The Spy Who Was Left Behind

by Michael Pullara

  “Are you trained as an investigator?” he said.

  This direct communication from opposing counsel was an unexpected turn of events. In American courts, the rules require that lawyers argue to the judge (and not with each other). This simple protocol tends to increase civility and decrease fisticuffs.

  Nevertheless, I’d been asked a question and the judge was quite obviously waiting for an answer.

  “I’m not exactly sure what my colleague is asking,” I said, addressing the judge, “but I am trained in a variety of techniques that are useful for investigating complex cases.”

  “Ah, so you are a lawyer and an investigator,” said the young prosecutor. “Are you also a pathologist?”

  This struck me as a particularly bizarre question. My first thought was that it related to the AFIP expert opinion that the fatal bullet entered Woodruff’s skull not above the right eye but above and behind the right ear. The young prosecutor was trying to discredit the message by discrediting the messenger. It was a clumsy tactic.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not a pathologist; I’m a lawyer. And as a lawyer, I routinely rely on expert reports—especially if I’m dealing with a subject about which I don’t have specialized education, training, or experience.”

  The young prosecutor smiled. “Do you have an expert report regarding the onset of rigor mortis?” he asked. “Or is this an area in which you have specialized education, training, or experience?”

  The young prosecutor had set a neat little trap and I had blundered into it. He had correctly identified a hole in my evidence: Even if the judge accepted my evidence of rigor, there was no expert evidence proving how long it would take for that rigor to occur.

  I muttered something about having consulted generally accepted medical textbooks and promised myself to be less arrogant.

  “The former minister Irakli Batiashvili,” said the prosecutor. “Did he personally see the police plant the shell casing?”

  “No,” I said. “It was his deputy—Shota Kviraya. He saw the police plant this evidence and reported the fact to Minister Batiashvili.”

  “So you do not have an eyewitness?” he asked.

  The question provoked an insight: Cross-examination of counsel was how Georgian lawyers made objections to their opponent’s evidence. That meant I was in the middle of a legal argument about the admissibility of my evidence and I didn’t even know it.

  I looked at the prosecutor again. He didn’t seem to be nearly as young as I’d previously thought.

  “I don’t have an eyewitness,” I said. “But I do have Shota Kviraya’s superior officer. And Kviraya’s report regarding the planted evidence is precisely the kind of oral communication that Minister Batiashvili relied upon in the ordinary course of his duties. As a result, the statements in the Batiashvili affidavit are admissible as evidence.”

  The judge nodded. She seemed pleased that I had finally figured out what was going on. Meanwhile, the prosecutor held up a black-and-white photograph mounted on foam board.

  “This picture was taken by the American FBI,” he said. “As you see—it clearly shows the bullet casing at the scene of the murder. Do you believe that the FBI was part of a conspiracy to frame Anzor Sharmaidze?”

  “The photograph accurately depicts what the special agents saw,” I said, “but they saw it nine days after the murder. The photograph doesn’t prove that the bullet casing was there continuously for nine days. As far as the FBI and the photograph are concerned, the casing could have been placed there just a few minutes before the special agents arrived.”

  “What about this photograph by your FBI?” he asked, as he held up another black-and-white image. “It shows a bullet hole near the rubber gasket at the top of the hatchback window. If, as you claim, this hole was made after the fact, how did the bullet get inside the passenger compartment of the Niva?”

  It was the question I’d been wrestling with for years: How do you kill a man inside a car without breaking the glass or puncturing the metal? As it turned out, the answer was fairly simple. “The car was stopped and the rear hatch was open,” I said.

  The young prosecutor seemed surprised and slightly off balance. It was not the answer he was expecting. “But that would mean all the witnesses are lying,” he said.

  I didn’t respond immediately, hoping the silence would emphasize the elegance of his observation. “Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what it would mean.”

  The prosecutor’s brow furrowed. He wasn’t having nearly as much fun now that I was fighting back. “It is an interesting theory,” he said. “But does any of your new evidence involve even one of the eyewitnesses from the trial changing their sworn testimony?”

  I’m not absolutely sure, but I think I saw the prosecutor smirk.

  He knew that Anzor’s companions had been spirited away each time I came to town. He knew that Elena Darchiashvili went into hysterics every time I tried to approach her. And he knew that Marina Kapanadze had disappeared to another country.

  “No,” I said. “None of the eyewitnesses have changed their sworn testimony.”

  The judge asked if I had any additional evidence, complimented my altruism, and adjourned the hearing. She was out the door before I had time to stand up. I had expected a ruling on my application and so was bewildered by her rapid departure.

  “What happens next?” I said to no one in particular.

  “Telephone justice,” said Lali. “She goes to her chambers and awaits a call from someone in the president’s office. They will tell her how to rule.”

  The unfairness of the process made me want to yell at somebody. I chose Tamaz.

  “What the hell were you doing in the hearing?” I said. “You wasted my best chance listing all the things you’ve done for Anzor. What was that about?”

  He looked at me blankly for a moment then pointed at Anzor’s mother.

  “I wanted her to hear what I’d done,” he said. “She promised to give me a cow if I saved him from execution—and she lied. She never gave me the cow. You can’t trust her.”

  Telephone justice and legal fees paid in cows. I really was a very long way from home.

  Finding out that the Woodruff application would be decided by the president had the unavoidable effect of dampening my enthusiasm for the Georgian judiciary. As I waited for the regional judge’s order, I thought about the implications of “telephone justice” and concluded that I had fundamentally misjudged the process in which I was involved. I had seen a familiar form, a regional court, and assumed that it was invested with a familiar substance, judicial independence.

  It was an amateur’s mistake. Nevertheless, realization of this colossal error led to an important insight: I was pleading my case to the wrong person. I needed to persuade Misha Saakashvili, the president of Georgia. And that meant I needed to know a whole lot more about him and the culture that had produced him.

  * * *

  Georgia is what used to be called an honor-and-shame society; that is, a society in which the primary mechanism for gaining control over children and maintaining social order is the inculcation of shame and the complementary threat of ostracism. By contrast, America is a guilt-and-innocence society—one in which control is maintained by creating and continually reinforcing the feeling of guilt (and the expectation of punishment now or in the afterlife) for certain condemned behaviors.

  Soviet society did a very poor job of allocating opportunities and rewards among the people on the basis of talent and initiative. As a result, individuals tended to rely heavily on social networks and kinship in order to obtain economic advantages. Nowhere was this more true than in the already clannish environment of Georgia. And—as Soviet society disintegrated and chaos ensued—the clan became even more important. It was the principal mediator of an individual’s success (or failure) and the primary arbiter of an individual’s honor (or shame).

  It was into this cultural landscape that the future president had been born on December 21, 1967. His father
was a physician; his mother a university professor. They divorced when he was three, and Misha was raised by his mother’s family. And the putative head of the clan was her brother, Temur Alasania.

  On one level, Misha’s uncle Temur was a successful Soviet diplomat who’d spent twenty-four years at the United Nations working on disarmament issues. On the other hand, he was, according to many sources, a KGB general and illegal arms dealer. Whether by dint of armament or disarmament, he had become powerful, wealthy, and well placed to help his young nephew.

  As a child Misha studied at the First Experimental School and then at the 51st Secondary School—elitist academies that educated the children of high-ranking officials and the occasional plebeian genius. According to one of Misha’s classmates, “Mere mortals did not attend our schools. At the beginning and end of each day, there were so many black cars crowded around that you could easily mistake it for a meeting of the Communist Party Congress.”

  Misha was remembered not for his academic excellence but for his stylish Western clothes. “Saakashvili did not study very well,” said the classmate. “All the children knew that he’d gotten into the First School because of his uncle, Temur Alasania. At a time when it was difficult to buy quality clothing, his uncle Temur would send him jeans from America. It was very noticeable: a classic gray mouse in good jeans.”

  He attended university in the neighboring Soviet republic of Ukraine, and while there, he performed abbreviated military service as a border guard at the Kiev International Airport. By the time he graduated, the USSR had collapsed; Georgia had declared independence; Zviad Gamsakhurdia had been deposed; and the bloodiest part of the Abkhaz war had ended.

  Misha spent a few months in Tbilisi as a translator for Western human rights organizations and then departed for Columbia University Law School and Uncle Temur’s Brooklyn apartment. The US Department of State had awarded him a fellowship reserved for emerging leaders from Eurasia. He interned at the United Nations, married a Dutch law student, and upon graduation took a job at a prestigious New York law firm.

  As I studied this biography of privilege, I began to perceive the presence of intelligent design. Whenever they were confronted with the possibility of danger to their favorite son, the Alasania clan chose the certainty of safety over the possibility of heroism. Thus, unlike so many other young men in Georgia, Misha had not joined the army or mafia in search of glory and political advancement. Instead, he had been steered out of harm’s way and into convenient and advantageous safe havens.

  The recognition of this pattern was an important realization: Any appeal for Misha to take a selfless and heroic stand on behalf of Anzor Sharmaidze would be wasted effort. His history suggested that whenever confronted with a difficult choice, he would choose the option that promised the least probability of personal risk and greatest possibility of personal benefit.

  For Saakashvili, survival was a fundamental family value.

  In 1995 Misha was approached by Zurab Zhvania, an old friend from Georgia who was working on behalf of then president Shevardnadze to recruit talented young Georgians into government service. He accepted the call and returned to Tbilisi after almost a decade of living abroad. He was elected to parliament, appointed minister of justice, and given the task of cleaning up the country’s criminal justice and prison system. The following year he resigned in an angry (and politically popular) protest of intractable official corruption.

  During this period Misha caught the eye of the American embassy. The US ambassador, Richard Miles, was a veteran of regime change in the Balkans. He had arrived in 2002 with a stern warning for Shevardnadze. “We would like to see stronger leadership,” he said. It was an unusually blunt and public criticism of a long-standing US ally.

  Miles began actively grooming Saakashvili to lead the succession. Misha was routinely filmed in front of his US diplomas and awards. George Soros—the Hungarian-American investor, philanthropist, and political activist—flew him and his followers to a Soros-sponsored seminar in Belgrade on how to stage your own “Velvet Revolution.” It didn’t matter that Eduard Shevardnadze was godfather to his oldest son (the eponymous Eduard Saakashvili). Misha was the anointed leader of a US-sponsored campaign to replace the existing government, and personal loyalty wasn’t going to stand in the way.

  In November 2003 Saakashvili surged to the front of widespread protests over corrupt parliamentary elections. For twenty days he and a huge crowd occupied the center of Tbilisi. Protesters waved flags, shouted slogans, and carried long-stem red roses. These flowers became the irresistible symbol of their insurrection. Western broadcasters descended on Tbilisi and breathlessly described the democratic dreams of an impoverished Georgian people. But no one bothered to report on the odd detail that was (for me) the most provocative question: Where did all those poor people get red roses in the middle of winter?

  A possible explanation emerged later. In early 2004 a former member of the Georgian parliament said that Soros “spent $42 million ramping up to overthrow Shevardnadze.” The billionaire philanthropist allegedly rented a fleet of buses for the protesters, imported a forest of roses, and generally bankrolled the coup d’état.

  In revolution, as in everything, amateurs focus on theory and professionals focus on logistics—and in matters of revolution Soros was definitely a professional. As it turned out, even the transition of power was a stage-managed affair. Misha stormed the parliament on live national television while Shevardnadze escaped out the back door. Saakashvili marched to the lectern, looked directly into the camera, and drank the deposed leader’s still-warm glass of tea.

  The new president promised that Georgia would be ready for European Union membership within three years, would have reconstituted borders within five years, and would operate under the rule of law almost immediately. Nevertheless, he used his party’s supermajority to push through constitutional amendments that increased executive authority and curtailed judicial independence. This was the legal infrastructure that made telephone justice a practical reality.

  In addition, Saakashvili appointed several of his family members to lucrative posts in the government. He made Uncle Temur a member of the national security council. And, though his position was officially “unofficial,” it was rumored that none of the security chiefs could make a single decision without him. Not surprisingly, the Alasania clan became the dominant business group in Georgia.

  As I studied Saakashvili’s meteoric rise, I began to wonder what impact the process itself had on his thinking: What did the Rose Revolution teach Misha? My best guess was two things: First, the process demonstrated that his power derived from and depended entirely on the Americans. His status as a popular messiah flowed from the people’s belief that he was supported by the US and therefore could deliver US aid. Second, the process showed that pedestrian notions of friendship and loyalty were utterly irrelevant. The Americans had unceremoniously unseated Eduard Shevardnadze, the man who negotiated the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. They would not hesitate to do the same and worse to Saakashvili.

  “He needs the Americans,” I thought, “and he needs the Americans to need him.”

  It made for a complicated, complex, and convoluted relationship—exactly the kind of Byzantine intrigue at which Georgians had excelled for fifteen centuries. In order to actualize this uneven partnership, Saakashvili installed several well-connected Americans at the highest levels of his administration. One of these, Daniel Kunin, was the thirty-three-year-old son of former Vermont governor Madeleine Kunin. In 2003 Misha appointed him senior advisor to the Georgian government. I had hoped that this young expatriate might embrace the Woodruff petition as a small step in the process of creating the rule of law in Georgia. But I was mistaken. Kunin stayed far away from me and my work.

  * * *

  More than a week had passed since the hearing and I was no closer to communicating directly with the president. There was no deadline for the regional judge to act, but prudence
dictated that I assume her ruling was imminent. Sensing my frustration, Lali offered me a distraction: dinner at the home of Carolyn Clark Campbell, the CEELI liaison who had referred me to Lali, and her husband, Lance Fletcher. When we arrived, they apologized for their apartment, saying their permanent residence was being reconstructed. Nevertheless, their temporary digs were utterly agreeable to me: It smelled like home.

  While Carolyn bustled in the kitchen, Lance played host. He was officially the president of Junior Achievement of Georgia and the deputy rector of the country’s oldest private university. In these capacities he promoted both entrepreneurship and liberal arts education. However, it was his unofficial activities that captured my imagination: He was a confidential advisor to Misha Saakashvili and a member of the young president’s kitchen cabinet.

  Lance had a vague familiarity with my case—but my questions about whether the Woodruff petition had been discussed with Saakashvili were met with circumspect silence. Nevertheless, I pressed what I thought was the most practical argument supporting intervention by the president: If he released Anzor, Misha could demonstrate his bona fides to the American public as a US-style civil libertarian while creating an unsolved crime to lay at the feet of his enemies.

  The stubbornly blank look on Lance’s face made me feel exposed as a novice. He was in the most polite way possible stating the obvious: I had no business giving political advice to a modern-day Machiavelli. Fortunately, I was rescued from further embarrassment by the delivery of lasagna. Carolyn carried her kitchen conversation to the dinner table. She was in the middle of describing for Lali the speech she intended to give the next day at Tbilisi State University. She and Lance had been asked to participate in a forum celebrating the first anniversary of the Rose Revolution.

  And Misha was expected to attend. Then, unbidden, Carolyn offered me a golden opportunity: If I arrived at the invitation-only event with her and Lance, I wouldn’t need any credentials to get in. I could sit with them and perhaps visit with one of the president’s advisors after it was over. Lance was silent. It was pretty clear he didn’t think my showing up was a good idea. Nevertheless, I accepted.