The Spy Who Was Left Behind

by Michael Pullara

  I was sitting in Lali’s parlor trying to think of clever ways to engage the local embassy in that effort when Georgia Woodruff Alexander proposed a somewhat more direct approach.

  “Why don’t I go talk to the ambassador?” she said. We made a call and got her an appointment. The next day Lali’s nephew drove her to the US embassy—a gated compound dominated by a new thirty-thousand-square-foot building. We had decided that she would go alone in order to demonstrate that her commitment to the reinvestigation of Freddie’s murder existed independent of my influence.

  She met with Ambassador John Tefft and a political officer from the embassy staff. In an interesting coincidence, the second man had the same job title as Freddie when he pretended to work for the Department of State. Both the ambassador and the officer were gracious, courteous, and apparently befuddled. They claimed to know nothing at all about the Woodruff murder or the family’s attempt to liberate Anzor. This seemed odd since it was Ambassador Tefft who had signed the letter endorsing the Sharmaidze conviction and declining the prosecutor general’s request for FBI assistance in a reinvestigation.

  “They didn’t answer any of my questions,” she told me. “I asked them if they were going to name the new building after him or put up a plaque or something. But they hadn’t thought about any of that stuff. They’d just left Freddie behind.”

  The next day I went to the embassy. I had called ahead. I wanted to meet the political officer who’d sat in on the prior day’s meeting. I assumed he was the local station chief and my best opportunity to talk directly to the CIA. I showed up on time and the receptionist put me in a hallway lobby to wait. I’d been sitting there thirty-five minutes when the political officer finally showed up. He seemed indignant.

  “You can’t just come here and expect to see the ambassador,” he barked. He had a short beard and wore a blue blazer. He looked more like a junior professor than a diplomat.

  “That’s all right,” I said. “You’re the one I wanted to see.”

  We had our meeting right there in the lobby—another petty discourtesy intended to distract me. But I had a goal in mind and I wasn’t going to be flustered by ego manipulations. I knew that the political officer would write a report summarizing our conversation and that his report would be circulated to people at the Agency who were interested in the murder of Freddie Woodruff. I wanted those people to know what I had discovered and how I had discovered it. And I wanted them to know that they could trust me. So I told him everything.

  He listened attentively, asked a few relevant questions, and then rushed me out of the building. I left the embassy grounds thinking that it had been an unsuccessful meeting. It would be a few weeks before I found out how wrong I was.

  By the time I got back to Lali’s house, Jamie had already gone out for an interview. He and Magda had been working for some time to get Eldar Gogoladze. The former bodyguard was reluctant to speak since the last time he did so publicly it had cost him his job. But he was a vain little man and could not pass up the opportunity for self-promotion. Jamie did the interview accompanied only by a local cameraman. Gogoladze was suspicious of the technician and made an effort to intimidate him. “Who are you?” he said. “I know where you live.”

  The interrogation produced no material revelations on the case. Gogoladze still claimed that the boys were twenty meters behind the car when he heard the shot; still claimed that on the night of the murder he thought the bullet had come in the front passenger window; and still claimed that he didn’t find the entry hole because the hot bullet had melted the gasket around the rear window. The only new detail to come out of the interview was Gogoladze’s request that Jamie ghostwrite his autobiography. “I’ve had a very exciting life,” he said. “And I know a lot of secrets.”

  The two men had bonded over their mutual antipathy toward me. Jamie didn’t like me because I was a provincial who had criticized his drinking. Gogoladze didn’t like me because I was an interloper who had interfered in his comfortable life.

  And he was angry about it.

  “It would be so easy for me to kill him,” Gogoladze told Jamie. “He doesn’t have any security, he doesn’t exercise any caution, and I have a long gun that would be the perfect tool for the job. I’ve already given the matter quite a bit of thought.”

  I caught up with Jamie and the crew later that night at a pub. They were there with Dell Spry.

  There was a hint of glee in Jamie’s voice as he recounted his conversation with Gogoladze. He seemed particularly amused by Gogoladze’s threat and how he had smiled as he pretended to aim the rifle. But the retired FBI special agent took it very seriously. “You’re leaving tomorrow,” he told me. “Eldar has means and motive. We aren’t going to give him opportunity.” Spry walked me out of the bar and led me through the shadows back to Lali’s house. “Get your hands out of your pockets,” he said. “When somebody says they want to kill you, it’s because they want to kill you. You need to be ready to fight.”

  I left the next day. Jamie and crew continued working in Tbilisi for another week. They followed Spry as he retraced the FBI’s post–Aldrich Ames investigation; they organized a poignant meeting between Georgia Woodruff Alexander and Anzor’s mother; and they filmed a dramatic reenactment of the murder using one of the local community’s best actors.

  * * *

  But it was all for naught. There’d been difficulties between Jamie and me. And shortly after returning to England, he abandoned the project. It was a dispiriting blow, but I knew I would have to press on again, by myself. I sat in my Houston office a few weeks later and did a harshly critical inventory of my meager accomplishments: I’d spent a small fortune in time and money trying to unravel a mystery and still didn’t know the answer. I could prove Anzor’s innocence but couldn’t get him out of prison. I could disprove the official version of Freddie’s murder but couldn’t offer a persuasive alternative. I had received informal support from a few retired intelligence professionals but hadn’t succeeded in getting any formal support from the US government. I was completely out of good ideas.

  And then the postman delivered that day’s mail. The package wouldn’t fit in my box and so was waiting for me at security: a thick manila envelope with no return address and a smudged postmark. I tore it open without much thought of its contents. Inside were three inches of Xeroxed documents bound by a rubber band.

  It was an English-language translation of the Georgian investigation file. I flipped through the first several pages without realizing what I was looking at. The reality of what it was and what it meant dawned on me very slowly. The political officer’s report of our meeting at the American embassy in Tbilisi had reached someone who cared about Freddie’s murder, and that someone had decided to help me.

  And I never knew whom to thank. Some of the file was irrelevant—documents related to a drug dealer who had committed a series of violent carjackings on the Old Military Road; interviews with people who’d been victims of other crimes on the same day; Marina Kapanadze’s personnel file from the Sheraton Metechi Palace.

  But most of it was pure gold. There were copies of witness statements from Anzor and his two companions; from the policemen at the roadside post; from nurses and doctors at various hospitals; and from the family in the village of Arsha with whom the foursome had Sunday lunch. These materials were rich in details that contradicted much of the testimony given at Anzor’s trial.

  However, the documents that were of most immediate relevance to my investigation were recorded statements by people who’d actually seen and heard the murder of Freddie Woodruff—three passengers in the Niva and seven people at the Natakhtari Drain.

  And Georgian investigators had interviewed them all.

  CHAPTER 16

  * * *

  OFFICIAL INTERROGATIONS

  Otar Djaparidze was a cruel man. Large, brutal, efficient, and clever. A competent and ruthless investigator for the Georgian prosecutor general. It was a fearful thing to fall into the
hands of Deputy Chief Djaparidze. And it was into those meaty hands that Eldar Gogoladze had been delivered.

  It was 4 a.m. on August 9—a mere seven hours after the murder—and Djaparidze sat across the table from the chief of Shevardnadze’s personal protection force. Gogoladze was generally disliked by his peers and hated by his subordinates. They considered him a closed and arrogant man who seemed always to be engaged in some hidden game. Nevertheless, he had risen from obscurity to a position of responsibility with meteoric swiftness. Obviously Gogoladze had a powerful patron. And that alone made him dangerous.

  In the cat-and-mouse game of interrogation, every interview starts with the undeniable: the core set of facts that both the interrogator and the witness accept as true. This interview was no different. It was undeniable that Gogoladze had taken a US diplomat on a day trip outside the city. It was undeniable that in so doing Gogoladze had violated ministry regulations requiring both prior authorization of such a trip and a chase car with bodyguards. It was undeniable that the US diplomat had been killed while on Gogoladze’s unauthorized and inadequately staffed day trip. And it was undeniable that Gogoladze had a problem.

  But Djaparidze also had a problem.

  The intentional murder of a CIA station chief was a bold act. And to kill the American spy while he was with the chief of Shevardnadze’s personal protection force was audacious. The act emphatically proclaimed the perpetrator’s belief that the objectives were worth the risk of retaliation. At 4 a.m. on the morning after the killing those objectives appeared both obvious and unavoidable—disruption of Shevardnadze’s “special relationship” with the US and isolation of the nascent Republic of Georgia.

  The prosecutor general believed that a thorough and professional investigation of the murder would lead to a perpetrator who was both audaciously bold and in a position to benefit from these foreseeable consequences. And in the minds of nearly every Georgian there was only one entity that fit that description: Russia.

  And therein lay the crux of Djaparidze’s problem. The Shevardnadze regime might not survive if it accused powerful Russian forces of murdering the American spy. Any perpetrator who was strong enough to confront the CIA was certainly strong enough to destabilize the fragile Georgian government. On the other hand, Georgia might not survive if it rebuffed a US demand for justice. Western financial and military aid were all that kept the country afloat.

  The strategy for how to investigate and avenge Woodruff’s murder was an intensely political decision affecting Georgia’s survival. And the State Council had not yet made that decision. As a result, in the hours immediately after the murder Djaparidze was not able to investigate in a manner that would definitively lead either toward or away from the real killer. He could not afford to create a record that was inconsistent with the government’s ultimate political choice. In practical terms that meant he could not afford to pin down the specifics of Gogoladze’s testimony.

  It was undeniable. And both the interrogator and the witness knew it.

  After being warned about the penalties for giving false evidence, Gogoladze testified that he had left the Sheraton Metechi Palace for Kazbegi at approximately 11 a.m. on August 8. He was driving his private white Niva—an inadvertent contradiction of a claim by the Ministry of Internal Affairs that Woodruff was killed while riding in an official government vehicle. There were three people in the car with him: Woodruff, Marina Kapanadze, identified as Woodruff’s “girlfriend,” and Elena Darchiashvili, whom Gogoladze quaintly identified as his “acquaintance.”

  According to Gogoladze the trip to Kazbegi had been made at Woodruff’s request: He wanted to see the Darjal Valley. Gogoladze had called ahead to a distant relative who lived in the area and instructed him to prepare for a visit. However, Gogoladze was silent as to whether he had complied with ministry regulations requiring that he inform the local police commanders about his travel plans. Djaparidze did not press the point.

  The two couples saw the sights of Darjal and then stopped at the village of Arsha for dinner with Gogoladze’s relatives. “We didn’t drink alcohol,” said Gogoladze, an unnecessary detail that the autopsy would expose as a deception.

  “We started on our way to Tbilisi from Arsha village at about six or seven p.m.,” said Gogoladze. “I was driving the car. Elena sat next to me and Marina sat behind me. Fred sat in the back seat on the right. We made some stops on our way to see the sights. Fred had a camera with him and he took pictures.”

  “Did anyone have a gun?” asked Djaparidze.

  “My passengers had no firearms,” said Gogoladze. “I had an Austrian Glock nine millimeter pistol.”

  Djaparidze made a note, but he did not ask to see the gun. Neither the Glock 9 mm nor any of Gogoladze’s other guns were ever inspected or tested.

  “After we passed Natakhtari village but before we reached the old Nerekvavi police post, I saw several people dressed in military uniform,” said Gogoladze. “One of them was armed with an automatic weapon. When I approached them—or even had already passed them—I heard a shot. After that, Marina Kapanadze started screaming.”

  Armed men in uniform near a police post. What Gogoladze had described could have easily been an official roadblock and his failure to stop a legitimate basis for deadly force. It was a possibility the interrogator needed to exclude.

  “Did they signal you to stop for inspection?” Djaparidze asked.

  “No, they didn’t signal me to stop,” said Gogoladze. “I drove on to the police post and told the people in militia uniforms what had happened—that I had a wounded man in the car and that the accident took place one hundred to two hundred meters from their post.”

  “Did they say whether they had heard the shot?” Djaparidze inquired.

  “The militiamen said that they didn’t hear any kind of shot,” said Gogoladze. “Fred had a head injury, so I left the road police post and took him to the hospital in the town of Mtskheta—but they didn’t have any electricity. So I took him to Hospital Number Two in Tbilisi. He was already dead when we got there.”

  “When was he killed?” asked Djaparidze.

  “Between nine and nine-thirty,” said Gogoladze.

  “And who killed him?” asked Djaparidze.

  Gogoladze paused before answering. “I don’t know who fired the shot at us,” he said.

  It was a stunning admission. Only four hours before, Gogoladze had arrested three young men saying that “they killed the American.” Now he claimed to know nothing of the shooter’s identity. As I reread the interview I realized that this was not a factual inconsistency. It was more in the nature of an offer. Gogoladze would give vague testimony free of inconvenient facts if the government would overlook his derelictions of duty. He would help them place the blame wherever they wanted, provided they didn’t place any blame on him.

  Apparently, Gogoladze would rather be seen as a bungler and a coward than be punished for violating ministry protocol. Such moral flexibility could be useful to the investigation—and was completely consistent with Gogoladze’s character—but Djaparidze needed to test the limits of how much shame the security chief was willing to heap on himself. To do so the deputy chief inquired about one of Gogoladze’s more contemptible acts of incompetence.

  “You mentioned that you had a gun,” he said. “Did you shoot back at the killer?”

  “No,” said Gogoladze, “I didn’t shoot in return—but after I left Fred’s body at the Tbilisi hospital I called my colleagues and we went to the scene of the accident.”

  A quick change of subject, a suggestion of vigorous police action, a hint of professional embarrassment.

  “We didn’t find anybody there,” he said. “But when we went to the old Nerekvavi police post, the militiamen had already detained four people—Genadi Berbitchashvili, Gela Bedoidze, Iosif Bedoidze, and Anzor Sharmaidze. One of them had a Romanian-made Kalashnikov automatic rifle. It had a bullet in the chamber.”

  Perhaps it was a mistake: a result of stress or ho
urs without sleep. Or perhaps it was intentional: a response to the shaming. Either way, Gogoladze had for the first time identified a fourth person who was allegedly arrested at the old Nerekvavi police post—Iosif Bedoidze, father of Gela Bedoidze. It was a troubling detail, an inconvenient fact, and a subtle reminder of Gogoladze’s ability to invent problems for the investigation. Djaparidze recorded the information but did not ask any follow-up questions.

  The witness statement was ambiguous and cunning. It sketched an outline of facts but did not dictate the identity of the perpetrator. It allowed the government to choose exactly how much truth it could tolerate and exactly how much justice it could afford. It left every option open.

  Gogoladze signed the statement a few minutes after 5 a.m. and left the deputy chief’s office. Djaparidze’s night was over. But he would be back at the station in a few hours to interview the two women from the Niva.

  Elena Darchiashvili was already known to the police as a victim. Her husband had a violent temper and was jealous of his wife’s beauty. He had responded to her many infidelities by scalding her with boiling water—twice. The couple had divorced in 1988. After the divorce Elena moved to her mother’s house on Kekelidze Street. The life she led there attracted the attention of her more conservative neighbors. “She likes men very much,” one neighbor told police detectives. “They often give her a ride at night.”

  Djaparidze interrogated Elena three times regarding the Sunday excursion to Kazbegi. The first interview began at 6 p.m. on August 9 with a standard series of questions: name, address, marital status, Communist Party membership. Elena was an ethnic Russian born and raised in Tbilisi. A non-Party woman, she had an advanced education and worked as an engineer at the Railroad Construction Institute. She claimed to be married and to live with her husband on Tchitaya Street, a transparent lie since her divorce from Guram was a matter of public record. The fabrication may have been an attempt to hide a misdemeanor violation of police regulations: She had failed to register her 1988 change of address to Kekelidze Street.