The Spy Who Was Left Behind

by Michael Pullara

  But Eldar was an egoistic and self-important little man. And kindness to strangers was simply not in his nature. If he stopped to offer aid to a stranded motorist, then Freddie would have become immediately suspicious. And this would have made it hard to hold him in the back seat of the Niva. As I talked this through with Special Agent Dell Spry, he reminded me of Occam’s razor. “The simplest answer is probably the right one,” he said. “We believe that Marina may have pointed a gun at Freddie, relieved him of his weapon, and told him not to move. The theory was attractive to us because it neatly explained three independent consequences of the encounter: the size of Marina’s reward, the magnitude of Elena’s terror, and the mystery of Freddie’s missing gun.”

  I had for the first time harmonized the forensic facts with the testimony provided by the witnesses who were present on the Old Military Road. The major pieces of the puzzle had come together and I now knew how Woodruff had been murdered.

  I called Mousia to share my progress and to ask for advice: Where could I get a Niva hatchback door to shoot with a Dragunov round? But she quickly brushed my question aside. “I’ve found someone who can tell us about the guardians on the side of the road,” she said. “He was in Georgian Group Alpha in 1993. And I found him through the Alpha veterans’ Facebook page!”

  Kote Shavishvili was retired from government service and working in the private sector. He occasionally traveled for business, and we arranged to meet in Cyprus. It was an easier connection than Tbilisi and provided me the illusion of Western security.

  Mousia flew in from Moscow. Obliging banks, a temperate climate, and a euro-based economy had combined to make Cyprus a favorite destination for Russians. There were several nonstop flights a day and they were all full.

  I was waiting for her at the bottom of the airstairs as she came off the plane. “Come,” she said. “I have a present for you.”

  We stood near the baggage cart at the side of the plane as handlers unloaded passenger luggage. Mousia clapped as a man with a wide Slavic forehead wrestled an automobile hatchback door out of the hold and onto the cart. He looked back inside the plane and then yelled to her in Russian.

  “Where’s the rest of the Niva car?” he asked.

  Mousia and I carried my prize to the hotel. The receptionist was from Rostov-on-Don and conducted the whole transaction in Russian. I was beginning to get the sense that Cyprus had been colonized.

  We were scheduled to meet Kote that evening at a restaurant near the beach. Mousia and I arrived early but he was already there waiting.

  A bald man in his early sixties, he had the hardened body of an athlete. His hands were calloused and his gray mustache was bushy. He was three inches shorter than me, but the straightness of his posture made him look taller. He was the kind of man who is easy to respect—a man of action for whom guile is an embarrassment. I liked him immediately.

  The restaurant he’d chosen served real Georgian food made by real Georgian cooks. The air was thick with the coriander smell of traditional red and green bean soup. And Kote was comfortable in his role as gracious host.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  I told him who I represented and why they had engaged me. “They are simple religious people,” I said. “And they want to honor their dead.”

  He pulled out the Cross of St. Nino hanging around his neck and smiled warmly. “I am a believer too,” he said.

  I summarized the statements from the roadside witnesses and told him my suspicions about the guardians. He listened closely, but I was pretty sure he already knew everything I was telling him. I got to the end of the narrative and stopped without asking him a question. The three of us sat in silence while he looked at me. It was obvious that he was thinking, but I couldn’t tell what. Finally, he spoke.

  “If you were going to carry out an operation like this, the assassination of an American CIA officer by a foreign shooter, then I was the man in Georgia you would call for logistical support.”

  His words had been carefully chosen. It was not a confession. It was a conditional admission about routine practice. He paused to check my reaction and then continued.

  “If you’re going to shoot someone, you need to put the shooter, the weapon, and the target in the same place at the same time. And if your shooter is foreign, then he needs someone local to organize the intersection of these three elements and to provide him support before, during, and after the operation. In 1993, I was second in command of Georgian Group Alpha under Igor Giorgadze—and it was my job to organize such things and to provide trained operators for support.”

  My heart was racing. This was exactly what KGB officer Stanislav Lekarev had told me in Moscow: The murder of Freddie Woodruff was organized through Giorgadze and facilitated by Georgian Group Alpha. But one important element of Lekarev’s surmise was missing from Kote’s description—the involvement of Russian military intelligence.

  The old Georgian soldier must have heard my thoughts because he replied to them directly. “Eldar Gogoladze was GRU,” he said.

  It was the same thing that Irakli Batiashvili had said about Gogoladze. But I didn’t let on that I’d heard it before. “I thought he was KGB,” I said.

  “He was KGB,” he said. “And GRU. And CIA. He was a triple agent. GRU took him out of a police substation and put him into Georgian KGB. And when the Americans came they recruited him to the CIA. In fact, that’s what the men in Group Alpha called him—‘the CIA agent.’ But his ultimate loyalty was always to Russian military intelligence.”

  It was a head-spinning revelation. But I finally understood why mafia chief Jaba Ioseliani had chosen Eldar as the head of Shevardnadze’s personal protection force and why Shevardnadze could not fire him. Eldar was in business with GRU and GRU was in business with Mkhedrioni.

  “What was Eldar’s role in the murder?” I asked.

  “Eldar was the messenger,” he said. “There was someone from Mkhedrioni that Freddie wanted to meet and Eldar was the conduit for arranging that meeting. Marina—who was also in Mkhedrioni—was there to make the introduction for Freddie.”

  He stopped talking, but I had the feeling he wanted to say more. He pursed his lips and furrowed his brow just enough to make the lines around his eyes stand out. He looked bitter. “They were both very well rewarded for their service,” he sighed.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “In GRU and KGB, the job you get after you retire depends on the perceived value of the contributions you made during your career—the more valuable your contributions, the better your job. I was Soviet Group Alpha; I fought in Afghanistan; I retired as a general—but my contributions weren’t valuable enough to get me any job at all. That’s why I’m stuck providing security for an Internet poker site.”

  Kote was a proud man. And clearly he felt insulted and demeaned. He wanted to complain to someone. “Eldar never lost his contacts in GRU,” he said. “They protected him and—after he got out of prison—they gave him an executive position at Cartu Group. They even rehired him at Cartu after you got him fired.”

  “They?” I asked. “I thought Cartu belonged to Bidzina Ivanashvili.”

  “Not really,” he said. “Cartu is funded—indirectly, of course—from a GRU slush fund. Ivanashvili is the face, but it’s not all his money.”

  It was a fantastic accusation, and I had absolutely no idea whether it was true. Nevertheless, it did provide a plausible excuse for Eldar’s employment in a position for which he was so obviously unqualified. And it did explain why he would be fired from Cartu after admitting on television that Woodruff’s murder was the work of “a great regional power.”

  But I had neither time nor inclination to pursue this line of inquiry. I did not want to distract Kote from his grievance. I was aiming at something and I needed him to be angry.

  “What about Marina Kapanadze?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “She was rewarded too. She got a job in the West—working for the Russians.
The Ministry of Defense, I think.”

  “And what about the shooter?” I said. “I know he was a professional—”

  “He was no professional!” Kote shouted. “One professional does not steal another professional’s tools!”

  His outburst quieted the restaurant, but it didn’t matter. I had what I needed: an implicit admission that he had provided logistical support to the shooter and that the shooter had betrayed him by stealing a silencer and two canisters of tear gas.

  Kote was the missing link between what I knew and what I didn’t know. And his outrage explained the shooter’s inexplicable arrest. As a deputy in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, he could easily have had the thief detained. And as a member of the Alpha brotherhood, he would have had every reason to do so.

  I had trouble going to sleep that night. I kept thinking about how close the shooter came to disappearing without a trace. But the FBI had identified him because he stole from a comrade and the comrade had him arrested. Thus, a complex operation to assassinate an American operative was put at risk because of petty dishonesty and righteous retaliation. The whole episode was utterly banal. And exactly how things happen in real life.

  I wanted to test the credibility of Kote’s indictment of Gogoladze by finding Marina. If she was in fact employed by the Russian Ministry of Defense, it would make his claim about GRU involvement more believable. Up until now, I had always been too afraid to meet her. After all, she was a very dangerous woman and I was a threat to her comfortable life. But I had accumulated sufficient contacts in the intelligence world that I believed I could learn what I needed to know without actually having to talk to her. And so, using the good offices of a cooperative US government employee, I hired two agents from a European intelligence service to find Marina Kapanadze.

  They failed. But in the process of failing they located her son in a suburb of Athens. A few years earlier, the young man had been arrested by Georgian authorities for stealing almost $1 million from an airport reconstruction project. According to the European agents, immediately after the arrest the Georgian prosecutor general received immense pressure from the Russian Ministry of Defense. Whether for that reason or another, the prosecutor general released the young man and terminated the investigation.

  It wasn’t a smoking gun, but it did imply that someone in the Kapanadze family had enormous influence in Moscow.

  It occurred to me that the FBI had conducted an extensive investigation to determine whether Eldar and Marina were complicit in Freddie’s death. Almost all the documentary evidence regarding this inquiry had been redacted from my FBI FOIA files. However, Dell Spry believed that in light of my success in liberating Anzor, the FBI special agent who took over the post-Ames investigation might be willing to talk to me.

  And so I reached out to Dave Beisner. A legendary veteran of FBI black ops, Beisner was a crusty curmudgeon. And he didn’t mince words about the Georgians with whom he’d dealt. “They all lie,” he said. “All of ’em. You can’t believe a word that comes out of their mouths.”

  On the basis of his experience, Beisner believed that the only way to ascertain the truth from a Georgian was using a polygraph. And so he’d taken one to Tbilisi. This information filled in a gap in my time line. I had travel authorizations for two special agents and a polygrapher, but I didn’t know the identities of the human subjects.

  They were Eldar Gogoladze and Marina Kapanadze.

  “I wired ’em up and asked ’em a single question,” he said. “ ‘Were you reporting to anyone about Freddie Woodruff’s movements?’ They both denied it and I got no indication of a deception. So I closed the case.”

  It was hard for me to follow the logic of his process. He seemed to assume that if Gogoladze and Marina were not reporting on Freddie, then Freddie’s death was not a murder. But that was, as lawyers like to say, a non sequitur: The conclusion did not logically follow from the premise. Just because they weren’t reporting didn’t mean it wasn’t a murder.

  More troubling still was his assumption that a polygraph would work effectively on Georgians. As a US government report noted in 1990, among some Eurasian cultures, lying on behalf of the state is fulfillment of a person’s highest duty and gives the deceiver a calm consciousness and immense joy. There is no guilt, and therefore, there is no observable pattern of physiological reactions to guilt.

  The more I thought about it, the more I suspected that the Bureau wanted to stop working on the Woodruff murder and used the polygraph as a scientific justification for that decision. Nevertheless, they’d been suspicious of Gogoladze and Marina up to the very last minute.

  * * *

  I’d all but given up on ever finding Marina when I got a call from journalist Eliso Chapidze. “Do you believe in coincidence?” she asked.

  Eliso had been in Western Europe for a seminar and was flying back to Tbilisi. Her plane stopped in Istanbul, and a matronly looking Georgian woman sat down in the seat next to her.

  “I am Marina Kapanadze,” she said.

  For the next two hours they talked about Freddie Woodruff. Marina was charming and sentimental and sad. She claimed to have cared deeply about Freddie. And at one point she cried. “His death ruined my life,” she said. “It followed me everywhere. And in the end, I was forced to leave home and move away.”

  She now lived in Athens and worked for a company that sold Russian military equipment. And she just happened to have a recent photograph with her colleagues. “It was Marina standing in the middle of a bunch of Russian army generals,” Eliso said. “The generals were all in uniform, but Marina said they were retired.”

  The barmaid had become an arms dealer. And I had learned about it because of a chance encounter on an airplane. My first reaction to this impossibly improbable coincidence was panic: My idle curiosities had become the subject of a Russian intelligence operation. A hostile foreign power was apparently monitoring my communications, analyzing my strategies, and steering my investigation.

  I felt naked and exposed. However, after a few sleepless nights I began to ponder why the Russians would organize this meeting with Marina. It seemed obvious that they wanted to confirm that Marina had been rewarded for valuable service to Russia. And—since Marina didn’t talk about anything other than Freddie and her current job with the Russians—they clearly weren’t trying to persuade me that her “valuable service” was somehow unrelated to the Woodruff murder.

  So why almost twenty years after his death would the Russian special services go to so much effort in order to confirm that killing Freddie had been a valuable service to Russia? I suspected that the answer to this riddle was somehow related to the reason they had killed him in the first place. According to experts, there were two competing theories as to why the Russians might have done that: One theory said the murder was related to the Russian drug trade and the other theory said the murder was related to the Russian spy Aldrich Ames.

  And since Marina was Mkhedrioni and Eldar was GRU, there was a good chance they would have been involved either way.

  I spent a long time thinking about Russian involvement in drug smuggling. It was a well-documented historical fact and one that even the Russians had tacitly acknowledged. Admittedly, my perspective was severely limited; nevertheless, I was unable to imagine any benefit to the Russians if I or anyone else ultimately attributed Freddie’s death to trespass on an old smuggling operation. As far as I could see, if drugs were the true motive for the murder, then the Russians would have been better served to leave Marina in Athens and me in ignorance.

  But they had intentionally chosen to inform me—to confirm the fact of their relationship with Marina and confirm the fact of her valuable service to Russia. And so I turned to the second theory: that the murder of Freddie Woodruff was related to the Russian spy Aldrich Ames.

  I immersed myself in the details of his betrayal. I read the declassified congressional reports and consumed a half-dozen biographies of his deceit. I talked to a broad cross section of
witnesses, from the FBI special agent in charge of the Ames investigation to the Washington, DC, lawyer in charge of the Ames defense.

  And I continued my correspondence with Aldrich Ames himself.

  Pursuant to a plea agreement, Ames had been sentenced to life in federal prison. He was housed in the Allenwood medium security facility in central Pennsylvania. Under the terms of his plea, the CIA reviewed and censored all of his incoming and outgoing mail. This effectively prevented any substantive dialogue about the Woodruff murder. In addition, the Agency exercised absolute authority to approve or disapprove his visitors. And they exercised that authority to refuse my and his requests for a face-to-face visit.

  The CIA knew who I was and it didn’t want me to talk to him.

  Around that same time I received a handwritten postcard from G. L. Lamborn in San Antonio, Texas. “I understand that you and Dell Spry (an old acquaintance) have been looking into the Freddie Woodruff case,” he wrote. “The case has bothered me for almost two decades. I believe I may be able to help you as I was uniquely involved in the mid-90’s. I’d like to see it closed and the results made known.”

  I wrote back immediately and scheduled a visit for Sunday afternoon.

  Lamborn had just gotten home from church when I knocked at the door. We sat in the dining room because the living room had been surrendered to rows of double-facing library shelves. Books in several languages seemed to have spilled out of the back bedrooms and down the hall before conquering the parlor.