The Spy Who Was Left Behind

by Michael Pullara

  “Can you describe the man with the rifle?” asked Djaparidze.

  “I can’t identify his face, but he was a little more than medium height and was wearing a striped telnyashka,” she answered.

  “Which kind?” asked Djaparidze. “Long-sleeve or tank top?”

  Marina seemed to hesitate a moment before answering. “A sailor’s tank top,” she said. “You know, the kind that leaves your shoulders mostly bare.”

  Marina had described in detail a peculiar kind of muscle shirt that was typically worn only by enlisted men in the Soviet navy. The alleged location of the murder was nowhere near the sea. Presumably there would not be very many sailors in and around Natakhtari wearing sleeveless telnyashka. It was a critical clue that could influence the direction and outcome of the entire investigation. And it seemed too good to be true.

  In his file Djaparidze had a photograph of the three young men Gogoladze had arrested for allegedly killing the American. Genadi Berbitchashvili was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt with thin horizontal stripes; Anzor Sharmaidze was wearing a short-sleeved black T-shirt; and the third young man—Gela Bedoidze—was wearing a sleeveless telnyashka. During his interrogation, Gogoladze had admitted that he did not know who killed Woodruff. Thus, when he arrested the three young men he had no reason to believe that any one of them was actually responsible for the murder. The young men had been randomly selected for arbitrary arrest. Nevertheless, Marina’s testimony now implied that this accidental arrest had netted someone who was dressed in the same eccentric fashion as the murderer.

  It was an extraordinary coincidence. And I have learned to be very suspicious of any extraordinary coincidence.

  “What about the rifle?” Djaparidze asked. “Can you describe it?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t know what type of gun it was—but when I saw it I was afraid.”

  “Can you describe the other men?” asked Djaparidze. “What they looked like? What they were wearing?”

  “No, I can’t identify any of those other men,” she answered. “I couldn’t see their faces and I can’t say what they were wearing.”

  It was just as I had expected. A single detail: easy to remember, easy to communicate, impossible to disprove. It was almost as though Marina had spoken to someone who was present when the three young men were arrested.

  “When did you realize that Woodruff was wounded?” Djaparidze asked.

  “When we first heard the shot, three of us screamed,” she said, “but Fred was silent. Then he moved . . . clumsily. I thought he was teasing us to make us think he’d been shot. I turned and looked at him and saw that something was wrong. His head was bleeding. That’s when I screamed and told Eldar to stop.”

  “Did you see a car following you at the moment you heard the shot?” asked Djaparidze.

  “I’m not sure,” answered Marina. “To tell you the truth, at that moment I couldn’t have told you who was standing in front of me. But I remember looking back when I heard the shot. And I don’t remember seeing any headlights.”

  “And did Gogoladze stop?” asked Djaparidze.

  “Not immediately,” said Marina. “It didn’t seem possible that Fred could have been hit. We didn’t hear the sound of broken glass or metal. But there was so much blood. Eldar finally stopped the car and Fred slumped over in the back seat. I was covered with blood. I just couldn’t stay there. I got in the front seat with Elena.”

  “And what was Gogoladze doing?” Djaparidze asked. “Did he have a gun? Did he shoot back?”

  “Eldar?” she said. “Eldar had a gun—but he didn’t shoot. He was crying and saying things like ‘Oh, my God! Fred! Oh, my God! What a tragedy!’ ”

  “Did Woodruff have a gun?” Djaparidze asked.

  “No, only Eldar,” said Marina. “Nobody else had a gun.”

  “Was Woodruff dead?” asked Djaparidze.

  “No, not dead,” said Marina. “I could hear his breath whistling. Eldar was shouting, ‘I heard him wheeze! Quickly! He is alive!’ Suddenly I saw a group of people. Eldar stopped the car again and I jumped out. ‘Help!’ I shouted. ‘Somebody shot our friend!’ I was hysterical. I have no idea if they even replied.”

  “What time was it?” asked Djaparidze. “When Woodruff got shot, I mean—what time was it?”

  “When we stopped by that group of people I looked at my watch,” she answered. “I remember that the crystal was coated with Fred’s blood. And that I rubbed it off so I could see. It was nine-fifteen p.m.”

  They raced on to the Mtskheta Hospital, but it had moved. “Some fellow showed us the way to the new place,” said Marina. “But there was no electricity. I ran inside to get help and saw the staff walking around with candles. They told us that they couldn’t do anything for Fred, that we’d have to take him to Tbilisi.”

  The Niva sprinted off toward the city. “When we got to Tbilisi we could see lights on the embankment—which meant they had electricity. So we went to Hospital Number Two on Kamo Street. A doctor came out to examine Fred and told us he was dead.”

  Having already recorded Elena’s testimony about inspecting the Niva for damage, Djaparidze raised the subject with Marina.

  “Yes, we checked out the car after we arrived at the hospital,” she said. “There wasn’t any damage—no bullet hole, no broken glass, no damage. After a while men from the security services took me to the Railroad Ministry Building to make a statement. Then they took me home.”

  I finished reading the three interviews and sat at my desk mulling over what I’d learned. I made a list of the key facts and rearranged them like puzzle pieces.

  Marina had identified as a potential suspect one of the young men arbitrarily arrested by Gogoladze. This testimony tended to redeem Gogoladze’s sullied reputation and at the same time steer the investigation away from other lines of inquiry. In my mind, the alternative theories that Marina did not want explored all involved the purpose of the meandering trip to the Russian border. Both Gogoladze and Marina had omitted any reference to this part of the day’s activities. Only Elena—the amateur—had spoken about it. And only Elena had been left in the car when the three professionals visited the shashlik shop. It was not a normal way for a group of holiday makers to behave—leaving their road-weary companion alone in the car while they went into a restaurant.

  Maybe this encounter in the mountains had something to do with the murder, I thought. Maybe the other witnesses could tell me the truth of what really happened at Natakhtari.

  CHAPTER 17

  * * *

  A REPORTER’S QUESTIONS

  Georgian investigators took statements from seven people who were on the Old Military Road at or near the time Freddie Woodruff was murdered. But none of those people testified at the trial.

  It was a calculated omission. If any of these seven had publicly recounted what they’d seen and heard, then the neatly constructed case against Anzor Sharmaidze would have collapsed.

  Eteri Vardiashvili—the woman who was misidentified in the regional judge’s order as “El. Vardiashvili”—had walked from her house in Natakhtari to the Drain sometime after 8 p.m. on August 8. Her husband (who worked as a security guard at the adjacent greenhouse) had driven the family cows up to the property that morning and she’d come to take them home.

  “I always drive my cattle home before sunset,” she told the investigator.

  She collected the animals near the greenhouse and herded them past the guards’ barracks and out through the gate. She (and the cows) turned left and made their way along the wall that screened the barracks from the highway. About thirty meters north of the gate—on the edge of the gravel apron that marked the turnoff to the Drain—she saw a white foreign car.

  “It was parked under the big tree,” she said in her witness statement, “with its front facing the highway.”

  There were four men standing by the car. They were wearing uniforms and appeared to be guardians. Eteri didn’t stop to talk to the men. She’d overheard
them threaten to slaughter her cows and was afraid to linger. She drove the cattle north along the roadside all the way back to Natakhtari. And, she told the investigators, at no time did she hear a gunshot.

  These last statements were problematic for the prosecutor general. The witness was walking the same stretch of road where Gela Bedoidze (allegedly) ran out of gas and she didn’t see him or his car. And she was walking there at the same time that Anzor Sharmaidze (allegedly) shot Freddie Woodruff and she didn’t see or hear the murder.

  It was little wonder that the government chose not to disclose this testimony to Anzor’s defense team.

  A second witness saw the same thing from a different perspective.

  Merab Gelashvili was driving north on the Old Military Road at approximately 9 p.m. Just in front of the turnoff to the Natakhtari Drain, he saw a man sitting on a round object in the middle of the highway. The man was facing west—toward the gate leading to the Drain—and (as far as Merab could tell) the object on which he sat was an automobile tire. As he was passing the man, Merab saw a light-colored car parked on the west side of the road and the silhouettes of two or three men nearby it. He didn’t see any weapons and he didn’t hear the sound of a shot, but he did see one or two southbound cars stop suddenly at that location as he was driving away.

  One of those southbound cars was driven by Ramin Khubulia, an assistant chief at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He told investigators that he drove past the Natakhtari Drain at about 9 p.m. “It was starting to get dark but I was not yet using my headlights,” he said.

  Ramin saw four men in guardian uniforms and assumed they were colleagues from his ministry—so he stopped to bum a cigarette. “I asked one of the young men whether they were militiamen from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but he denied it,” Ramin said.

  As he continued trying unsuccessfully to get a cigarette, another one of the guardians demanded that Ramin give them a spare inner tube or tire. The man’s tone was disrespectful and his attitude was aggressive—not at all the way the assistant chief was used to being treated.

  Ramin looked over at the guardians’ car but couldn’t see whether it did in fact have a flat tire. “It was white, it was foreign, and it didn’t have any license plates,” he said. “And it was parked in a very strange way: It was on the roadside but it was facing the road.”

  He didn’t like the situation—the men’s belligerence, the car parked for a quick getaway—so he got back in his automobile and drove home. It wasn’t until the next day that he learned there’d been a shooting in the area.

  I paused to think.

  The whole scene seemed oddly familiar: a car broken down on the side of the Old Military Road; a single guardian trying to flag down drivers; a few other young men in uniform clustered around a disabled vehicle. And then it struck me—it was exactly the setting that Gela, Genadi, and Anzor had described when they testified in court.

  The lie they’d been forced to tell had apparently contained elements of truth.

  I looked back at the time line. The interviews of witnesses from the Old Military Road were conducted in the days and hours immediately before Gela, Genadi, and Anzor gave their official statements. Those official statements seemed to borrow heavily from the reality described by the witnesses from the Old Military Road. However, nowhere in their official statements did Gela, Genadi, or Anzor mention the four guardians who were, according to the witnesses from the Old Military Road, less than one hundred meters away from the spot where Anzor allegedly shot Freddie Woodruff.

  It was a conspicuous omission. Why, I wondered, did the Georgian authorities want to erase the presence of those four guardians from the official story of the murder? And—assuming they did want to erase their presence—why did the Georgians give the Americans un-redacted witness statements that so explicitly cast suspicion on the guardians?

  Another one of the locals who saw the guardians was Badri Chkutiasvili. He had a farm across the highway from the Natakhtari Drain and was staying there overnight to guard his vegetables. Around 9 p.m. he and one of his laborers (a man named Vasiko from the village of Pasanauri) went up to the guard shack at the Drain to watch TV. As he crossed the Old Military Road, Badri saw a light-colored foreign car parked near the wall separating the road from the guard barracks.

  “Both doors on the right side of the car were damaged,” he said. “And the car wasn’t parked parallel to the road—its front was facing the road and its rear part was on the grass.”

  He also saw four young men near the car. They appeared to be changing a flat tire. One of the young men was wearing a long-sleeved blue-and-white-striped telnyashka—the kind of T-shirt worn by Soviet seamen and (on the night of his arrest) Genadi Berbitchashvili. However, Badri specifically recalled that (unlike Genadi) this young man had no beard. There was a second man—slightly taller than the first—dressed in a guardian jacket and civilian pants. There were two other men but Badri couldn’t make out any details.

  “I couldn’t see them because it was already dark,” he said.

  As soon as they got behind the wall, Badri and Vasiko saw that there were no lights on in the guard shack. They assumed that the electricity had gone off and so stopped to smoke a cigarette.

  “We were hidden behind the wall,” Badri told the investigator. “We couldn’t see the four guardians and they couldn’t see us. But we could hear how they stopped cars and asked for gas and an inner tube. After a little while we heard a loud noise—a kind of crackle—that sounded like a gunshot. But we didn’t pay much attention to it: These days we hear gunfire on the highway all the time. But less than a minute later we heard a woman scream. ‘My God, they killed a man!’ she said. The scream was coming from the same spot where the four guardians were standing—just beside the foreign car—and we thought the guardians had killed a man.”

  Badri and Vasiko were frozen in terror—but they could hear everything clearly. One voice said that the wounded man should be taken to the hospital; another voice answered that he could not start his car; a chorus replied that they would help push. The two frightened farmers took this as a sign that it was safe to come out of hiding.

  “There were two guardians pushing the car,” said Badri. “But I didn’t see the other two guardians. The car was a light-colored Niva. One man and two women were sitting in the front seats and another man was laying down in the back seat by himself. One of the guardians reached in and lifted up the man’s head. ‘Take him to the hospital,’ he said. ‘He may yet live.’ Vasiko and I helped push the Niva and—after five or six meters—the car started and the driver went off in the direction of Tbilisi.”

  In the conversation that followed, the guardians denied that they’d stopped the car, denied that they’d heard a shot, and denied that they’d seen a bullet hole in the glass or metal. One of them—the man wearing the blue-and-white-striped telnyashka—washed blood off his hands in a puddle and self-consciously declared that none of the guardians had a gun. “We should thank God that we’re unarmed,” he said. “Otherwise, we’d be accused of a crime we didn’t commit.”

  A couple of guards from the Drain showed up and asked who was responsible for the gunshot.

  “The guardians answered that it wasn’t a gunshot at all,” Badri said. “That when they were pumping air into the tire, the valve had come out and made a big noise.”

  About five minutes later—their car somehow suddenly fixed—the guardians drove off in the direction of Tbilisi. Badri recalled that they had explained the timing of the repair by claiming that one of the cars they’d just stopped had given them gas and an inner tube.

  I tried to imagine the scene.

  Badri swore that while he was standing behind the wall he heard the guardians stop cars on the highway and ask drivers for an inner tube. Even if one of those drivers had given the guardians an inner tube in the minutes before the shooting, they would still have had to install it and inflate it by hand—exactly what they said they were doing when the valv
e allegedly exploded “like a gunshot.” Assuming that the valve did in fact explode, then the guardians would have had to repair the valve, reinstall the inner tube, and reinflate the tire. All of this activity would have taken time and attention. But the light-colored Niva (and the mortally wounded American diplomat) arrived less than a minute after the alleged valve explosion.

  The minutes between the arrival of the Niva and the departure of the guardians were simply not enough time to make the necessary repair—particularly in light of the fact that two of the guardians were busy push-starting the Niva and the other two guardians were nowhere to be seen.

  The more I thought about it, the more I suspected that the guardians had been waiting for the Niva and were only pretending to have a flat. Badri hinted that he suspected the same thing too.

  “The next day my father told me that the foreign car had been parked in that place since noon,” he said.

  The guardians were parked two thousand meters from Natakhtari and five hundred meters from the Nerekvavi police post. But they hadn’t gone to either place for help. Instead, they sat in the August sun for nine hours and left immediately after the murder.

  It seemed too coincidental to be a coincidence.

  Two days later Badri was reinterviewed by an assistant prosecutor general and added a few curious details to his story. He now claimed that—prior to the Niva stopping and the woman shouting about murder—he had been in a position to see the guardians clearly. He had watched as they stopped several different cars, and he recounted for the investigators the models of automobiles involved.

  “They stopped a 2109 car,” he said. “Afterwards, they told us that they asked the 2109 driver for a tube and he gave it to them.”