The Spy Who Was Left Behind

by Michael Pullara

  “Let’s deal with the issue of my bona fides,” he said. He handed me his passport and a badge identifying him as retired CIA. This was obviously something Lamborn had done before and he had a protocol.

  I fumbled for my own passport but he stopped me. “It’s all right,” he said. “I know who you are.”

  Lamborn was an angular man: lean, dry, athletic. He dressed like a Baptist deacon, but his military bearing made the costume look like a uniform. I could see immediately that he was disciplined, intense, and dangerously patient. But what struck me most profoundly about Lamborn was his unusual combination of astonishing intelligence and genuine humility. This was a forceful man who’d spent his life cultivating a fundamental respect for people.

  “I took over Freddie’s branch chief job in 1995,” he said. “I was there when the FBI was investigating whether the murder was related to Aldrich Hazen Ames.”

  It was a surprising disclosure.

  Lamborn had written a book and I had read it before driving over to San Antonio. In it, he revealed himself to be a specialist in both influence operations and counterinsurgency. That kind of expertise would normally place him in the Agency’s Special Activities Division and outside a normal rank-and-file posting. But after a moment’s quick reflection I realized that his skill set was probably the perfect résumé for a Transcaucasia branch chief.

  “I spent twenty-six years at the Agency,” he said. “I was in the Directorate of Operations, the Directorate of Intelligence, and in the Office of the Director.”

  It occurred to me that this might be the man who sent me the translated Georgian investigation file. Or the man who prevented me from visiting Ames in prison.

  “I never heard of you until I retired,” he said. “And I never sent you anything. I contacted you because Freddie’s murder has bothered me for twenty years and I think it’s time somebody solved it.”

  He talked a little about the mechanics of the murder. He assumed without discussion that Anzor was innocent and the criminal trial had been a charade.

  “Dave Beisner let slip that a professional sniper had been hired to kill Freddie,” he said. “I have no idea where that bit of information originated.”

  And so I told him. He listened without moving as I described Dell Spry’s invitation to a noisy Georgian wedding; the unlikely arrest of a Russian at the train depot; the witness testimony about guardians on the Old Military Road; and Kote’s eruption when I referred to the shooter as a professional.

  “Why do you trust Kote?” he asked.

  It was a crucial question and one that I’d struggled to answer since the beginning of my investigation: How do you trust someone that you know lies to you?

  “I believe that—if you can identify what a person cares about more than anything else in the world—then you can trust that they will always be doggedly devoted to that thing. You then interpret their words and actions through the lens of their heart’s desire. As for Kote, I believe he is a patriot who values personal honor and professional integrity above all else. His volcanic response to the shooter’s dishonorable conduct emanated from his center and was, therefore, trustworthy.”

  I felt vaguely embarrassed by my sophomoric psychobabble. But it was an intimate question and I had given an intimate answer. And Lamborn seemed satisfied. At least, I assumed he was because he handed me a five-page single-spaced memorandum laying out his conclusions regarding the murder of Freddie Woodruff. We went through it together.

  “Narcotics had nothing to do with Freddie’s murder,” he said. “Ames was giving the Russians everything we knew about drug smuggling in the region. And with that information they could easily evade our net—all they had to do was change the shipping arrangements. There was simply no need to kill a CIA ops officer like Freddie in order to protect their drug trade.”

  In a few sentences he had demonstrated the central flaw in a theory it had taken me weeks to discount. This was going to be fun.

  “It is much more likely that Ames got drunk and revealed details that identified him as a Russian spy,” he said. “Perhaps he even tried to recruit Freddie. But whatever he did, he said enough that Freddie’s entire demeanor changed radically overnight.”

  This compelling narrative melded together the time line, the character of the players, and the evidence regarding their demeanor. Lamborn was accounting for every fact.

  “As far as we know, Freddie didn’t put anything regarding Ames ‘in traffic’ to headquarters. However, this failure to document is completely reasonable. It is a very serious thing to accuse a fellow officer of being a spy for another intelligence service. And should the accusation later be proved false and unfounded, the would-be accuser could himself be in serious trouble. Freddie knew he was due to rotate back to headquarters shortly, and he may have thought it best to discuss these matters behind closed doors at Central Eurasian Division.”

  Lamborn had introduced a powerful and previously unknown factor into the analysis, the bureaucratic culture of the institution. These customary practices informed each employee’s operative reality and to an extent that is hard to underestimate influenced every interaction with the institution.

  “No matter how drunk he was that night, when he woke up Ames was sober enough to realize that he had committed a serious indiscretion. He may have contacted his Russian handler upon return to Washington or he may have triggered an emergency clandestine meeting while still in Tbilisi. Either way, he definitely would have told the Russians about his drinking binge with Freddie and the security problems it had created. The Russians understand CIA culture and would assume that Freddie was waiting until he returned to headquarters to report about Ames. This gave them a window of opportunity to silence Freddie and protect their highly valuable penetration of the CIA.”

  “I suggested this to Ames’s handler, Victor Cherkashin,” I said. “He said it was a nice theory but that Freddie was rotating back to headquarters in two weeks and the KGB simply couldn’t move that fast.”

  For the first time, Lamborn laughed. “You wouldn’t believe how fast they can act when they want to,” he said. “And remember, this is Russia’s backyard. In 1993 they had all the assets they needed right there in Georgia.”

  Lamborn’s analysis was predicated on the assumption that Ames was sufficiently valuable to the Russians that they would kill Freddie to protect him. But I wondered whether that was still true at the time of the murder.

  “Ames was transferred out of counterintelligence and into counternarcotics in December 1991,” I said. “And the FBI formally opened an espionage case against him in May 1993. One KGB officer to whom I spoke suggested that by August 1993 Ames had lost his importance to the Russians and that they killed Freddie not to protect Ames, but to draw attention to him and thereby protect another more valuable agent.”

  Lamborn became completely still. His eyes were open but unfocused. After a minute of silence he finally spoke. “It is a serious theory,” he said. “We don’t know whether the Russians knew about our investigation of Ames prior to his arrest. Nevertheless, whether the Russians killed Freddie in order to save Ames or to sacrifice him—his responsibility for the murder remains the same. Aldrich Hazen Ames is the reason why Freddie Woodruff was murdered.”

  We talked for almost four hours. When it was over, he walked me to the door and shook my hand. “The bottom line is that killing Freddie Woodruff was not accidental and was not carried out by a random shooter,” he said. “His murder was professionally planned and carefully executed.”

  It was exactly what I had suspected when I started this adventure so many years before.

  * * *

  I made two more trips to Tbilisi. The reclusive Bidzina Ivanashvili became the leader of a coalition of opposition parties in 2012 and forced Misha Saakashvili out of power and out of the country. The oligarch’s new justice minister promised to reexamine the Sharmaidze conviction but after Anzor was arrested for a petty theft nothing came of the reexamination. As of this wr
iting, Anzor is back in prison—a victim of the continuing sanctions imposed on him as the man who murdered Freddie Woodruff.

  The caravan had moved on and it was time for the dogs to stop barking.

  I had spent a small fortune in time and money to collect a box full of facts. And I could arrange those facts into a coherent story that accounted for all the relevant details. But was it the truth? Or was it simply as close to the truth as you can get in the murky world of intelligence?

  I could not know. But what I did know was that the official version of the murder had deprived Freddie of a warrior’s death. It had painted him as the hapless victim of a drunken potshot. It had impugned his tradecraft and besmirched his memory. And it had denied him the immortality of myth.

  The director of central intelligence had retrieved Freddie’s broken body but had left his honor behind. And now that honor had been recovered. The Georgian and American governments had acknowledged that he had, in fact, been targeted for murder. The Agency had unofficially confirmed that Freddie was assassinated because he was a singular threat to an implacable enemy. The world now knew that Freddie Woodruff was a hero.

  It was all the justice a spy could ever hope for.

  EPILOGUE

  * * *

  THE SPY WHO WAS LEFT BEHIND

  I believe that Vladimir Rachman assassinated Freddie Woodruff. He and one or two members of Georgian Group Alpha parked their vehicle on the west side of the Old Military Road about a mile north of the turnoff to the Natakhtari Drain. One of the team members flagged down Eldar Gogoladze’s southbound Niva and asked for gas or a tire for their stalled car. When Eldar opened the rear hatch, Rachman fired a single shot from his Dragunov at the passenger sitting on the right side of the back seat.

  That’s what Elena Darchiashvili was talking about when she told the guardians at the Natakhtari Drain that their friends had shot the American.

  And it explains why Eldar went home to take a shower. He’d chosen to drive the Niva that day because the two-door car restricted Freddie’s movements in the back seat and with the rear hatch open allowed the shooter a clear view of the target. But since Eldar was standing outside when Freddie was shot, he didn’t have any of the splatter on his clothes and person that investigators would expect to find if he’d been sitting in the driver’s seat. He went home to wash and change clothes in order to eliminate his damning spotlessness.

  Rachman had been at the shashlik shop in the mountains when Freddie, Eldar, and Marina Kapanadze stopped there for a meeting. He watched Marina identify Freddie as the target and observed Freddie slide into the Niva and sit on the right side of the back seat.

  That’s why Marina made Freddie scoot over to the right side when later he tried to sit on the left, behind Eldar.

  The bullet that Rachman fired lodged in Freddie’s brain. But the caliber of that projectile did not match the caliber of the weapon seized from Anzor Sharmaidze; therefore, both Rachman’s bullet and Freddie’s brain were made to disappear.

  Marina was concerned that Freddie might have photographed Rachman or his vehicle at the shashlik shop. So immediately after the shooting she exposed all five canisters of Freddie’s 35 mm film.

  Rachman received logistical support from Georgian Group Alpha. They provided him with housing, transportation, weapons, and personnel, including the four guardians at the Natakhtari Drain. The guardians at the Drain acted as a blocking force and a control for oncoming traffic.

  In addition, Georgian Group Alpha equipped Rachman with a silencer and two canisters of tear gas. He didn’t use this matériel to assassinate Freddie but tried to steal it anyway. In response, the Georgian Group Alpha commander had him arrested. These tit-for-tat insults were key to the FBI unraveling the truth about how Freddie was murdered.

  The plotters delivered a message through Eldar offering Freddie a Sunday afternoon meeting with a Mkhedrioni operative at a shashlik shop in the mountains near the Russian border. Because of the Mkhedrioni connection, Marina was invited along to make introductions. Elena was brought along to make the cover story of a Sunday picnic more believable; however, she was excluded from the meeting at the shashlik shop.

  The location of the meeting was carefully chosen. The Old Military Road was the only way in or out of the valley. Thus, the plotters had a kill zone through which Freddie was required to pass. Rachman chose the area just south of Natakhtari for the actual attempt because it was close enough to the mouth of the valley to allow him and his team to make an easy escape.

  Eldar and Marina were GRU operatives, and they both would have had to know from the beginning that the true purpose of the excursion was to murder Freddie. They did their jobs and they were handsomely rewarded for their participation in the conspiracy.

  Elena was not an intelligence professional and therefore not a reliable coconspirator. But the events of that day and the threats of what would happen to her if she talked had so frightened Elena that twenty years later she was still hysterical.

  I believe that the SVR, working through colleagues in the GRU, hired Vladimir Rachman to assassinate Freddie Woodruff.

  While he was in Tbilisi on Agency business, Aldrich Ames got drunk and compromised himself to Freddie. He revealed enough information that Freddie began to suspect that Ames was a traitor. This suspicion explains both the radical change in Freddie’s demeanor and his angry exchange with Ames at the Piano Bar.

  Ames knew that his drunken declarations to Freddie could terminate his usefulness to the SVR and put him at risk of arrest in the United States. He requested an emergency secret meeting with his SVR handlers in order to inform them about his breach of operational security. That meeting probably occurred in Tbilisi. In the absence of a plan to neutralize the effect of his disclosures, Ames would not have left Georgia—a place that allowed for easy and immediate escape to asylum in Russia.

  The SVR was informed about CIA culture and knew that Freddie would wait to communicate his suspicions about Ames until he could do so in person at CIA headquarters. This gave the SVR a window of opportunity to kill the messenger before he had delivered the message.

  The SVR probably didn’t know that Ames was already under investigation for espionage. But they did know that Ames’s most recent position at the CIA did not afford him access to valuable intelligence and that his prospects for advancement at the Agency were not good. His days as a high-value Russian agent were limited; nevertheless, the SVR instructed Ames to return to the US and contracted with Rachman to assassinate Freddie.

  But the SVR did not kill Freddie because it was good for Ames; they killed Freddie because it was good for the SVR. If their goal had been simply to protect Ames, they could have invited him to fly across the border and retire in Moscow. Instead, they chose the extreme sanction of violent murder, a dramatic and largely unprecedented act that could easily draw attention to the very agent they were ostensibly trying to preserve.

  The only rational explanation for the SVR’s decision to send Ames back to America and kill Freddie is that they chose to sacrifice Ames in order to protect a more valuable and more highly placed intelligence asset. It is possible that the object of this support was the traitorous FBI special agent Robert Hanssen; however, this seems unlikely since even the SVR did not know Hanssen’s true identity.

  I believe that errors and omissions by US government officials contributed to the murder of Freddie Woodruff.

  Ames got drunk and told Freddie a secret. That disclosure led inexorably to Freddie’s murder. But the FBI and CIA already knew Ames’s secret. FBI special agents had already searched his home and office; were already eavesdropping on his conversations; and were already following him twenty-four hours a day. They could have arrested him at any time. Instead, they permitted him to travel to the former Soviet Union.

  If the FBI had prevented Ames from going to Tbilisi, Freddie would not have been murdered. If the CIA had informed Freddie about Ames’s treason, Freddie would have been prepared and would not have respo
nded to Ames’s drunken confession in a way that incited panic in Ames.

  The FBI and CIA chose to expose Freddie to Ames’s treachery without warning him about the risks. This decision put Freddie in harm’s way and ultimately led to his death. It also led to the sabotage of the FBI investigation of his murder. A thorough investigation of Woodruff’s murder was not in the interest of the officials who had authorized Ames to go to Tbilisi. Nor was it in the interest of those who wanted to avoid any suggestion that Ames was responsible for the murder of an American intelligence officer and therefore should not escape the death penalty.

  And that’s how Freddie became the spy who was left behind.

  An American boyhood: Freddie Woodruff, pictured here twice with his sister Georgia, grew up in the small town of Stillwater, Oklahoma, in the 1950s and ’60s. At age eighteen, he moved to Searcy, Arkansas, a town that boasted all the elements of mid-century American prosperity—a drugstore, a department store, a Sears Roebuck catalogue store, a pool hall, a baseball field, and a one-screen movie theater. (Photos courtesy of Georgia Woodruff Alexander)

  The makings of a spy: After college, where he displayed a gift for languages, Woodruff served in the US Army in West Berlin as a Russian interpreter. Recruited by the CIA in Germany, he went on to become fluent in German, Turkish, and Greek. A muscular, physically imposing man of the world, Woodruff is seen here fishing, standing in an outdoor market in Turkey, and aboard a ferry in a foreign shipping port, probably Saint Petersburg. (Photos courtesy of Georgia Woodruff Alexander)

  Operative in a dangerous land: Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the former Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze (above, center), known as “the Silver Fox,” became the leader of the new country of Georgia. The capital, Tbilisi, was a dangerous place populated by many Soviet intelligence officers and sympathizers. (Viktor Drachev/AFP/Getty Images)