the Natakhtari Drain when Freddie was shot. My Georgian colleague was excited when he called and this made his normally incomprehensible stutter even worse. There were lots of words, but all Lali could make out was “This could be the man.”

  The three of us drove past the turnoff to the Natakhtari Drain and into the village itself. Lali stopped the car in front of what had been a roadside restaurant—a now-defunct purveyor of authentic Georgian barbecue. There were still a half-dozen shaded picnic stalls scattered across the lawn in front of the kitchen. We slid into one to escape the noontime sunshine.

  After a few minutes, a tall man in his early thirties came walking toward us. Anzor’s lawyer hailed the dark-haired man, and we unfolded ourselves from the tiny booth to exchange the obligatory greetings.

  Tamaz Tserekashvili was dressed in dark blue cotton slacks and a light blue cotton shirt, the official uniform of the guards at the Natakhtari Drain. He had seen Eliso’s article and knew about our interest in the murder. The only thing he found surprising was that Anzor was still alive.

  The circumstances made it hard to conduct the interview. Lali was forced to translate for everyone: English into Georgian; Georgian into English; stutters into fluency. Caught in the middle of this muddle was the witness: a man of modest education and more than a little apprehension. No one had talked to him about the murder for more than ten years. And as far as he could see, no good could come of talking about it now.

  He’d been on duty in the guardhouse at the Natakhtari Drain that day and heard a woman screaming about a man having been killed. He walked the forty or so meters to the highway and saw a white Niva. It had pulled onto the gravel apron by the gate and was parked facing toward Tbilisi.

  Close by—parked under the tree that had a tire nailed to it—was another white car: a late-model foreign sedan with the steering wheel on the right and damage to the driver’s side door. This car, perhaps a Toyota, had been parked facing the Old Military Road all day long.

  It had been driven by three or four young men dressed in guardian uniforms. Tserekashvili assumed they’d had a flat: He remembered how one of the soldiers sat on a tire in the middle of the road, stopping cars and asking for a spare inner tube.

  The driver of the Niva had flooded the engine so Tserekashvili helped push start the car. Through the rear hatch he saw a man sprawled in the back seat: shot, bleeding, dying. One of the guardians—paramilitary soldiers from the Ministry of Internal Affairs—who was helping to push the car said he was glad that he and his friends didn’t have any weapons with them; otherwise, they might have been accused of the murder.

  As soon as the Niva had departed, the soldiers climbed in their car and drove off toward Tbilisi. Tserekashvili wasn’t sure when or how they’d fixed the problem that had kept them marooned most of the day.

  Anzor’s lawyer handwrote the witness statement and Tserekashvili signed it. But he wondered why we needed it: Didn’t we have copies of the statements taken by the police at the time of the murder?

  I was still innocent enough to be surprised.

  “You mean you were interviewed by the police?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “By both the police and the security services. They talked to everybody who was there.”

  I felt a flash of anger followed closely by a surge of fear. No one had mentioned these witnesses at Anzor’s trial. No one had contrasted their version of events with the sanitized descriptions offered by Gogoladze and the barmaid Marina Kapanadze. No one had talked about the mysterious guardians or the miraculously timed repair of their car. No one had presented any of the alternative theories of the crime supported by this evidence, because the defense had never been informed about Tserekashvili and the other eyewitnesses he’d just identified.

  This also meant that someone powerful enough to manipulate the outcome of a murder trial was heavily invested in making sure that a nosy American lawyer didn’t expose their conspiracy to frame an innocent man. Every insight into the tragedy of Anzor’s predicament seemed to bring with it a corollary insight into the danger of my involvement. The process was maddening.

  I asked Tserekashvili about the other witnesses and their testimony, but he was spooked. If we didn’t have copies of the official statements, then we didn’t have the government’s blessing for our investigation, and that meant he didn’t have the government’s permission to talk to us.

  The conversation was over. Tamaz Tserekashvili wasn’t going to help us find any of the other witnesses. But we had his signed statement—and hopefully that would be enough.

  Local journalists kept the story in the public consciousness over the next several days. I was interviewed a number of times for newspaper articles, twice for the evening news, and once for a dramatized reenactment of the murder. And so—on my third day back—when Lali told me we had an afternoon appointment, I assumed it was another reporter.

  “No,” she said. “It’s Avtandil Ioseliani.”

  I recognized the name immediately. Prior to his seven years as director of the intelligence and information service, Ioseliani had been the deputy director and Eldar Gogoladze’s immediate superior. He was tall, dapper, and courtly. Short-cropped gray hair, tweed jacket, solid tie, beige slacks: He looked more like a professor than a spymaster. He had retired from the intelligence service in February 2004, the same month that Misha Saakashvili became president. And he had come to Lali’s house to have coffee with me.

  We sat in straight-back chairs with our knees a few inches apart. He kept his hands in his lap and spoke softly. Lali positioned herself just to my right and centered between us. Her translation was so fluid that I hardly noticed Avtandil and I were speaking different languages.

  “I remember the events surrounding the Woodruff murder very clearly,” he said. “I was just about to leave the ministry offices when Eldar’s radio call came in. It was a few minutes past ten p.m.”

  The retired director had compassionate eyes. They gave the impression that he was seeing without judgment or expectation, but I was pretty sure that impression was wrong.

  “I dispatched members of the presidential protection unit to find them on the road and went immediately to the Kamo Street Hospital. By the time I got there, Eldar had already arrived, dropped off the body, and gone home to take a nap—at least, that’s what he told the unit members who arrived before me.”

  Eldar’s deception was sill
y but not that surprising coming from someone who was both arrogant and incompetent. What was surprising was the fact that Avtandil had told me about it. Clearly there was no love lost between him and his former lieutenant.

  “I sent unit members to Eldar’s house with orders to bring him back immediately. They returned with him about twenty minutes later. He had showered and changed his clothes. I never knew what happened to the clothes he was wearing. We never tested them—or the small purse gun he always carried.”

  Avtandil paused to see whether I understood the significance of what he had just said. Satisfied, he continued.

  “I told him to take his men, go back to the scene of the murder, and see what he could find. I told him he needed to do something to salvage his career.”

  I remembered that Gogoladze had subsequently been fired (albeit briefly) for failing to follow security protocols: He had carried a foreign diplomat in his car without prior approval and he drove the diplomat outside the city without a fully staffed chase car. I raised the issue with the former director.

  “When I first came to Georgia, we met in his office at Cartu,” I said. “Eldar told me that he hadn’t used a chase car for two reasons: first, because it was Sunday and he didn’t want to interfere in his unit member’s family time; and second, because there was a gas crisis and he couldn’t justify a second vehicle.”

  Avtandil threw his head back and laughed heartily. “Eldar cared nothing for his men or their family time,” he said. “He hated them and they hated him. And as for gasoline—we were the security services. We had gas to go across town for coffee if we wanted.”

  I was amazed and slightly unnerved by Avtandil’s willingness to implicate Gogoladze as a perpetrator. He had never said any of these things publicly before—so why was he telling me now? And what more would he tell me if I pressed a little?

  “Eldar told me that the fatal bullet penetrated the car through the rubber gasket at the top of the hatchback window,” I said.

  It wasn’t really a question. I was trying to avoid the confrontation of interrogation. But my caution was unnecessary. Avtandil had decided what he would and would not tell me before he ever arrived at Lali’s house. And this was something he wanted me to know.

  “I examined the car very carefully that night,” he said. “Both inside and out. There was no bullet hole. Not in the gasket and not anywhere else.”

  The former director of the information and intelligence service had just provided me with independent confirmation that the bullet hole found several days later by forensic investigator Zaza Altunashvili was not present on the night of the murder. He had unambiguously confirmed the observations made by FBI special agent George Shukin less than eighteen hours after the shooting: There was “no indication of glass or other part of the vehicle having been damaged by gunfire.”

  And in the same moment, he had revealed himself to be a knowing participant in the conspiracy to frame Anzor Sharmaidze for the murder of Freddie Woodruff.

  His statement about the absence of a bullet hole was consistent with what I believed (and what I wanted to believe). But this evidence came from a man who had just (implicitly) confessed that he would embrace a lie in order to send an innocent man to prison. How was I supposed to figure out which statements to believe and which statements to disbelieve? It was an issue that had first revealed itself in my conversation with Gogoladze. And it was now imperative that I find a way to answer it.

  Then—as if to emphasize the point—Avtandil hinted at involvement in the creation of the counterfeit bullet-hole evidence. “I took possession of Anzor’s weapon that night,” he said. “I locked the AK-74 in my safe and kept it there until we delivered it to the Americans.” As a result, if Anzor’s rifle was later used to make an after-the-fact hole in the Niva hatchback, Avtandil would presumably have been involved in removing the weapon from his safe.

  “What about the woman who was with Freddie?” I asked. “Did you interview Marina?”

  “No one interviews Marina,” he said.

  The former director paused for a moment. I got the sense that this was a topic he hadn’t anticipated in advance. When he finally spoke, his tone was different: He was respectful, almost deferential.

  “Marina Kapanadze is a person of very bad character,” he said. “She was already well known to us. My office had a thick file on her . . . but it all disappeared during the revolution.”

  It was a surprising statement about a simple barmaid from the Sheraton Metechi Palace. I assumed it would take real power to purge a file at the intelligence and information service. If that was true, then Marina had friends in very high places and was in her own right very dangerous.

  Avtandil stood up. “This has been very interesting,” he said.

  We shook hands and moved toward the door. He said something to Lali that she didn’t translate, bowed slightly, and left.

  “There is something I’m not supposed to tell you,” she said a few moments later. “Something that Avtandil said as he was leaving.”

  I am by nature far too curious to encourage such discretion. I did my best to look plaintive and hoped that silence would goad her into telling me what he’d said. It worked.

  “He told me that he’d come here to find out whether you were with the CIA or not,” she said. “He’s now sure that you are.”

  I didn’t know whether to feel flattered or afraid. I hadn’t done anything to create this erroneous impression. I was exactly what I appeared to be: a lawyer. But perhaps to a citizen of the former Soviet Union, an American lawyer’s pursuit of truth is very like a spy’s pursuit of secrets.

  * * *

  A few days later the Georgian Supreme Court sent word that they were remanding the Woodruff petition to the local regional court for a hearing on the new evidence. I was instructed to confer with the Prosecutor General’s Office about procedural matters and so the next day I found myself sitting across the table from the junior lawyer who’d been assigned to handle the case.

  The selection of counsel was calculated: The prosecutor general was saying that he did not believe the case was worthy of first-string talent. It was a none-too-subtle way of telling me and the press that he would defeat the application with little or no effort.

  The young prosecutor was meticulous in a way that smacked of inexperience. He’d written out an agenda to assure that he didn’t overlook any of the obvious issues: the Woodruff family’s standing to bring the application; the authenticity of the alleged new evidence; the identity of new witnesses; and the fact that none of the old witnesses had changed their testimony. We touched on all the same points I’d discussed with the prosecutor general.

  Halfway through an unnecessary discussion of scheduling, the door popped open. A gray man in a brown suit looked in, surveyed the room, and quickly slammed the door. Lali looked perplexed.

  “It was the prosecutor Chanturia,” she said.

  I shook my head. The name didn’t mean anything to me.

  “Chanturia,” she said again. “He was the prosecutor from Anzor’s trial.”

  The prosecutor general had made an effort to create an appearance of casual indifference to the entire proceeding. However, Chanturia’s conduct suggested something else entirely—concern. But that didn’t make any sense to me. Why would anyone in the Prosecutor General’s Office be concerned about a doomed application to reopen a twelve-year-old case? Perhaps there was something they feared more than losing.

  The regional judge scheduled and rescheduled the hearing several times—once when I was halfway across the Atlantic on my way to Tbilisi. I began to get the impression she was testing my stubbornness, stamina, and credit limit. But there was a silver lining to all this delay. Eliso Chapidze persuaded Eldar Gogoladze to respond to the accusations that I was making against him. This on-the-record interview was his first public statement since Anzor’s trial, and the former chief bodyguard gave a bravura performance. He said that Freddie had been his closest friend and therefore it
was illogical to believe he could have been involved in the murder.

  This was a specious argument: As Brutus eloquently proved to Julius Caesar, friendship is no guarantee of personal safety. But far more important than Gogoladze’s self-serving non sequitur were the factual admissions that he made. He said that—at the time of the murder and for several days thereafter—he believed that a sniper had shot Woodruff through the open passenger’s side front window. In addition, he said that immediately after delivering Woodruff’s body to the Kamo Street Hospital he carefully examined the Niva 1600 and found no evidence of a bullet hole in the car.

  It was a public reiteration of two statements he’d made to me in our private meeting. And it made me feel a savage pleasure. Gogoladze had inadvertently presented me with a golden opportunity to practice my skills as a trial lawyer. I quickly wrote and Lali quickly translated an Op-Ed piece for Eliso’s newspaper, Resonance. The open letter applauded Gogoladze’s willingness to come forward and challenged him to debate me. Lali contacted the program director at ZTV and persuaded him to invite Gogoladze, Irakli Batiashvili, and me to appear live on the station’s evening news program.

  My challenge was a gamble—but Gogoladze had already publicly acknowledged the fact of my allegations. As a result, he could not now pretend that he hadn’t noticed the insult. Facing me had become a matter of honor. I began preparing immediately. I walked across the city in search of a model car and a toy soldier. There weren’t many toys available in Tbilisi, but I found a small cache in a shop that sold school supplies. They had a serviceable SUV hatchback and a tiny Ghostbuster wearing a green jumpsuit.

  I carried my treasures to Lali’s house and thought about the impending confrontation. By the time I walked into the parlor, I had persuaded myself of one essential truth: What I was planning to do was very dangerous. And I was going to need some help.