The Spy Who Was Left Behind

by Michael Pullara

  He answered on the second ring. He already knew about me and the reopening of Anzor’s criminal conviction. “We believe that he’s innocent,” I said.

  “Of course he’s innocent,” growled Baer. “Freddie was murdered by GRU.”

  Over the course of my investigation, I’d encountered several witnesses who suspected that Woodruff had been murdered by agents from Soviet military intelligence. But this was the first time anyone in the US government had asserted it as a fact.

  “Yeah,” he said, “the Russians killed Freddie. But I don’t want to talk about it on the phone. I’ll be in California tomorrow. Come and see me.”

  I stumbled back into the bar and sat down. Doran was the one who was drinking, but I was the one who felt drunk. I told him about my extraordinary conversation and Baer’s invitation to meet him in Newport Beach.

  “Let’s go to California,” he said. “We can leave in the morning.”

  I was a little surprised at how quickly my invitation had become our trip to California. But so long as Baer did not object, I could see no harm in cultivating a relationship with an Irish documentarian.

  We arrived at LAX just after noon, rented a car, and drove down the coast. Our meeting with Baer was scheduled for the morning. We took rooms at the Holiday Inn Express and the next day met the retired CIA officer at a trendy open-air shopping mall. He was waiting for us outside a coffee shop. Blue jeans, T-shirt, work boots—he looked more ironworker than superspy. His arms and chest were thick. He was a man who had once spent a lot of time in the gym.

  Introductions were quick and perfunctory. Even so, I stumbled a little. I was nervous and tongue-tied—overexcited to meet a real live CIA man. Fortunately, Doran had offered to take the lead. “Leave it to me,” he’d said. “I know how to deal with these intelligence types.”

  We sat equidistant around a circular metal patio table. Doran started his conversation with Baer the same place I’d started mine. “We think that Anzor is innocent,” he said. Then almost imperceptibly he leaned back. He was waiting, creating an opening for Baer to fill.

  But Baer was stubborn. So we sat in silence. After a moment Baer leaned forward and offered his own open-ended declaration. “This has already been fully investigated,” he said.

  I wasn’t sure, but when he leaned back it looked a little theatrical—as though he was making fun of Doran. If so, Doran didn’t seem to notice.

  I nodded, waiting for more, waiting for anything. But this was not serve-and-volley conversation. It was two men, expert in the arts of manipulation, attempting to use silence as a weapon. Neither would relent and relinquish the illusion of control.

  And so we sat for thirty minutes in intermittently punctuated silence, shook hands, and went our separate ways.

  “I think that went well,” said Doran. But I said nothing. It was my turn to be silent.

  As I reconsidered the day, I realized that I had chosen to make a mistake. I had embraced Doran’s self-professed expertise with intelligence officers because I was nervous about talking to Baer. As a result, I had condemned myself to watch style get in the way of substance.

  It was an expensive lesson but not necessarily beyond redemption. Having tried and failed to manipulate Baer, I saw no real downside to humility and transparency. If all else fails, tell the truth. And so I called him again.

  “Bob, I’m not as smart as you,” I said. “I don’t have your training or your experience. And I won’t ever be able to manipulate you into telling me anything that you don’t want to tell me. On the other hand, if you ask me a question, I’m going to tell you everything I know on the subject. I’m not going to keep any secrets. I would appreciate it if you’d talk to me. But if you can’t, I understand.”

  Baer could have made me wait, made me squirm a little bit—but he didn’t. He just started talking. The barrel-chested immovable object I’d seen sitting on the opposite side of the patio table became almost chatty.

  The metamorphosis was remarkable. But I couldn’t help feeling that Baer modulated his personality the way a spider fine-tunes his web: a process that is endlessly fascinating to observe—unless you’re the prey.

  “Freddie’s murder wasn’t up to GRU’s typical standard of professionalism,” he said. “It was clumsy and ham-handed—too many witnesses, too many variables, too many things that could go wrong.”

  “What about motive?” I asked. “Was the motive related to his work—perhaps something the Russians viewed as threatening?”

  “The Agency never identified a credible motive,” he said. “But you have to understand—Freddie wasn’t working against the Russians. In fact, he did a lot of work with the Russians. So it didn’t make any sense for the Russians to kill him. There just wasn’t any profit in it.”

  “But if the operation wasn’t up to GRU standards and the Russians didn’t have a motive, perhaps they didn’t do it.”

  “No, the Russians killed him,” he said. “We identified the shooter. He was former Soviet Special Forces. And the Bureau interviewed him.”

  I had by now spent a great deal of time believing in the mystery, believing that Freddie Woodruff was murdered by “person or persons unknown.” And I had spent a lifetime believing that if the good guy catches the bad guy, then the bad guy gets punished. But if Baer was telling the truth—if the US government really had identified the shooter and still allowed Anzor to languish in prison—then my reality was a naive fantasy. And that was a truth I wasn’t eager to learn.

  Baer seemed to sense my ambivalence. He was quiet as I tried to put the puzzle pieces together. An assassination that was hastily conceived and sloppily executed. A killing that could not be rationally related to the victim’s work. No obvious motive and no clear beneficiary. Little effort to hide the who and how, but maximum effort to obscure the why.

  Then it hit me: The fact that it was so difficult to identify the beneficiary of the murder suggested that the motive for the murder was (as least in part) to protect that beneficiary from being identified. And I knew there was at least one person in Freddie’s orbit whose true identity the Russians were desperate to protect.

  “What about Aldrich Ames?” I asked.

  Baer answered with a growl of approval. “Good question,” he said. “You need to talk to Special Agent Dell Spry.”

  I’d heard the name before. He was part of the FBI task force that investigated the CIA mole. According to the caption on a photo beamed around the world, Spry was the agent who put the cuffs on Ames the day he was arrested.

  Baer gave me his number and I called that same afternoon. Spry didn’t pick up, so I left a message. He later told me that he wouldn’t have called back at all if I hadn’t mentioned Bob Baer by name. Both then and later, the fact that Baer had talked to me was the passport that gave me entrée to the tight-knit fraternity of intelligence operators.

  We met in Atlanta. Spry was starched, creased, and buttoned-down. He wore a crew cut, a conservative striped tie, and a smile. He was polite, respectful, and poised. He exuded honesty and integrity. He was very clearly a methodical man whose attention to detail made him dangerous. His speech was slow and his Southern accent thick, but his mind was sharp and fast. He was a tier one counterintelligence operator whose activities were authorized at the highest level of the US government. And he had a reputation among America’s secret keepers as a man who could connect the dots and find people who didn’t want to be found.

  I’d brought my entire file. Baer had encouraged me not to ask questions, so I started at the beginning and told Spry everything I knew and everything I thought I knew. When I was finished, he reached into my stack of documents and pulled out the heavily redacted letterhead memorandum. “I wrote this,” he said, “all twenty-five pages. You’ve done a good job of filling in the blanks.”

  He paused for a moment. He appeared to be deciding something.

  “I remember this case,” he said. “It left a hole in me.”

  And then he started at the begin
ning and walked me step-by-step through his investigation. He was as candid and direct with me as I had tried to be with him.

  “You’re right about the film,” he said. “Freddie borrowed a camera and checked out five canisters of thirty-five mm film from the embassy stores. The Georgians only returned four canisters—and those had all been overexposed. Elena told us that just after the shooting she saw Marina pulling film out of canisters and exposing it to light. That caused us to view the film as a critical piece of evidence.”

  He turned to the next page in the memorandum and stared at the blacked-out paragraphs. “On the way back from Mount Kazbek they stopped at a pub: a kind of beer-and-barbecue place. It was Sunday afternoon and the little restaurant was supposed to be closed, but there were several cars there, supposedly people that Marina knew. Eldar told Elena to wait in the car while he, Freddie, and Marina went inside. They stayed about thirty minutes, and when they came out, Marina said she was cold and asked Freddie for his coat.”

  I was entirely focused on his words. It was only when he paused for a drink of water that I realized my heart was pounding.

  “It’s standard procedure to identify the target of an assassination for the shooter. You really don’t want him to make a mistake and kill the wrong person. It can be done several different ways—light a cigarette when they walk up, put out a cigarette when they walk away, give them something, take something from them. We think that the shooter was there at the pub and—by taking Freddie’s coat—Marina was identifying him as the target.”

  The facts were coming too fast to memorize. I asked if I could take notes.

  Spry nodded. “We know that Freddie was investigating smuggling operations in Georgia,” he said, “drugs and weapons. We know that he had a camera with him. And we know that he was a consummate professional. All that together means he was probably taking pictures the whole time: inside the pub, outside the pub, on the highway. We believe that Freddie probably photographed the assassin and that Marina probably destroyed that photograph. We also suspect she may have taken Freddie’s handgun. He always carried a weapon but we never received it from the Georgians.”

  My writing was becoming an illegible scrawl. My hands were shaking. And in my excitement I momentarily lost sight of Baer’s good advice.

  “Bob said the Bureau identified the shooter,” I said. “That you actually talked to him.”

  Spry paused and looked at me without expression. “Have you ever gone to a Georgian wedding?” he asked.

  It was a jarring turn in the conversation and I immediately regretted my question.

  “No,” I said. “I never did.”

  “Everyone is invited,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether you know the family or not. In Georgia, it’s bad manners to walk by a wedding and not go in to celebrate. But the noise! The singing, the shouting, the music, the laughter—you can hardly hear yourself think.”

  He paused for a moment—just long enough to notice the anxiety that his unexplained digression was causing me. “I made a friend in the Georgian security service. One day he called me and said, ‘Let’s go to a Georgian wedding.’ And we went—because at a Georgian wedding no one can overhear your conversation.”

  Spry smiled and his eyes twinkled. “He told me that the day after the murder the police had stopped a man at the Tbilisi train station—a Russian born in Kazakhstan who was using the name Vladimir Rachman. When they searched him, they discovered that he was carrying a silencer and two canisters of tear gas. The police arrested the man for possession of military paraphernalia, and almost immediately, the Russian Ministry of Defense began pressing the Georgian government to release him. The man had been in Spetsnaz [Russian military intelligence special forces], had fought in Nagorno-Karabakh, and been wounded in the left hand. The Georgians let him go and the man went to Azerbaijan. And my friend thought the whole thing might be relevant to the Woodruff investigation.”

  I stopped taking notes and just listened. I’d never heard anything like this in my life.

  “I took the five identifiers—name, country of origin, military organization, duty station, distinct physical injury—and asked Bob Baer to see if he could find the man. A few weeks later, on a Sunday morning, Bob called me. ‘You’d better get in here,’ he said. ‘I found him.’ And he had. A perfect match on all five identifiers. I now had the man’s name, his aliases, his contacts, and his photograph.”

  It was a mind-boggling accomplishment. The CIA had found a single needle in a worldwide haystack.

  “Then I went back to the Georgians. I told them that we’d identified this man; that we knew he’d been arrested right after the murder; and that—given the severity of his offense—we were sure he would still be in prison. I told them that we wanted to meet him as soon as possible. And then we sat back and watched while the Georgians reached out to the Russian Ministry of Defense and begged them to find this man and return him to Tbilisi.”

  The image made me laugh: the FBI secretly watching as Keystone Cops constructed one lie in order to protect another lie.

  “After a few weeks they called and told us that he was available. So we went back to interview him—me and my partner on the case, Special Agent Dave Beisner. It was definitely our guy. And on the surface, he looked and smelled the part of an inmate in a Georgian prison. But his hands weren’t calloused; he wasn’t suffering from malnutrition, tuberculosis, or fleas; and his beard had recently been trimmed. He told us that he didn’t know much about Freddie’s murder except that the CIA man had been shot in the back of the head. He offered to help us with some other stuff and asked for political asylum in America. We talked about that for a while and then circled back to Freddie. I asked him how he knew that the bullet had hit Freddie in the back of the head and he said that he’d read it in a newspaper somewhere. But that was a lie. We’d collected and translated every newspaper article in the world that had ever mentioned the murder of Freddie Woodruff—and not a single one of them had ever said that the bullet struck him in the back of the head. The only people who knew that fact were the FBI, the pathologist who’d done the microscopic reconstruction of bone fragments, and the man that fired the bullet.”

  It wasn’t a confession, but it did suggest that Rachman had been present at the murder or that he had talked to someone who had been present.

  “We traced his movements in the weeks after the murder—where he went, what he did. When he left Georgia he went to Azerbaijan and met with the minister of internal affairs. So we went to Baku and had our own meeting with the minister. He didn’t really want to cooperate at first. He was mostly concerned that the FBI knew about his meeting with a possible assassin. But I pressed him, ‘Do you really want me to go back to Washington and tell my president that you would not help America with this important case?’ And that did the trick. He gave us a one-page document that Rachman had given him—a CV for a company called Mongoose. In the document, the company took credit for killing the CIA man in Georgia and offered to do murder for the ministry at a cost of one thousand dollars per bullet.”

  “But who hired him to kill Freddie?” I didn’t realize I’d asked the question out loud until I saw the look on Spry’s face. But he wasn’t offended. I think he knew the impulse was irresistible.

  “When I took over this case, I ordered a second Bureau-wide search for documents related to the murder. I wanted to see every piece of paper from every government agency or public source that referred to the shooting of Freddie Woodruff. During the course of that search, I became aware of information concerning an event that supposedly occurred a couple of months before Freddie was killed. A high-ranking member of Russian organized crime allegedly attended a meeting in May or June of 1993 at the Hotel Rossiya in Moscow—a kind of board of directors meeting chaired by Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev and attended by the Ministry of Defense, GRU, and the Russian mafia. During the meeting, one of the people in attendance complained that they needed to ‘do something about a troublesome CIA o
fficer named Freddie Woodford and a Georgian named Eldar Gogoladze to whom he’d gotten too close.’ At a subsequent meeting held after August 1993, someone asked, ‘Whatever happened to the troublesome CIA officer in Georgia?’ The person asking the question was told not to worry about it, that the problem had been taken care of.”

  The story knocked the breath out of me. The murder of an American intelligence officer sanctioned by the Russian minister of defense himself? It was hard to imagine that Freddie was involved in anything of sufficient importance to merit the compliment of Grachev’s notice.

  “Is it possible that the whole thing was made up?” I asked.

  “It’s possible,” he said. “The memo was allegedly written before the murder, but it wasn’t produced in response to the FBI shooting team’s search request. The official explanation for this failure was that the memo referred to the targeted CIA officer as Woodford and not Woodruff. But flimsy excuses like that tend to diminish an investigator’s confidence in the reliability of the evidence.”

  “What about Moscow?” I said. “Did you ever follow up there?”

  Spry chuckled. “Yes and no,” he said. “I made a plan to go there. And I applied for country clearance. And I briefed the FBI liaison at the State Department. But while I was on the plane bound for Russia someone revoked my country clearance. The FBI legal attaché in Moscow met me at the airport and told me I had to get on the first flight home—because without official country clearance, I had no authority to do anything in Russia.”

  “Who revoked your country clearance?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You’ll have to ask Ambassador Strobe Talbott.”

  It was a completely incredible story told by a completely credible man. But some of it was still awfully hard to believe. At a time of near total anarchy—when patrons at the local Sheraton Hotel were asked to check their guns at the door—the Georgian police had randomly stopped a Russian man at the train station and arrested him for carrying a silencer and tear gas. At a moment when the FBI investigation had identified a hired assassin but not yet identified his employer, the Bureau discovered a report in its files that provided the precise evidence necessary to steer the inquiry.