The Spy Who Was Left Behind

by Michael Pullara

  This particular part of my education started with an e-mail. The chief investigator had contacted Lali and Lali had contacted me: The prosecutor general wanted a meeting—in person, in Tbilisi, as soon as possible. It seemed an awfully long way to go for a conversation, but the prosecutor general was a serious man so I assumed it was a serious matter.

  A week later Lali and I were standing in his office. There were no preliminaries. He came straight to the point. “I received a reply from the American ambassador,” he said, and handed me a letter on US embassy letterhead.

  The document was terse and categorical. The United States had no interest in reinvestigating the murder of Freddie Woodruff. America was satisfied with the original Georgian investigation and with the prosecution of the accused. The US government declined to produce the requested FBI documents and refused to make its investigators available for interview.

  It was a devastating development. And it didn’t make any sense. My country—the champion of liberty and justice for all—was deliberately obstructing due process for Anzor Sharmaidze. It was acting with conscious intent to deny freedom to the innocent and at the same time grant immunity to the guilty.

  It was mind-boggling. I simply could not comprehend how such petty cruelty served US national interests. Nevertheless, the implications of US opposition were obvious and immediate. The Georgians could not resist the will of their US patron. If the Americans did not want to reinvestigate the murder of Freddie Woodruff, then the Georgians would not reinvestigate it. They would go through the remaining motions, but the conclusion was now preordained.

  After a few minutes of postmortem conversation, the prosecutor general thanked me for coming and said goodbye. The chief investigator walked me to the elevator and shook my hand. Just as the door was closing he said something that made Lali laugh.

  “What was that about?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I was just surprised to hear him say he was sorry.”

  I was sorry too. And angry. And frustrated.

  It was a significant setback and an inexplicable exercise of American power. Why was the United States so committed to keeping an uneducated Georgian man in prison for a crime he did not commit? It all seemed so wasteful and unnecessary. The part I couldn’t get over was the seeming irrationality of US opposition. After all, reinvestigation of Freddie’s murder appeared at least on the surface to serve American interests: It would allow Georgia to burnish its credentials as a modern democracy committed to the rule of law and at the same time provide the US an opportunity to identify and potentially to punish the real perpetrator of Freddie’s murder.

  But the US didn’t want any of that. And I couldn’t figure out why not. The question gnawed on me. Eventually, I realized something obvious: The fact that the case was a big deal to me didn’t mean that it was big deal to the US government. America’s opposition to reinvestigation of the Woodruff murder was not based on some baffling antipathy to Anzor Sharmaidze. Rather, that opposition was a very small, perhaps insignificant, part of a much larger US strategy to achieve a much more important US goal.

  Anzor was merely collateral damage in a great game of political and diplomatic confrontation. It was a chilling insight. And I needed someone a whole lot smarter than me to help me understand its implications. So I called Bob Baer.

  I told him about the status of my case and my view of advantages that the US could accrue from reinvestigation of the Woodruff murder. I was trying hard to be efficient.

  “If the US can identify the real murderer,” I said, “then they can avenge Freddie’s death and deter future threats to agents in the field. I understand Realpolitik but—”

  “You don’t know shit about Realpolitik,” he interrupted. “Nobody is ever going to avenge Freddie’s death. If you’re the US government, you don’t start down that path unless you’re willing to launch the Eighty-Second Airborne—because that’s what it’s ultimately gonna take. The question always is: Are you willing to go to war over one man’s death? And every CIA officer who ever went into harm’s way knows that the answer to that question is an emphatic ‘Hell no!’ ”

  The words stung. I felt unmasked as an amateur and a fool. But he was right: I didn’t know anything about Realpolitik. That was the domain of specialists, foxes who know many small things. I was at best a generalist, a hedgehog who knew two or three big things.

  And so after I’d recovered from the embarrassment of my telephone call I attempted to do an inventory of that knowledge. I sat in a dark room and searched the corners of my mind. The results were not encouraging.

  First, I knew that the US government did not want a full, fair, and public investigation into the murder of Freddie Woodruff. They had suggested as much when they subverted the second FBI inquiry and confirmed it when they interfered in my reinvestigation.

  Second, I knew that the possibility of Russian involvement in the murder was a patently obvious issue that the Americans and Georgians had scrupulously ignored. Notwithstanding all the Russian smoke, the investigators had gone out of their way to avoid seeing a Russian fire.

  And third, I knew that the only leverage I would ever have involved well-timed use of the Western news media. I needed a well-researched story, a crisis in Georgia, and the biggest megaphone I could find.

  Henceforth, I would stop depending on the courts and start relying on the press; I would stop trying to use the Americans to pressure the Georgians and start trying to use the Russians to pressure the Americans; and I would stop trying to prove Anzor’s innocence and start trying to prove someone else’s guilt.

  In other words, I would have to go find the real killer. And that meant I had to go to Moscow.

  CHAPTER 14

  * * *

  THE SEARCH FOR THE REAL KILLER

  In 1994 Jamie Doran made a documentary about Soviet nuclear weapons. During the course of production he became friends with several members of the Russian elite. One of those was Maria Semenova. Maria—who goes by the nickname “Mousia”—lived in a wooded compound outside Moscow’s third ring road. Stalin had given the spacious country house to her maternal grandfather after he built and detonated the USSR’s first atomic bomb. As a result, Mousia had grown up with neighbors named Rostropovich, Shostakovich, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Sakharov.

  That’s where Jamie and I stayed when we went to Moscow.

  Mousia was shy, unpretentious, and wickedly clever—the product of very good genetics: One grandfather was chief designer of all Soviet nuclear weapons; the other grandfather was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. But her natural intelligence and ruthless honesty were a handicap in the Soviet Union. She saw through the fundamental deceit of Marxism-Leninism and became apostated from all “isms.”

  I’d come to Moscow with a pocketful of crisp new hundred-dollar bills. Jamie said it was a city where you could buy anything you wanted—but you had to pay cash.

  I wanted information. And everyone knew that information was expensive. To get what I needed we turned to one of Jamie’s contacts—the Colonel. A slender and elegant man with a fondness for all things Italian, he was a fixer for Western journalists and had a source inside the office of the SVR archivist. I briefed the Colonel on the high points of the Woodruff murder and offered my conjectures on what documents might exist in the Russian files.

  “No,” he said. “We don’t tell him what we want. We ask him to tell us what is available.”

  We got the answer four days later. The Colonel called and demanded that we meet him in his apartment. He was already angry and afraid when he answered the door.

  His source had contacted him in a panic. “You’ve ruined me,” the source said.

  According to the Colonel, the source had made a routine request for documents relating to the killing of CIA officer Freddie Woodruff. But instead of getting files from the archivist, the source got a visit from SVR security officers.

  “You cannot have these documents,” they told the source. “And it’s
not worth your life to ask for them again.”

  The Colonel was furious. We had caused him to burn a valuable asset and he would get nothing for it. He demanded to know what we were playing at.

  “Do you have any idea how dangerous this is?” he said. “Leave. And don’t ever come back.”

  The archivist’s refusal was an unexpected outcome. Prior to approaching the archivist I’d done extensive research on Russia’s information black market. A vigorous backdoor business had always existed, but with the collapse of the organized economy the illicit information industry had exploded. Government secrets became a commodity that could be easily monetized for hard currency. Foreign spies submitted shopping lists, and opportunistic clerks trawled through confidential files to fill their orders.

  One American intelligence officer told me that the United States had paid millions of dollars for a trash bag. It was the waterproof wrapping around a packet of secret documents that had been passed to the KGB by a mole whose true identity was unknown to the Russians. But there was a fingerprint on the trash bag. And the CIA was able to use this print to identify the traitorous mole as FBI senior special agent Robert Hanssen.

  Why, I wondered, would the SVR allow such treasures to escape willy-nilly out the back door while responding with such vehemence to an archivist’s request simply to examine a decade-old murder? Their reaction suggested not only that they were involved in the Woodruff killing but that his assassination was directly relevant to deeper and perhaps more contemporary secrets.

  I didn’t have the resources, expertise, or inclination to investigate this bigger mystery. Nevertheless, I needed to know the subject of Russian concern so that I could assess the risks and formulate a strategy. Once again, Jamie knew someone who might be able to help.

  “Igor is connected,” Jamie said. “He knows everybody. He can tell us what they’re worried about.”

  And so, a few days later, the British documentarian and I were sitting in an apartment talking to a KGB officer. It was surreal. This sort of thing didn’t happen in real life. But it was happening to me. Igor talked matter-of-factly about things I’d never heard of, never even imagined. I suspected it might all be a lie. But even so, it was a fascinating story.

  According to Igor, a few days before the USSR dissolved (on December 26, 1991) the national and regional leaders of Soviet intelligence met at a dacha near Moscow. They were there to solve an unprecedented problem: How would their agencies continue to function in the absence of a central government that had for decades funded their operations?

  The men in attendance were custodians of a highly professional security apparatus. But they knew with absolute certainty that if they did not immediately find an alternative source of funds their organizations would quickly disintegrate. It was a desperate time that called for desperate measures. And their solution was both pragmatic and amoral: They created a narcotics cartel.

  They called their venture “Friends United” and chose a Chechen intelligence officer, Usman Umaev, as the first principal director. The Friends used SVR and GRU assets to smuggle opium paste out of Afghanistan to a processing lab in Shali, Chechnya. In the summer of 1993, they began using Chechen trucks guarded by Mkhedrioni (the mafia army led by Jaba Ioseliani) to drive tons of refined morphine through Georgia to the Black Sea ports of Poti and Batumi. From these ports the product typically continued to either Romania or Turkey, although one enterprising lieutenant arranged to export the heroin directly to the Caribbean on ships that had brought in Colombian cocaine.

  I recognized the smuggling routes that Igor was describing. They were the same ones that Freddie Woodruff had identified to the CIA in his thirty-page memo on narcotics trafficking in the Caucasus. But I didn’t say anything about it. And as it turned out, I didn’t need to.

  Igor already knew. “I can say with ninety-nine percent confidence that Woodruff was not killed because of Aldrich Ames,” he said. “Rather, the American was killed because of what he knew about this drug smuggling operation.”

  According to Igor, prior to 1995 the Georgian arm of the cartel was owned fifty-fifty by Mkhedrioni and Shota Kviraya, the deputy chief of information and intelligence services who told Batiashvili that the police had planted a shell casing from Anzor’s rifle for the FBI to recover. The Georgian joint venturers paid the Shevardnadze family 10 percent of their profits as consideration for not interfering in cartel business. After 1995, Kviraya owned the Georgian business by himself and began paying the Shevardnadze family 20 percent of the profits. Notwithstanding this expense, Kviraya’s share was more than $4 billion.

  It was a fantastical story. But on the surface it seemed conveniently consistent with what I knew or, at least, consistent with what I thought I knew. And that made me suspicious. Why would the SVR respond so ferociously to the archivist’s request if the Woodruff murder and the content of the requested file related only to Russia’s well-documented participation in narcotics trafficking? And why would the Russians provide me a former KGB officer to explain that relationship while at the same time preventing me from obtaining a file that ostensibly explained exactly the same thing?

  It bothered me that I could not answer these questions. And so in the end Igor’s insistence that the Woodruff murder was not related to Aldrich Ames had the paradoxical effect of redoubling my commitment to investigate the possible relationship. Fortunately, there was a vibrant cottage industry of former KGB officers willing for a fee to elucidate the unwritten history of the KGB. One of those was the affable and garrulous Stanislav Lekarev, a former member of the KGB First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence) who had worked undercover in London as a Soviet film executive. He spoke English with a slight British accent and seemed to have adopted completely the manners and mannerisms of the West.

  “Call me Stan,” he said. “I’m happy to help you. I’ll do anything I can to free an innocent boy from prison.”

  The motion picture arts were a natural cover for Lekarev. His father had been an actor on stage and in film, his mother a stage actress and acting instructor. He spoke knowledgeably about topics ranging from film production to acting techniques. He considered himself an expert on Hollywood accounting and the use of sex as a weapon.

  “Do you remember Clayton Lonetree?” he asked. “He was one of mine.”

  Lonetree had been a Marine guard at the US embassy in Moscow in 1985. He was seduced by a Russian woman who worked as an embassy telephone operator. Under duress, Lonetree delivered embassy floor plans and top secret cables to the KGB. He was ultimately arrested, convicted of espionage, and sentenced to thirty years in prison.

  “If I know your birthday,” Lekarev said, “especially if I know where you were born and exactly what time, I can do your horoscope and tell you what kind of woman you like. This is what we did. Then we slowly introduce the woman to your subconscious—passing on a street, sitting on a bus—until finally you meet. After the relationship has developed, the woman invites you home to meet her uncle Vanya. The uncle—in truth a KGB officer—tells you that we will kill the woman unless you give us an embassy document. No matter what you provide, we praise you lavishly when it is delivered. After that, we own you.”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But I knew one thing for sure: He wasn’t kidding.

  “What about Aldrich Ames?” I said.

  “Ah, Mr. Ames,” said Lekarev. “Prior to 1991 Ames was a treasure. His identity was known to only three or four people in the Russian government. One of those people was Vladimir Kryuchkov—the head of foreign intelligence and later the chairman of KGB. He betrayed Ames by killing all the agents that Ames had identified. After that, it was only a matter of time before the CIA identified Ames as a mole.”

  I was busy scribbling notes as fast as I could. Lekarev anticipated my next question.

  “By 1993 it was highly unlikely that the SVR would kill Woodruff to protect Ames,” he said. “In fact, I suspect that the SVR sacrificed both Ames and Hanssen to protect an e
ven more important agent.”

  It was a diabolical idea: that the Russians killed Woodruff not to save Ames from discovery but in order to draw attention to Ames and away from someone else.

  “But what if they did?” I asked. “What if the Russians did kill Woodruff because of Ames? How would they do it?”

  “You have to remember the conditions that existed in 1993,” he said. “The central government wasn’t functioning. There was no vertical coordination—the top couldn’t tell the bottom what to do. However, there was still strong horizontal cooperation. Intelligence officers could contact their peers in other organizations and get them to do things.”

  Lekarev took a piece of paper and drew an XY axis graph.

  “Coordination was down here in the negative numbers,” he said. “But cooperation was over here in the positive numbers. That’s how they did it.”

  I looked at the graph. It was a simple and terrifying indictment of post-Soviet Russia: a highly effective killing machine with no central command authority. Brawn without brain.

  “In 1993 Georgia was essentially still a part of Russia,” he said. “Shevardnadze didn’t want to join Yeltsin’s Commonwealth of Independent States; he wanted to align himself with the West in hopes of getting Western aid—but that didn’t matter. Russia had its army, GRU, and SVR all over Georgia. There were Russian loyalists everywhere in the Georgian government. So anything that Russia wanted to do in Georgia, they could do quickly and without concern.”

  Lekarev was silent for a moment—remembering, calculating, or (perhaps) just acting. Then he leaned forward and lowered his voice.