The Spy Who Was Left Behind

by Michael Pullara

  I couldn’t help believing that the facts were true but the story was false. The puzzle pieces needed to be reassembled to make a different picture. And for that, I needed more evidence.

  “Nothing about this case is simple,” I said. “The regional judge hinted that there might be eyewitnesses. But if they exist, I have no idea how to find them.”

  Spry looked at me quizzically. “Do you have a copy of the Georgian investigation file?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “The only investigation file I have is from the FBI. In light of what they did to Anzor, I didn’t think the Georgian files would be of much use.”

  The special agent leaned forward, looked me in the eye, and touched my arm. “You need to get that file,” he said.

  CHAPTER 13

  * * *

  A LETTER FROM THE AMERICAN AMBASSADOR

  I returned to Tbilisi in March 2005, sixty days before President George W. Bush’s scheduled arrival. The Georgians were literally painting the town. They paved every inch of highway Bush would drive on, painted every facade he would see, and washed every window he might care to look through. They illuminated monuments that had always stood in the dark and turned on fountains that had been dry for more than twenty years. Old people walking on Rustaveli Avenue were warned not to loiter lest they be renovated against their will. And it was all completely artificial: creating the appearance of prosperity where none existed. If George Bush was Catherine the Great, then Misha Saakashvili was Grigory Potemkin and Tbilisi was his village.

  I had come back in hopes of getting the Georgians to make good on the promise of reinvestigation. But time was short and opportunity was fleeting: When George Bush left town, my leverage would leave with him. Lali had gotten me an appointment with Zurab Adeishvili, the newly installed prosecutor general. He had formerly served as head of the Ministry of State Security. A diminutive man in a gray suit, he had a narrow face, penetrating black eyes, and a perpetual expression of mild incredulity.

  He was in every sense unremarkable, until he opened his mouth. As soon as he began to talk, he revealed himself as the kind of man that one underestimates at one’s peril. I had come prepared for intransigence. As a consequence, Adeishvili’s first question left me speechless. “What do you want us to do?” he asked.

  “That depends largely on both your capabilities and your commitment,” I said. “What tools do you have, what manpower can you allocate, what support can you get?”

  Sitting on the opposite side of the room was Zaza Sanshiashvili, the chief investigator for the Prosecutor General’s Office. He had been in each of my prior meetings with the former prosecutor general, Irakli Okruashvili.

  “Perhaps Mr. Zaza and I can meet briefly, discuss these issues, and present a plan of action for your review,” I said.

  After a murmur of approval, our newly formed committee adjourned to the chief investigator’s tiny office. Mr. Zaza settled in behind his desk and gestured toward a suspicious-looking electric kettle.

  “Chai?” he said.

  It was an act of hospitality and respect. Not at all what I had anticipated from a chief investigator. I looked around the room for some hint that would allow me to resolve the dissonance between expectation and experience. The only personal artifacts in the office were two Georgian Orthodox icon prayer cards taped to the wall.

  Mr. Zaza was a man in his late fifties or early sixties—and so had lived most of his life under the cloak of state-sponsored atheism. His high professional position suggested that he had at least publicly observed the official policy.

  “Is he a recent convert?” I wondered. “Or perhaps a lifelong secret dissenter?” Either way, the prayer cards suggested that the chief investigator had an affection for epic myths of justice and mercy.

  He passed Lali and me tea bags and mismatched cups. He stood up to pour the boiling water and sat down to wait for our first sips. Then he laid his hand on a sheaf of red rope folders stacked in the middle of his desk. “I’ve already reviewed the file from the first investigation and the evidence you submitted in support of your claim,” he said. “Your evidence is not in a form that complies with our rules.”

  “Then we should begin there,” I said. “Retrace my steps and collect the evidence in a form that can be used in your courts.”

  It was an uninspired suggestion, and he responded with a sigh of undisguised disappointment. “I’ve already talked to Irakli Batiashvili and Avtandil Ioseliani,” he said. “They both confirm the statements given to you.”

  I could feel his patience slipping away. I needed to say something substantive or I was going to lose his confidence. I looked again at the prayer cards and decided to take a chance.

  “The truth is, Mr. Zaza—I don’t know how to reinvestigate this case. My goal is to get an innocent man out of prison. I want to do whatever is necessary in order to accomplish that goal.”

  I watched him closely as Lali translated my words. The lines around his eyes softened, his shoulders eased downward, his hands opened ever so slightly.

  The chief investigator had relaxed. “What you need to do,” he said, “is reinterview the eyewitnesses who testified at trial, the three people in the car with Woodruff, and the two boys on the side of the road with Sharmaidze. If they change their stories and testify that the defendant is innocent, then he’ll be released. In order to prepare for those interviews, you need to obtain properly authenticated copies of the FBI documents. And you need to gain access to the special agents, scientists, and doctors who authored those documents. The authors have to testify that the documents are accurate before a Georgian court can accept them as real evidence.”

  “And how do we do that?” I asked.

  “We write a letter to the US ambassador,” he said. “We ask the Americans for help.”

  The committee had a plan. We trooped back upstairs, presented our proposal to the prosecutor general, and spent the next thirty minutes drafting a letter to Ambassador Richard Miles. In addition to a broad request for assistance, the letter asked the US government to confirm the observations by Special Agent George Shukin (that there were no bullet holes in the Niva) and the AFIP pathologist (that Freddie was shot in the back of the head). “I would like to affirm our interest to properly investigate the murder of Mr. Woodruff and to adequately address all the questions that have arisen in the past ten years,” the prosecutor general wrote. “Let me assure you that your involvement will substantially facilitate the process of this investigation.”

  I was almost buoyant as we left the building. The US government would provide the prosecutor general with authenticated copies of the documents they had given me; FBI special agents would brief Georgian investigators regarding their observations and conclusions; and the fact of Anzor’s innocence would be established.

  This was good news that I needed to share. Lali and I headed across town to see Anzor’s attorney, Tamaz Inashvili. The route to his office took us by several blocks of dilapidated Stalin-era apartments. Lali slowed down and pointed toward one of the indistinguishable mint-green buildings.

  “That’s where they found Zhvania’s body,” she said. “It was just last month.”

  The prime minister of Georgia had allegedly been playing backgammon in a squalid little apartment. After several hours without contact, his bodyguards broke down the door. Zurab Zhvania and a twenty-five-year-old male companion were dead. According to the official report, both men had died from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a poorly ventilated gas heater.

  But no one believed the official report. The circumstances of Zhvania’s death, an apparent same-sex encounter with a younger man, made a public investigation problematic. Georgia is a macho culture and homosexuality is an embarrassment. As a result, the government had a ready-made excuse for its failure to perform a thorough and transparent inquiry.

  Nevertheless, the staging of the scene was so clumsy that most people saw the sexualized context as a contrived attempt to distract from the truth, that the
popular prime minister had been murdered somewhere else and then moved to the apartment. And it was generally agreed that there was only one person in the country who had both the power and the resources to kill Zhvania and orchestrate a cover-up: the president, Mikheil Saakashvili.

  “I need to be very careful,” I thought. If reasonable Georgian people believed that Saakashvili was capable of killing his own prime minister, then I needed to believe he was capable of killing a tiresome Texas lawyer.

  I was still thinking about it when we arrived at the Ministry of Energy Regulation.

  Inashvili was working there in the Legal Department. At the same time, he continued to serve as Anzor’s criminal attorney. It was a thankless job that made him adverse to the people who paid his salary. He listened politely as I described my meeting with the prosecutor general, but he didn’t share my enthusiasm. He was, I learned, distracted by other developments.

  “Anzor got married,” he said. “His new wife is living with the Sharmaidze family. And I’m pretty sure she was put there by the government to spy on us.”

  The Woodruff family’s petition had made Anzor a minor celebrity. He’d been interviewed on television, quoted in the newspaper, and discussed at dinner tables. As a result of this short-lived notoriety, he had for a time become the object of feminine interest and attention. And one of these pen-pal relationships had blossomed into romance.

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Inashvili said. “Why else would a healthy woman marry a prisoner?”

  Lali, whose ex-husband had been imprisoned for involuntary manslaughter, smiled. “There is one advantage,” she said. “Come nightfall, you always know where your man is.”

  I had worried about the effects that publicity might have on my case. But I had never imagined that one of those effects might be a prison wedding. Nevertheless, it was highly improbable that the Georgian government would waste any effort trying to seduce Anzor Sharmaidze. He didn’t know anything about the murder and he didn’t know anything about our case. But Inashvili’s suspicion did tell me something about the cultural attitude toward personal and political relationships: Georgians wed and bed for convenience, opportunity, and advantage; not necessarily for love.

  For example, President Saakashvili had offered to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with America in its post–9/11 wars. And he backed this offer with Georgian blood and treasure: He sent two thousand soldiers to Iraq and sixteen hundred soldiers to Afghanistan. This commitment of manpower was, on a per capita basis, second only to that of the US, and it made Georgia a major player in the coalition forces. But to the average Georgian, the country didn’t have much reason to be fighting in these faraway conflicts.

  The official justification for involvement was thin—that after two decades of constant need Georgia could finally demonstrate its ability to give something back and thereby hasten its entry into NATO. But the idea that Georgia could make a material contribution to the war effort or get NATO membership was (at best) theoretical.

  The real motivations for Saakashvili’s commitment were much more practical and much more self-serving. First, his active support for the American wars made his political survival a matter of US national interest. In the eyes of the US government, any threat to Saakashvili was a threat to Georgia’s continued participation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Second, his commitment of Georgian troops meant that the country would be spending millions of dollars on matériel and munitions—and all of those transactions would be handled by Misha’s uncle Temur. The Alasania clan would get rich and at the same time cultivate the support of Western defense contractors.

  But American interest in Georgia went much deeper than an accommodating politician and deployment of a few thousand soldiers. Georgia was a strategic asset to America—an outpost of US influence that was literally inside the territory of the former Soviet Union. It was for the US what Cuba had been for the USSR. And the Russians were just as annoyed at American trespass within their sphere of influence as the Americans had been at Soviet trespass ninety miles off the coast of Florida.

  Shortly after the White House announced that President Bush would expand his trip to Moscow with stops in the former Soviet Republics of Latvia and Georgia, the Russian foreign minister sent a letter of protest to the US secretary of state. A Kremlin spokesman called the side trips “a kind of slap in Russia’s face”—comparable to Putin visiting Washington between stops in Havana and North Korea.

  The American reply was neither diplomatic nor conciliatory: Bush would visit whatever countries he wished whenever he wished to visit them. In retrospect, the timing of the visits seemed unnecessarily provocative. They were scheduled to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the allied victory over Nazi Germany—a victory that had cost the USSR more than 20 million lives.

  The ill-timed visits were the kind of symbolic insult that often provokes a symbolic response.

  Air Force One arrived in Tbilisi from Moscow on the evening of May 9. While in Russia, the American president had reviewed a Victory Day Parade and laid a wreath at the Kremlin’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. However, during his twenty-hour stay in Georgia there would be no mention of either the Second World War or Soviet sacrifice.

  The US delegation traveled from the airport to Old Town Tbilisi via the recently repaved and renamed George W. Bush Highway. The guest of honor was greeted by the locals with a program of diatonic singing and frenetic dancing. He clapped in time to the raging tempos, and as he was leaving the stage wiggled his hips and did a very credible Texas two-step, seeming to genuinely enjoy the excesses of Georgian hospitality.

  The next day, Bush spoke to 150,000 Georgians (and me) in Freedom Square. As he noted in the speech, the location had played a central role in the country’s history. It was the place where Soviet shock troops had attacked peaceful Georgian protesters and where those same Georgians had declared independence from the Soviet Union. It was the epicenter of the Rose Revolution and the birthplace of Georgian self-government. It was hallowed ground—like Constitution Hall, Yorktown, and the Alamo all rolled into one.

  The American president thanked the Georgians for their contributions to the War on Terror and praised them as an inspiration for color-coded revolutions around the world. He paid homage to Zurab Zhvania and extolled him as a leader in a global democratic tsunami. He encouraged Georgian efforts at reform and dangled the possibility of a closer relationship with NATO.

  And then he tried to speak Georgian. The goal of his linguistic misadventure was “Sakartvelos gaumarjos!”—the traditional toast “Here’s to Georgia!” But the syllables rebelled and refused to march in the right order. Nevertheless, the Georgians were happy for the effort and cheered all the way through the translation.

  The choir sang the relevant national anthems, the politicians exchanged affection and awards, and Mr. Bush waved goodbye. And then it was over.

  * * *

  A few weeks later I received a report from Anzor’s lawyer, Tamaz Inashvili, regarding the status of the prosecutor general’s reinvestigation. Irakli Batiashvili—the former head of Georgia’s information and intelligence service—had formally confirmed to the government everything he had informally revealed to me: that Woodruff had been murdered by the GRU; that Eldar Gogoladze had been involved; and that Anzor Sharmaidze had been framed. Likewise, Avtandil Ioseliani—one of Batiashvili’s two deputies and Gogoladze’s immediate superior—confirmed that on the night of the murder he did a thorough inspection of the Niva; that there was no bullet hole in the rear hatch; and that Gogoladze had disappeared from the Kamo Street Hospital for one hour immediately after dropping off Woodruff’s body. According to the status report, Batiashvili and Ioseliani each provided substantial additional details to the chief investigator and independently gave statements that were entirely consistent one with the other.

  The chief investigator had not yet interviewed the two women who’d been riding in the Niva, Marina Kapanadze and Elena Darchiashvili; the two men arrested wit
h Anzor, Genadi Berbitchashvili and Gela Bedoidze; or the US embassy staffer who had observed the onset of rigor mortis. The investigator’s attempts to interview Gogoladze had so far been frustrated by that witness’s unexplained disappearance.

  Tamaz and Lali were busy locating additional witnesses for the reinvestigation—the people in Kazbegi with whom Freddie had lunch on the day of the murder; the people in Natakhtari who saw Freddie’s body on the night of the murder. They asked me to contact the FBI and expedite delivery of the materials requested in the prosecutor general’s letter to the US ambassador. In response to my inquiry, the Bureau advised that they had no record of the Georgian request. The FOIA clerk told me that the prosecutor general’s letter had not yet been conveyed to them, which suggested that the request was still being considered by the State Department.

  Nevertheless, I was encouraged. Even though George Bush had left town, the Georgians continued to do a rigorous reinvestigation of the murder. As far as I could see, there was every reason to believe that as soon as the FBI delivered authenticated copies of its files, the prosecutor general would acknowledge Anzor’s innocence, the court would set aside the conviction, and the government would release the prisoner.

  But once again I was being naive.

  The issue in this case had never been whether Anzor Sharmaidze was in fact guilty of murder. The Georgian government had known from the beginning that he did not kill Freddie Woodruff. Instead, the issue was and always had been whether it was in the Georgian government’s immediate best interest to publicly acknowledge the fact of Anzor’s innocence. And as I was about to find out, the Georgian government’s perception of its immediate best interest was something that could be easily manipulated by certain external forces, one of which was the United States.