> Our Man in Tbilisi
Patriot Games
OCTOBER 18, 2008
Our Man in Tbilisi
Fifteen Years Ago, a Bullet Felled CIA Agent Freddie Woodruff. Was It
the First Shot in a New Cold War With Russia?
TBILISI, Georgia -- On Aug. 8, 1993, a single bullet to the head
killed Freddie Woodruff, the Central Intelligence Agency's station
chief in Georgia. Within hours, police had a culprit -- a vodka-soaked
village bumpkin. A tidy explanation quickly followed: It was a tragic
accident.
U.S. diplomats hailed Georgia's swift work, and both countries
breathed a sigh of relief. A killing that threatened to disrupt a push
by Washington into former Soviet lands fell on the shoulders of a lone
drunk, Anzor Sharmaidze.
Convicted of murder and still in jail, Mr. Sharmaidze is now sick,
emaciated and angry. He says he was framed. "The government invented
this whole thing," he says, hunched on a wooden chair at the Ksani
Prison near Tbilisi. Haggard far beyond his 36 years, he wheezes and
protests his innocence: "I didn't kill the American."
The bullet that killed Mr. Woodruff, 15 years to the day before
Russia's recent military thrust into Georgia, was never found.
Evidence casting doubt on the official story wasn't presented at Mr.
Sharmaidze's trial. Key witnesses have now retracted their testimony,
saying they were beaten and forced to finger Mr. Sharmaidze.
If Mr. Sharmaidze didn't do it, though, who did? Those who don't buy
the official explanation suspect that the answer lies in the spy games
that played out on Russia's frontier following the 1991 collapse of
the Soviet Union. Mr. Woodruff was an early actor in a dangerous
drama. American spies were moving into newborn nations previously
dominated by Soviet intelligence. Russia's security apparatus,
resentful and demoralized, was in turmoil, its nominal loyalty to a
pro-Western course set by President Boris Yeltsin shredded by
hard-line spooks and generals who viewed the Americans as a menace.
Mr. Woodruff's Tbilisi was a den of intrigue. It had a big Russian
military base and was awash with former and not-so-former Soviet
agents. Shortly before Mr. Woodruff was shot, veteran CIA officer
Aldrich Ames -- who would soon be unmasked as a KGB mole -- visited
him on agency business.
Recent events show that, far from fading, the geopolitical struggles
in the Caucasus have only escalated. In August, Moscow's efforts to
reassert its influence under Vladimir Putin brought Russian tanks and
troops to within 20 miles of Tbilisi.
A handful of Americans, including Mr. Woodruff's sister and a dogged
Texas lawyer, remain determined to get to the bottom of Mr. Woodruff's
death. "I'm not crazy, but I'm very stubborn," said Houston attorney
Michael Pullara, during a recent trip to Tbilisi, his ninth.
Georgian authorities, prodded by Mr. Pullara, have re-interviewed
witnesses. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has sent a slew
of agents to Tbilisi over the years to dig into Mr. Woodruff's murder,
says its own investigation is still "pending" but declined to give
details.
James Woolsey, who as head of the CIA flew to Tbilisi to pick up Mr.
Woodruff's body, says he's skeptical of conspiracy theories about his
agent's death. But "in that part of the world," he notes, "it is
impossible to say anything is beyond the possible."
The end of the Soviet empire in 1991 opened up exciting but
treacherous vistas for America's spies. It also strained the CIA's
thin bench of capable overseas operatives. The first American sent to
Georgia by the CIA quit and went home. The agency picked Mr. Woodruff,
a former Bible major from Searcy, Ark., to replace him. Mr. Woodruff
spoke some Russian, and had served previously in Leningrad, Turkey,
Ethiopia and Kazakhstan.
Camouflaged as a regional-affairs officer at the U.S. embassy in
Tbilisi, Mr. Woodruff took charge of the CIA's operations in Georgia.
These included programs to train the bodyguards of the country's
leader, Eduard Shevardnadze, and a small but well-armed elite unit
called Omega -- America's answer to a Russian-trained force called
Alpha.
Mr. Woodruff got on well with the locals. He liked to drink and "was
very emotional like Georgians," says Eldar Gogoladze, a veteran Soviet
security officer who was the head of Mr. Shevardnadze's security
detail. He was "one of the last cowboy spooks" and loved "wild, weird
parties," says Thomas Goltz, an American expert on the Caucasus and a
friend of Mr. Woodruff.
By the summer of 1993, Mr. Woodruff was nearing the end of his tour.
He arranged to spend Aug. 8 sightseeing with Mr. Gogoladze, a female
friend of the bodyguard chief and Marina Kapanadze, a barmaid from the
Piano Bar of Tbilisi's Metechi Palace Hotel, where Mr. Woodruff and
many other embassy employees lived.
With Mr. Gogoladze at the wheel of a white two-door Niva jeep and
carrying a pistol, the party set off in the morning for Mount Kazbek,
near Georgia's border with Russia. Mr. Woodruff sat in the back next
to Ms. Kapanadze, who spoke good English and was known to Piano Bar
regulars as "black Marina," because of her dark good looks and
suspected intelligence ties.
After a meal and frequent stops so that Mr. Woodruff could take
pictures, they headed back to Tbilisi. Soon after they passed the town
of Natakhtari on the Georgia Military Highway, a single shot rang out
and "everybody exclaimed," Ms. Kapanadze later told police. "Fred
didn't say anything...I looked at him and saw that something was wrong
with his head. Stop, stop, stop!" she screamed, according to a
transcript of her police statement.
"There was blood everywhere," recalled Mr. Gogoladze, now retired, in
an recent interview in Tbilisi. He says he immediately suspected an
assassination -- but figured he, not Mr. Woodruff, was the target. "My
first emotion was that this must be the Russians. They hated me," he
says.
Mr. Gogoladze says he drove on without stopping to a nearby town. One
hospital was closed, another had no electricity. He says he continued
on to Tbilisi, where Mr. Woodruff, 45 years old, was dead on arrival
at the No. 2 Hospital.
Georgia's leader, Mr. Shevardnadze, informed about the incident,
rushed back to his office. He promptly fired Mr. Gogoladze as head of
his security team. Mr. Shevardnadze now says he didn't suspect foul
play, but was upset by Mr. Gogoladze's "bad behavior" -- driving
around with a CIA agent and two women without proper security. In a
message to President Clinton after the shooting, he hailed Mr.
Woodruff as a "soldier in the army of freedom."
Transcripts of interviews conducted by Georgian police soon after the
killing reveal wide discrepancies in accounts of what happened.
While Mr. Gogoladze says he kept driving, several witnesses told
police that his Niva paused for some time. One reported a roadside
altercation between a man roughly resembling Mr. Gogoladze and an
unidentified man. Others saw a white foreign car parked for much of
the day near the scene of the shooting. Its occupants, all men, said
they had a flat tire. This car, witnesses told police, raced off
immediately after the shooting. The mystery vehicle and its occupants
were never identified.
After taking Mr. Woodruff to the hospital, Mr. Gogoladze says he
rushed back to the crime scene. He stopped at a nearby police post --
and happened to spot three men he says he'd seen earlier on the
roadside with a gun. The very drunk men -- Mr. Sharmaidze and two
friends -- were arrested and taken to the offices of the Georgian
version of the KGB.
Mr. Sharmaidze, a volunteer soldier from an impoverished mountain
village, had spent much of the previous year fighting Russian-backed
separatists in Abkhazia, a region that again flared into violence
during Georgia's recent war with Russia. He says he thought police had
grabbed him because he was carrying an unregistered gun, a trophy from
his Abkhazia adventures.
After several days, he and his friends were moved to a holding cell at
Tbilisi police headquarters, where previously mild questioning gave
way to fierce beatings with clubs and fists, he says. The police chief
at the time, Davit Zeikidze, a tough former Soviet soldier, says, "of
course we violated human rights" because "it was a very bad time." He
says he doesn't know the details of Mr. Sharmaidze's treatment because
the "case was handled by the [Georgian] KGB." He recalls summoning Mr.
Sharmaidze -- "a stupid village drunk" -- and being struck by his
refusal to confess. "It is not easy to make denials to me," says Mr.
Zeikidze. "Everyone was afraid of me."
One week after his arrest, Mr. Sharmaidze confessed: He said he'd shot
at the Niva in a fit of pique after it nearly hit him. Because of the
beating, he says now, "I would have confessed to anything."
The first FBI agent to arrive on the scene had serious doubts about
the official explanation. "The story about a randomly fired shot seems
unlikely at this point," the agent said in a written report three days
after the murder. Noting that no part of the vehicle showed any damage
from gunfire, he speculated that the murder might have taken place
"somewhere other than the car" and that "the subsequent story was
concocted as an explanation."
The FBI flew in additional agents. They looked at the Niva jeep again
and found a small bullet hole in the rear. The bullet itself, however,
was never found. The search for evidence was hampered by the fact that
much of Mr. Woodruff's brain was missing when his corpse got back to
the U.S., making forensic analysis difficult.
Also missing, at least initially, was the brass casing from the
bullet. Georgian investigators took their American colleagues to what
they said was the scene of the shooting and fired a round from Mr.
Sharmaidze's Kalashnikov rifle. They followed the casing ejected from
the gun -- and spotted another one nearby, which they said must be the
missing casing. The find, which struck some in the FBI as suspicious,
was later presented in court to tie Mr. Sharmaidze to the crime.
In September 1993, the FBI interviewed an American military officer,
Gilberto Villahermosa, a friend of Mr. Woodruff who had been in
Tbilisi a few months before the shooting. He "expressed the opinion
that the shooting of Woodruff was not a chance occurrence but that he
was assassinated by [Russian military intelligence] GRU," according to
an FBI record of the interview. He reported that Mr. Woodruff had
identified a number of GRU agents in Georgia and been "killed to send
a message that the U.S. could not continue to run intelligence
operations" in territories Russia regarded as its own turf. Mr.
Villahermosa did not respond to emails requesting comment.
A diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi added another tantalizing
twist. He told FBI investigators that he'd met Ms. Kapanadze, the
barmaid, after the shooting and that she'd whispered to him: "Just
remember: I'm a spy."
After Mr. Woodruff's funeral in Washington, family and friends
gathered for drinks at the home of his widow, Meredith, who was
working at the time at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Among the
guests was Aldrich Ames, a veteran CIA officer and an old friend of
the Woodruffs. He'd been in Tbilisi a few days earlier. Mr. Woodruff's
sister, Georgia Woodruff Alexander, says Mr. Ames spent much of the
party talking emotionally with her grieving father.
Six months later, in February 1994, Mr. Ames was arrested as a Russian
spy. During interrogation, he denied any role in his old friend's
death, but confessed to passing to the Russians over the years
virtually every document that crossed his desk, including reports
about Mr. Woodruff's work in Tbilisi.
Dell Spry, the FBI agent who put the handcuffs on Mr. Ames and worked
with the CIA on the case, says he's certain Mr. Ames "did not set
Freddie up to be killed." But he thinks the secrets Mr. Ames betrayed
may have contributed. "Whether he meant to or not, Ames was perhaps
responsible for Freddie being killed," he says.
Others dismiss any connection. "Nonsense," says Bill Lofgren, who ran
the CIA section responsible for the former Soviet Union. "We found no
hidden hand in the killing of Freddie. None. We found no KGB assassins
lying by the road."
Back in Georgia, Mr. Sharmaidze went on trial in 1994. He initially
repeated his confession, but then retracted it, explaining that he'd
been beaten and "told to write the story" of his guilt. The witnesses
who had told police about the mysterious foreign-made car and other
details that raised questions about the random-bullet theory were not
called to testify. Nor was a woman who could have helped Mr.
Sharmaidze establish an alibi.
Karina Mamoyan, speaking recently in Tbilisi, says Mr. Sharmaidze and
his companions visited her family's ramshackle house on the day of the
shooting to share a drunken meal with her father-in-law, who did
testify. She remembers lighting candles during their visit because it
was already dark, which suggests the trio was still in the center of
Tbilisi around the time Mr. Woodruff was shot far from town.
The most damning courtroom testimony came from Gela Bedoidze and
Gennadi Berbichashvili, friends of Mr. Sharmaidze who had been
arrested with him on the night of the shooting. They said they'd run
out of gas and that Mr. Sharmaidze fired a shot when a white Niva
refused to stop.
After a two-month trial, Mr. Sharmaidze was found guilty and sentenced
to 15 years. (His sentence was later extended after an escape
attempt.)
Speaking recently in the hillside shack outside Tbilisi where he now
lives with his wife and two children, Mr. Bedoidze said his testimony
was scripted by investigators and was untrue. "They hit me and
threatened to go after my family," he said. Their car did run out of
gas, he said, but it was at around midnight, two hours or more after
Mr. Woodruff was killed.
Mr. Bedoidze's wife, Inga, says he arrived home after 20 days of
detention with bruises and cigarette burns. Why did he not come
forward earlier? "Fear, fear, fear," she says.
Mr. Bedoidze has since retracted his testimony in interviews with Zaza
Sanshiashvili, a Georgian investigator who has been re-examining the
case for Georgia's Prosecutor General. Mr. Berbichasvhili, who was
also with Mr. Sharmaidze that night, also has withdrawn his testimony.
A U.S. diplomat who sat through the trial noted, in her written
reports, assorted inconsistencies, including contradictions between a
Georgian autopsy report and a later one done in the U.S. The Georgians
believed Mr. Woodruff had been shot in the forehead; the Americans,
who didn't share their findings with the Georgians, concluded the
bullet entered the back of his head. The U.S. embassy in Tbilisi
nonetheless declared itself satisfied with the trial.
Mr. Pullara, the Texas lawyer, who had lived in the same Arkansas town
as the Woodruffs and knew the family, describes the trial as a
"fraud." Its primary purpose, he contends, was to shut down the case
quickly to avoid embarrassing two already wobbly U.S. allies -- Mr.
Shevardnadze and Russia's President Yeltsin. Both were hanging to
power by a thread.
Mr. Shevardnadze, a former Soviet foreign minister who ruled Georgia
from 1992 until 2003, denies this. He says he believes Mr. Woodruff's
death was a "random bullet, period." He says he was himself the target
of two Russian-orchestrated assassination attempts in the 1990s, but
he doubts Russia had a hand in Mr. Woodruff's death. Russia "has more
than enough sins for one country without this."
Despite Mr. Sharmaidze's conviction, the FBI kept up its
investigation. In late 1994, a new FBI team traveled to Tbilisi to
re-interview key witnesses, including Mr. Gogoladze, the driver, and
Ms. Kapanadze, the barmaid. But Georgian officials said they couldn't
find the second woman in the car, Yelena Darchiashvili.
When they finally produced her, "she was shaking she was so
terrified," recalls Mr. Spry, the FBI agent. "It was kind of obvious
what was going on: Someone had told her she didn't remember anything."
The FBI got a tip that a Soviet soldier-turned-mercenary with a
war-mangled hand had been picked up by Georgian police soon after Mr.
Woodruff's killing. A silencer and other suspicious gear had been
found in his bag, the Americans were told.
When Mr. Spry asked about it, he and another FBI agent were taken to
meet the man, Vladimir Rakhman, a former Soviet special-forces
soldier. He struck them as too well-groomed and relaxed for someone
who had been locked up for months. He told them he'd hurt his hand
fighting as a mercenary. He said he'd heard there was a contract out
on Mr. Woodruff, and he thought the job might have been taken by a
colleague based in Rostov-on-Don, in southern Russia. "He was very
matter of fact. He viewed himself as a businessman," recalls Mr. Spry.
The CIA had picked up reports that a man with a mangled hand had
popped up elsewhere in the Caucasus and was trying to drum up business
for a murder syndicate known as Mongoose, according to people familiar
with the affair. Part of his sales pitch: the syndicate had murdered
Mr. Woodruff.
U.S. officials didn't know what to make of Mr. Rakhman and his story.
Mr. Spry says one detail suggested intimate knowledge of Mr.
Woodruff's killing: Mr. Rakhman mentioned that the CIA agent had been
shot in the back of the head, not the front, as everyone outside a
small circle of Americans thought.
Investigators argued over the significance and credibility of Mr.
Rakhman. "There was no conclusive evidence" either way, recalls Robert
Baer, then a CIA agent working on the case with the FBI. Mr. Rakhman's
current whereabouts are unknown.
To try to sift fact from fiction, the FBI flew a lie detector to
Tbilisi and asked various people to sit for a test. The exercise,
according to a 1996 FBI memorandum, produced "nothing to suggest
something other than an accidental shooting."
In Georgia, internal struggles swamped the case in political intrigue,
with rivals accusing one another of involvement in the killing. In
late 2003, the political scene changed dramatically. The so-called
Rose Revolution swept Mr. Shevardnadze from office and brought to
power Mikheil Saakashvili, an American-trained lawyer who promised a
clean break with the past.
Mr. Pullara approached members of Mr. Woodruff's family to ask if
they'd support a formal request to reopen the murder case. His eldest
sister, Ms. Alexander, a nurse in Arkansas, quickly endorsed the
effort. She says she never believed the "blind bullet" explanation.
"It smells fishy," she says.
But Mr. Woodruff's widow, Meredith, herself a former CIA officer,
wanted no part of it. She says she "has no idea" whether Mr.
Sharmaidze belongs in jail, but wants nothing to do with Mr. Pullara's
campaign. She declined to comment further.
In 2004, Mr. Pullara traveled to Tbilisi to formally ask for the case
to be reopened. Irakli Batiashvili, Georgia's intelligence chief at
the time of the shooting, signed an affidavit alleging that the
evidence used to convict Mr. Sharmaidze had been "manufactured," and
that the spy's death was a "thoroughly planned and professionally
executed political assassination."
A Georgian court rejected the appeal for a review, but the prosecutor
general later asked Mr. Sanshiashvili, a senior investigator, to take
another look at the affair. The absence of key witnesses, says the
investigator, has made this difficult.
Of Mr. Woodruff's three companions in the Niva, only Mr. Gogoladze,
the driver, is still around. He now says he is certain the shooting
was an accident and Mr. Sharmaidze was responsible.
Ms. Kapanadze, the barmaid, has left Georgia and has been rumored
variously to be in Turkey, Estonia and Germany. The second woman, Ms.
Darchiashvili, has also vanished, says Mr. Sanshiashvili, the
investigator. Neighbors at her old Tbilisi address say she moved out
years ago.
Georgia's president, Mr. Saakashvili, heavily dependent on U.S.
support to stay in power, says he's agnostic himself on who killed Mr.
Woodruff. "It is very hard to disclose the facts" after so many years,
he says. This leaves "a never-ending field for speculation."