First, I was pretty sure I could tell when he was lying. The abrupt torrent of words and explosion of confidence seemed to emanate from an entirely separate part of his brain. But suspecting a lie was not the same thing as knowing a truth. If I was to have any hope of discovering the true nature of his involvement, I would need to find someone who was both close to Giorgadze and willing to be transparent with an American lawyer.
Second, from Giorgadze’s perspective, everything that happened in Georgia was inextricably connected to everything else that happened in Georgia. No single event could be understood without an appreciation of its historical context and knowledge of the relationships among the people involved in the transaction.
So what was the true historical context of Freddie Woodruff’s murder? And what were the relationships among the people who benefited from Anzor’s continued incarceration? The answer to these questions lay buried in old investigation files that the Georgian government did not want me to see.
CHAPTER 15
* * *
“THEY BEAT ME”
Jamie committed to producing a documentary about the quest to liberate Anzor Sharmaidze. In preparation for filming in Georgia, we hired a local journalist to locate Gela Bedoidze and Genadi Berbitchashvili—the two men who’d been arrested with Anzor and who’d testified against him at trial. Not only did Magda Memanishvili find the witnesses, she got copies of sworn statements they’d given the prosecutor general during his reinvestigation of the criminal charges.
As counsel for Georgia Woodruff Alexander, I was entitled to receive copies of all such statements. However, Giga Bokeria—Lali’s godson and Saakashvili’s chief lieutenant—had personally vetoed my request for the affidavits on grounds that I was a foreigner and therefore could not be allowed to see such potentially embarrassing documents.
When I finally got to read them, I understood why he thought so. Both Gela and Genadi had repudiated their prior testimony. They now claimed that they’d been tortured and threatened and made to memorize and recite a fabricated story. They now swore that at the time of the murder, they were thirty kilometers away; that they never made it to the Old Military Road before being arrested; and that Anzor was completely innocent.
“We lied,” said Genadi. “But we were in a horrible situation. I would have signed anything they put in front of me and sworn to anything they told me to say.”
The witness statements were a parable about the caprice of fate.
Gela, Genadi, and Anzor spent most of August 8 going from place to place drinking. They found a black-market tanker truck and filled Gela’s car with gasoline. Anzor complained that he hadn’t seen his family in months and begged his companions to drive him home to Pansheti. Just outside of Mtskheta, eight kilometers before the turnoff to the Old Military Road, they stopped to help three girls whose Fiat was out of gas.
“I entertained myself with two of the girls while a third siphoned gasoline out of my tank,” said Gela. “After they left, I turned the ignition and the low-fuel light came on. The girls had emptied the tank.”
The boys no longer had enough gas to make it to Anzor’s house. Genadi suggested that they go to a nearby police post; he had colleagues there who might help them get more gasoline. They’d only been at the Nerekvavi police post a few minutes when security officials arrived from Tbilisi and arrested them.
It was a meaningless string of random events stumbling drunkenly toward tragedy—and evidence of Anzor’s innocence.
I was surprised to discover that the prosecutor general had actually reinvestigated the case. After months of silence, I’d begun to believe that the court order requiring reexamination was nothing more than a clever ploy to distract, delay, and ultimately disappoint. Nevertheless, the prosecutor general had been in possession of these witness statements for almost half a year and he’d done nothing to end Anzor’s torment. The implications of this inaction were clear: Notwithstanding its promise to do justice and love mercy, the new government of Misha Saakashvili had joined the old conspiracy against Anzor Sharmaidze.
The only way I had to end this evil was to expose it.
Meanwhile, I had to just get on with business. This was the second time I’d come to Georgia with Jamie. During the first trip we drove up to Anzor’s family home in Pansheti. It was a humble structure perched between a two-lane road and a slope that seemed to fall away forever. There was a cold drizzle when we arrived, and clouds had formed below the house. The mist parted for a moment, and I saw cows grazing on the mountainside and a river a mile below on the floor of the valley.
It was sublime. And seeing it made me sad.
“This is one of the things that Anzor lost,” I thought.
A shirtless man in his early thirties was working on the engine of a rusted-out car. He came toward us with a wrench in his hand but stopped when Lali hailed him.
A strong family resemblance belied the need for any introductions: This was Anzor’s younger brother. He led us into the house. The front door opened into a small room that served as kitchen, dining room, living room, and workroom. Anzor’s mother was sitting near the fireplace, hand stitching a pair of torn pants.
She smiled when she saw us. This—and the bright colors of her clothes—were starkly different from our first meeting at the courthouse. She was gracious and hospitable. We were guests in her home and she was proud to have us there.
She served tea while Jamie set up his camera, and then she sat for an interview. The questions were uninspired but essential: How does it feel to have your son wrongly convicted of murder? What do you think about the Woodruff family’s effort to get Anzor out of prison?
She dutifully exposed her pain and confessed her admiration for American generosity. Quite obviously, she would say or do anything to help her child.
We said our goodbyes and left as the sun was going down. On the drive back to Tbilisi I realized anew the harsh inflexibility of the Old Military Road. It was carved out of an ascending valley, and the mountains on either side formed a funnel. A traveler on the road had to either continue north into Russia or return south via the same route taken in. There was simply no other way out of the valley. And that made this road an ideal place for an ambush.
Once Freddie Woodruff turned north toward Kazbegi, a shooter could wait for him at the mouth of the funnel near Natakhtari with 100 percent certainty that the CIA officer would return to that point. But the combination of uncertain timing, gloaming darkness, and multiple occupants in a fast-moving vehicle made a single-shot kill highly improbable. To increase the odds of success, an assassin would need help—from outside the vehicle, inside the vehicle, or both.
Identifying those helpers would be key to solving the puzzle. In the meantime, we had a documentary to make. Both Georgia Woodruff Alexander and Dell Spry would join Jamie, Mousia, and me in Georgia—she as the woman whose concern had inspired reexamination of Anzor’s conviction and he as the FBI special agent whose investigation had gotten closest to discovering the truth. Lali would provide our room, board, and transportation—giving over her entire house and housekeeper for two weeks and hiring her nephew and his van to squire us around the city.
Jamie’s plan was to retrace my steps, reinterview the witnesses, and reenact the murder. And he started at the top with Eduard Shevardnadze. The former president still lived in a self-imposed internal exile. Nevertheless, he was bright, congenial, and a little impish.
Jamie made small talk in a transparent attempt to inflate his résumé. “You know, I’ve met Mr. Gorbachev before,” he said.
The old politician smiled. “I have met him more,” he replied.
Shevardnadze confirmed on camera everything he’d told me in our first meeting—his reliance on Freddie Woodruff; his distrust of Eldar Gogoladze; and his belief in Georgian judicial process. But he was coy about current events in Georgia and declined Jamie’s invitation to cast suspicion on Igor Giorgadze or to criticize Misha Saakashvili.
“I am alone with my me
mories,” he said. “Such things no longer concern me.”
Over the next several days we quickly replowed ground it had taken me a long time to till. Jamie interviewed Avtandil Ioseliani, the former deputy minister who had been Eldar Gogoladze’s direct superior in August 1993. The retired security officer confirmed that Eldar had gone home (to take a nap) immediately after he delivered Woodruff’s body to the hospital and that when he returned, Eldar was freshly showered and wearing a new suit of clothes. More importantly, the deputy minister described how—on the night of the murder—he had carefully inspected Eldar’s Niva and determined that there was no bullet hole in the vehicle.
This dovetailed nicely with Jamie’s interview of the ballistics expert, Zaza Altunashvili. He confirmed that when he examined the Niva a few days after the murder there was a bullet hole in the rear hatch and that the size of that hole matched exactly the size of the bullets fired from Anzor’s gun.
We had hoped to do an on-camera interview with Irakli Batiashvili—to get him to confirm that the police had planted a spent cartridge case from Anzor’s rifle for the FBI to find. But there was a problem. The Georgian prosecutor general had arrested the former minister and current opposition politician.
The prosecutor accused Batiashvili of committing high treason by providing “intellectual support” to insurgents in the breakaway province of Abkhazia. The only proof of his crime was a fabricated recording that pieced together snippets from several unrelated telephone conversations. In the final product, Batiashvili allegedly encouraged the leader of a rebel group “to not give in”—but the forgery was of such poor quality that the prosecutor general didn’t offer the tape as evidence at trial. Nevertheless, Batiashvili was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison.
It was apparently a very dangerous thing to be accused of a crime in Georgia—and even more dangerous to be perceived as a potential candidate to replace Saakashvili.
Magda scheduled an interview with a retired Georgian security officer—an interrogator with a specialty in torture.
I was antsy as the hour approached: eager to see the definitive face of evil, eager to feel the thrill of moral superiority. But the torturer turned out to be an unremarkable man, disappointingly average, a banal civil servant glad for the chance to discuss his expertise.
He sat on Lali’s couch and calmly described the mechanics of breaking a person’s mind and body. “It isn’t difficult,” he said.
Jamie quizzed him about the abuses that Anzor claimed to have endured.
“I would cuff their hands behind their backs and then suspend them in the air by their wrists,” he said. “It didn’t take long for both shoulders to dislocate—gravity does all the work. But I found that holding them down and beating the bottoms of their feet was more efficient. They knew immediately that if they didn’t give me what I wanted, they would never walk again.”
“What about the prisoner Sharmaidze?” Jamie asked. “Did you interrogate him?”
“I don’t remember,” said the torturer. “Too many people, too long ago—and I never really spent much time trying to get to know them.”
The next day Tamaz Inashvili joined us for a trip to the prison. Anzor had been moved twice since I filed the Woodruff petition and was now at a facility on the edge of Tbilisi. We arrived in mid-afternoon, but the guards wouldn’t let us in.
“No cameras,” they said.
Someone informed the warden of a disturbance at the front and he came to investigate. He was a massive human being: six feet, eight inches of intimidation. And he wasn’t happy to see me.
Lali began arguing for our entry and the warden began coloring with rage. I pulled her back from the combustible conversation for a warning.
“Be more careful,” I said.
Lali frowned. She seemed insulted.
“One person’s already been assassinated and another person’s been framed for murder,” I said. “Killing you or me would be nothing to them.”
She blanched. And sputtered a little. I think until that moment she’d actually forgotten the dangers inherent in our quixotic little project. But when she remembered, it frightened her.
“Then I quit,” she said. “I don’t want to get killed. I quit. It’s not that important.”
I left her to calm down and returned to the jailer. Tamaz had turned the conversation toward procedure, and the two men were discussing whether ministry approval was necessary before cameras could be admitted.
“We already have approval from a higher authority,” I said. “The president went on national television and directed his government to cooperate with the American lawyer. And I am that American lawyer.”
The giant’s eyes widened. He remembered the speech and the president’s commitment.
“If you’d like to call President Saakashvili to discuss it,” I said, “I have his cell phone number.”
“No,” said the warden. “We don’t need to bother the president.” He turned and barked a few orders. The guards opened the steel door and rushed to pick up our equipment bags.
I held out my hand to Lali. She took it and we walked inside. By the time we got set up, it was dark. The guards escorted Anzor from his cell and parked him by one of the buildings in the courtyard. He stood facing a wall with his hands clasped behind his back. It was the pose that prisoners were required to assume in the presence of guards, and like all the rules it was enforced with swift and terrible violence.
Anzor was wearing a black turtleneck sweater, a black leather jacket, and dark slacks, clothes he had received from home. In a Georgian prison, only the guards wore uniforms.
Jamie placed him on a concrete step in front of a whitewashed background. The setting was austere, a perfect complement to Anzor’s aggressive indifference. After more than a decade in prison, tourists like us were not even mildly interesting to him.
The truth was that we were wasting his time. Anzor didn’t know anything about the assassination of Freddie Woodruff. He could once again deny his involvement in the murder, but he couldn’t tell us what really happened that night on the Old Military Road.
Nevertheless, Jamie asked and Anzor answered.
He spoke softly and without affect, as though he were describing trivial things that had happened to someone else. He replied to each inquiry with monotone and apathy. There was no resistance in him, until Jamie asked him to describe the torture.
“What’s the point?” he said.
“It’s for the Western viewers,” Jamie said. “They need to understand why you confessed to a crime that you didn’t commit.”
Anzor seemed to wilt. He focused his eyes on a spot near his feet and sighed. I had the sense that he was watching his young self be brutalized and feeling pity for that lost boy. The look on his face reminded me of Mary in the Pietà, except that the broken body Anzor held was his own.
His soft voice became a whisper. “They beat me,” he said. “They tied my hands behind my back and hung me from a pipe. And beat me. They held me down and beat the bottoms of my feet with a stick. They hit me with guns and threw me into walls. They punched me and kicked me and stomped me. I wanted to die but they wouldn’t let me.”
He paused and looked up at Jamie. “Is it enough for your Western viewers?” he asked.
I felt indicted by the question, unmasked as a parasite that feeds on the pain of others. My adventure was his nightmare. And it made me want to vomit.
Afterward, I pulled Anzor aside and mumbled a few words of encouragement. He looked at me with sad dead eyes and grunted. “I just want to go home,” he said.
Two days later Tamaz showed up at Lali’s house with Gela Bedoidze and Genadi Berbitchashvili. I think Tamaz had been waiting to see how we treated Anzor at the prison. His arrival with the two key witnesses suggested that he was more or less satisfied.
Life had not been kind to Gela and Genadi. The two boys who’d been arrested with Anzor were hardly recognizable in these middle-aged men. Alcohol and indolence had ra
vaged their bodies and stolen their vigor. But it was the arrest on August 8, 1993, that had ruined their lives.
With the camera rolling they both confirmed their written statements: They were tortured; they lied; Anzor was innocent. He was never on the Old Military Road; he never shot at the Niva; he didn’t kill Freddie Woodruff. The trio was in the wrong place at the wrong time because Anzor wanted to see his mother in Pansheti.
Gela and Genadi had finally told the truth. But neither man seemed to get any relief from the act of public confession. They were still terrified, still sweating, still trembling, still jumping at every sound. It took me a moment to realize what I was seeing: Their lies had never been the cause of their fear. Instead, they were afraid of the powerful people whose secret crimes they had witnessed. They were afraid of what would happen if the people who tortured and framed Anzor began to view them as a threat.
They had been desperately afraid of those people for more than a dozen years. And that fear had crippled them. Nevertheless, from my perspective that fear of retaliation was compelling evidence that this time Anzor’s companions were telling the truth. In my experience, if a witness says something that puts them at risk of prison or death, the only reason they do it is because the statement is true. And that was exactly what Gela and Genadi had done: They had confessed to perjury and they had accused some very dangerous people of some very serious crimes. They were either telling the truth or they were crazy.
Their recantation demolished the last shred of evidence supporting the prosecutor’s case. I could now prove that Anzor did not kill Freddie. And proving that fact was an essential step in getting the US government to stop using the Sharmaidze conviction as an excuse not to reexamine the Woodruff murder. So long as Anzor was in jail for the murder, they had a facially plausible reason not to reinvestigate.
Once I eliminated Anzor as an excuse, I might be able to get them to help me identify who killed Freddie and why they killed him.
* * *
The Spy Who Was Left Behind Page 26
