The VAZ-2109 is a four-door hatchback commonly referred to as the Lady Samara. It was the kind of car that Ramin Khubulia was driving that night. According to Ramin, he stopped to ask for cigarettes about the same time that Badri was lurking by the wall. According to Badri, he only saw one 2109 car stop for the guardians. So presumably the 2109 car that Badri saw was Ramin’s.
But Ramin said that he didn’t give anything to the guardians. And that meant the guardians were lying about the inner tube.
Finally, Badri identified the guards who had walked down from the water tower to ask about the gunshot. The first was Giorgi Tserekashvili. The second was his brother, Tamaz Tserekashvili.
It made me smile to realize how I’d stumbled onto the truth: There were two male witnesses named Tserekashvili and (contrary to the indignant claims of the regional judge) I had not attempted to pass off Tamaz Tserekashvili as Giorgi Tserekashvili. Rather, I had (without really realizing the implications) found new evidence—or at least evidence that was new to the defense.
And it must have set off alarm bells at the Prosecutor General’s Office. Because Tamaz Tserekashvili had told the investigators that one of the women in the Niva had accused the guardians of murdering Freddie Woodruff.
“The screaming lady was telling the two guardians who pushed the Niva that their friends had killed the man,” Tamaz Tserekashvili said. “She meant that those who shot at them were also dressed in guardian uniforms.”
Men wearing guardian uniforms had killed Freddie Woodruff. And the hysterical woman in the Niva had seen them do it. Perhaps it was the other two guardians that were nowhere to be seen. Or perhaps there were even more uniformed men standing on the side of the Old Military Road between Natakhtari and the Drain.
Based on the description, I assumed that the screaming woman was Elena Darchiashvili. She was the amateur among the intelligence professionals in the car. She was the one most likely to panic. And there had not yet been time or opportunity for Eldar and Marina to frighten her into absolute silence.
What she said was, I believe, exactly what she saw—and exactly why she was so terribly afraid to ever talk to me.
Just about that moment, another witness, Lali Tserekashvili, passed by the Drain on her way to Tbilisi. She’d hitched a ride with a stranger and was sitting alone in the back seat of his Moskvitch sedan.
“There were three or four men dressed in guardian pants and striped shirts,” she said. “They had automatic guns in their hands and were arguing with a man standing near a Niva. There was another man standing two or three meters away from the guardians. He was below average height and dressed in a white shirt and a tie. He had sunglasses on. And he wasn’t talking to anybody.”
Most of what she reported was consistent with the other witness statements. But the information about a short man in a white shirt and tie was entirely new. No one else had mentioned a man in civilian clothes wearing sunglasses at night.
Who was he? I wondered. And why was he there? Was this the man from Mongoose who later claimed credit for the murder of the CIA officer in Georgia? Was this Vladimir Rachman, the man arrested at the train station and freed as a result of pressure from the Russian Ministry of Defense?
I’d gotten to the end of the witness statements and was still only at the beginning of the mystery. The Georgian investigators had done an outstanding job of identifying, locating, and interviewing a disparate group of people who’d been at the Drain at or near the time of Freddie’s murder. But there was a glaring omission. There was no record of any attempt to interview the guardians or the short man in the white shirt and tie.
Having studied their work, I couldn’t believe that the Georgian investigators had simply failed to do their duty. They had demonstrated themselves to be first-class professionals. And if they didn’t interview the guardians, it wasn’t because they hadn’t thought of it. It was because someone kept them from doing it.
And then I remembered my conversation with Dell Spry. If the man in the white shirt and tie was Rachman, then it was the Russian Ministry of Defense that had prevented the Georgian investigators from interviewing him. And if the Russians had prevented the interview of Rachman, then perhaps they had done the same thing for the guardians.
Perhaps. But only perhaps.
I was becoming overwhelmed by the data. I had a huge box of jigsaw puzzle pieces and no idea how to differentiate the real from the fake, the relevant from the irrelevant, the true from the false. What I needed was a guide—someone with expertise in solving unsolvable puzzles, someone who could give me a paradigm for judging the reliability and placement of each individual piece.
What I needed was Bob Baer.
Fortunately, the peripatetic ex-spy was in America at the time. We met for dinner in Oakland, California: me, Bob, his wife Dayna, and Adam Ciralsky. During his earlier life as a CIA lawyer, Adam had represented Bob and the two had become friends.
When I arrived at the restaurant they were already deep in conversation about NATO’s allegedly erroneous bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. In 1999, eight years before our dinner, B-2 bombers from Whitman Air Force Base in Missouri had dropped five JDAM GPS-guided precision bombs on geographic coordinates provided to NATO by the CIA. Secretary of Defense William Cohen claimed that the targeting was an error—that “our planes attacked the wrong target because the bombing instructions were based on an outdated map.”
But my dinner companions disagreed. “That was no mistake,” said Bob. “The Serbs had recovered the wreckage of a downed F-117 and sold it to the Chinese. Our plane was in the basement of their embassy and we destroyed it.”
Such is table talk among spies. I was seated across from Dayna, a willowy beauty who seemed far too delicate for her rough-and-tumble husband. I was surprised to learn that she had also worked at the CIA—but as a social worker. It was for me an unthinkable thought.
“The Agency hires social workers?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said. “They would point at someone and say, ‘Tell us what’s wrong with them. We don’t want you to fix them, we just want to know what’s wrong.’ And after doing that for a while, I went into covert ops—technical surveillance and security. I was the girl with the machine gun on the back of a motorcycle. That’s how I met Bob.”
She smiled broadly. Her expression was warm, disarming, and ever so slightly mischievous. This was an exceedingly smart woman and she was clearly enjoying the fact that she’d shocked me.
Her husband rescued me from the embarrassment of speechlessness by asking about my investigation.
“So how much will you tell me?” he asked.
It was an incisive question. When I first began this project, I struggled with the issue of how much to reveal to people who asked me about it. There was a strong temptation to be secretive—to hide my agenda and obscure my strategy. After all, discretion regarding such things is obligatory for trial lawyers and de rigueur for spies. But this was not litigation and the SVR was not bound by the rules of court. So I’d chosen a completely different tack.
“Whenever somebody asks me something about my investigation,” I said, “I tell them everything I know about the topic. I never know the true identity of the person to whom I’m talking, so I never try to hide anything from anybody. I don’t talk in code and I don’t use encrypted e-mail. It may be silly, but I don’t try to keep anything secret.”
A chuckle rumbled out of Bob’s barrel chest. “That’s not silly,” he said. “That’s why you’re still alive.”
I felt a surge of panic but pushed it aside. For now, I had the attention of an expert and I didn’t intend to waste it. So I started at the beginning and told him everything. He listened without interrupting until I got to Vladimir Rachman.
“The police stopped him at the train depot and did a random search,” I said. “They arrested him for possession of military paraphernalia—a silencer and two cans of tear gas.”
“That’s bullshit,” he said.
“No, no—” I stuttered. “That’s what Dell Spry told me.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “It’s bullshit. That’s not how things happen. No Georgian policeman is ever going to stop a Russian unless somebody tells him to.”
I was suddenly very confused. Bob seemed to be saying that Rachman hadn’t been arrested at the train depot. But if that was true, then FBI special agent Dell Spry was an unreliable source of information, and that seemed impossible.
I was working as fast as I could to unpack the riddle. And then it hit me: It wasn’t the objective facts Bob was rejecting, it was the subjective explanation of the facts. Bob didn’t deny that Rachman had been arrested; he denied that Rachman had been arrested as the result of a random search.
He could see that I’d figured it out and he smiled—an odd kind of smile a man might make if he’d never seen one in person but read about them in a book. Nevertheless, I felt the warm sensation of approval. I was just beginning to enjoy it when I remembered: I was dealing with a master manipulator and I needed to be very careful.
My eyes must have betrayed the thought because the smile disappeared and the big man grunted. “Find the guy who ordered Rachman’s arrest,” he said. “He’s the link between what you know and what you don’t know.”
It was a daunting task and I had no idea how to accomplish it. But Bob had exploded the logjam of my thoughts by asking a common sense question: How do things really work in that environment? And at least with respect to Rachman that was a question I could answer.
Both Rachman and I were strangers in the strange republic of Georgia. We didn’t speak the language, we couldn’t read the signs, and we didn’t know our way around. We both depended completely on local Georgians to feed us, house us, drive us, and generally help us do the jobs we were hired to do. Without that local assistance, we were both helpless.
This somewhat pedestrian insight allowed me to formulate an achievable goal: to identify the people who had provided Rachman’s logistical support. And if I could find those people, then presumably they could tell me who had him arrested.
One of the ancillary effects of this insight was that it gave meaning to a previously enigmatic section of the FBI letterhead memorandum. That section—entitled “Spetsnaz Group Alpha”—discussed the deep bonds of loyalty that exist among current and former members of this elite special operations force. “They have been trained to lean on each other for support and trust each other for discretion,” the memo said. “It is not unthinkable that a former Group Alpha member would have the assistance and support of a current Group Alpha member.”
Most of the remaining text had been blacked out by the censors. But the section concluded with what now appeared to be an obvious reference to Rachman’s arrest. “———— was ———— days after the shooting death of Fred Woodruff.”
The message was clear: The FBI believed that then-current members of Georgian Group Alpha had provided logistical support to Rachman in connection with his assassination of Freddie Woodruff.
So, in hopes of finding the man who’d ordered Rachman’s arrest, I went looking for some of the most lethal special operators in the world. But I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to find them. My first step was to turn to Mousia Semenova, a woman with an uncanny knack for finding people inside the former Soviet Union. She listened patiently as I described what I needed and then changed the subject.
“I know a Russian journalist living in Paris,” she said. “She’s smart, experienced, and well connected. I think that if you tell her your story, it will lead to something interesting.”
I had learned not to resist such detours. And so I made contact and booked a flight.
Natasha Gevorkian was a sultry and voluptuous bohemian. The daughter of a KGB officer, she’d been born in Armenia and raised in Georgia. She was a celebrity among Russian journalists and had been chosen to coauthor the first and only authorized biography of Vladimir Putin. We met over coffee and traded stories. Hers were better.
“In 1997, Saint Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak was accused of corruption,” she said. “Putin—who was deputy mayor of the city—publicly refused to denounce him. It was a very unusual display of loyalty and it caught Yeltsin’s attention. You see, Yeltsin had a problem: When you’re riding the tiger, it’s impossible to get off. So Yeltsin summoned Putin to Moscow for an interview. ‘If I make you president of the Russian Federation, will you be loyal to me in the same way?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want to be president,’ whined Putin. ‘I want to be an oligarch.’ Yeltsin laughed at him. ‘You won’t be an oligarch,’ he said. ‘You will be the oligarch.’ ”
Natasha’s dark eyes twinkled. She took a deep drag on her cigarette as an excuse to make me wait for the punch line. “They struck a bargain,” she said. “Yeltsin promised to make Putin president and Putin promised to never investigate Yeltsin or his family for corruption. And—as the whole world knows—Putin is president and Yeltsin died rich.”
It was a marvelous tale and she told it well. But the conversation was about more than captivating anecdotes. I was being vetted. She was trying to decide if she could trust me. And for Natasha, trust was a matter of life and death.
“I am close to the oligarchs who oppose Putin,” she said. “And that has made me an enemy of the state. I was there when Alexander Litvinenko was dying of polonium poisoning—and I don’t want to die that way.”
We talked for several hours before apparently I passed the test. Coffee had become dinner had become coffee again. She pushed the cup away and lit another cigarette. “I have a meeting tomorrow with Irakli Okruashvili,” she said. “I think you should come.”
Okruashvili was the first prosecutor general with whom I’d met, the one who had turned down the Woodruff family’s initial request to reopen Anzor’s case. Since that day in 2004 he’d fallen out of favor with Saakashvili and been prosecuted for extortion, money laundering, and abuse of power. He’d come to France seeking political asylum. Natasha was right. Okruashvili was someone to whom I was eager to speak.
We met at Café de Flore on the boulevard Saint-Germain. It was one of those in-between days that come at the end of winter. We crowded around a small outdoor table until a cold drizzle drove us inside. Okruashvili was a study in understated elegance: black cashmere blazer, black collared sweater, gray herringbone slacks, black Italian loafers. He didn’t look like any political refugee I’d ever seen. He and Natasha greeted one another in Georgian and then switched to English for my benefit. He knew who I was but didn’t remember meeting me twice before. Nevertheless, he seemed content to speak freely.
“Next month the Georgian court is going to sentence me in absentia to fifteen years in prison,” he said, seeming curiously unfazed by the prospect. “My application for asylum is scheduled for hearing in Paris the month following—but I don’t expect to get it. It would be a bad precedent: a determination by France that Georgia engages in political repression.”
I turned the conversation toward the murder of Freddie Woodruff and the continued incarceration of Anzor Sharmaidze.
“I don’t have any direct knowledge about the Woodruff murder,” he said. “But logic dictates that it was the Russians. After all, no one else had an interest in doing it. As for Sharmaidze, I attended a cabinet meeting in which we decided to release him. It was just before Bush’s visit and 60 Minutes was going to do a story—we didn’t want bad publicity in the West. Did they not let him go?”
It had been four-and-a-half years since my first visit to Georgia and I was still surprised at how casually the local elite treated the total destruction of innocent lives.
“No,” I said. “They did not let him go.”
“Must have been Misha,” he said. “He’s disconnected and unrealistic, not at all aware of the real situation in Georgia. All he cares about is retaining his power, increasing his wealth, and fighting with Putin.”
Okruashvili put down his café crème and looked at me as though for the first time. I had the
feeling that something important had occurred to him and he was wondering whether to waste it on me. After a few seconds of silence he spoke. “Misha is going to go to war in Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” he said. “It’s already been decided: He will try to retake the provinces before George Bush leaves office.”
It was March 2008 and the election was eight months away. Okruashvili was predicting war before November. He must have sensed my ambivalence because he immediately began trying to prove himself as a knowledgeable and trustworthy insider.
“I was in Misha’s inner circle,” he said. “I was with him at least four hours every day since the beginning. I know his secrets.” He began naming the sources of Misha’s wealth and the identities of his contract assassins. He identified Misha’s principal allies in Washington and his primary CIA advisors in Tbilisi. He described defects in the official story of Zhvania’s death and offered to help find a witness who could unravel the mystery of Woodruff’s murder.
“Shota Kviraya will have all the details,” he said. “He lives in Moscow now and spends all his time drinking—but I can put you in touch with someone who knows his location.”
For some reason Okruashvili really wanted me to believe his forecast of imminent war. It didn’t take me long to figure out why. It was the old bugaboo: He thought I was a CIA officer and he was hoping that his early warning would ingratiate him with the US government. I couldn’t promise a reward from the Americans, but I could tell anyone who’d listen that war was coming to the Caucasus. And I did so later. But I’m not sure anyone heard me.
Just before he left the café, Okruashvili returned to the topic of Misha’s upcoming military adventure. “He’s going to need US support,” he said. “And he’s going to be very sensitive about how he and Georgia are portrayed in the Western press.”
I appreciated his saying this, but the topic was already in my mind. This was the crisis that would allow me to leverage American opinion and force the Georgian government to release Anzor.
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