The Spy Who Was Left Behind Page 4

  Notwithstanding the holidays, a few people were sitting in the gallery. One of them was Lynn Whitlock, the Georgian-speaking vice consul at the US embassy. She had been assigned to monitor the case for the United States. Her twenty-page memorandum recounting the day-by-day proceedings was provided to me by the Department of State in response to my FOIA request.

  Curiously, the FBI did not send an investigator to observe the trial. Perhaps Georgia was still too dangerous for the intrepid special agents. Or perhaps the FBI did not believe that the testimony of the so-called eyewitnesses was worth the price of a plane ticket. In any event, the Bureau’s professional indifference to the trial suggested a certain lack of confidence in the Georgian legal process.

  The chief judge conducted the questioning of Sharmaidze. The defendant had trouble speaking and could not remember details, but was generally calm. He told the chief judge that he was a machine gunner in the White Eagle Brigade and had been fighting in Abkhazia for ten months. While at the front he had two weapons: his official rifle and an AK-74 (an updated version of the infamous AK-47) that he’d found on the battlefield. When his battalion returned to Tbilisi, he delivered his official rifle to the quartermaster but kept the unofficial AK-74. It was with this weapon that he had allegedly killed Woodruff.

  Sharmaidze testified that, on the morning of August 8, he invited his friends Genadi Berbitchashvili and Gela Bedoidze to accompany him to his family home near Mount Kazbek. Before leaving Tbilisi, the trio visited the grave of a fallen White Eagle comrade. They drank three or four bottles of vodka at the cemetery and several bottles of wine at the home of the dead soldier. Sharmaidze told the chief judge that he was too drunk to know the time when they finally left the city for his village.

  Sharmaidze was uncertain whether they ran out of gas or simply realized they wouldn’t have enough to make the trip. In any event, Bedoidze stopped the car on an isolated patch of road close to the village of Natakhtari and Sharmaidze began trying to wave down passing cars to ask for fuel. He was holding the AK-74.

  Several cars went by without stopping. Sharmaidze said he was standing in the road as Gogoladze’s Niva approached and that the speeding car almost hit him. The near miss made him angry. He raised his rifle and fired one shot.

  At first he said that he shot into the air. Then he said he shot in the general direction of the car. However, he denied that he had aimed at anyone in particular or that he had intentionally shot in any specific direction. He estimated that the Niva was about thirty meters past him at the time when he fired his weapon.

  He did not remember much about what happened next, except that his friends were upset with him for firing the rifle. Two hours later he and his companions were arrested by the police.

  The chief judge passed the witness to the prosecutor, who asked about a cut bullet in the AK-74 magazine. According the FBI lab, the tip of the top bullet in the gun’s magazine had been sliced off, effectively turning the round into a dum-dum or expanding bullet. Flattening the nose of a 5.45 × 39 mm round makes the bullet more likely to deform and fragment upon impact with soft tissue—something that the high-velocity AK-74 round typically does not do. This tendency to fragment increased the projectile’s wounding effectiveness and formed the basis for the official explanation of the missing bullet: Sharmaidze fired a cut bullet at Woodruff and it disintegrated when it struck the victim’s hard head.

  But to me there was an obvious flaw in the logic of the official explanation: Freddie’s head was not the first hard thing that the bullet hit. In order to reach the victim’s skull the bullet first had to penetrate the metal skin of the Niva. It seemed unlikely that a deformed bullet would retain its physical integrity when it passed through steel but fragment when it encountered bone.

  “Was Woodruff’s skull harder than steel?” I wondered.

  However, Sharmaidze’s lawyer did not pose this common-sense question. Instead, he asked his client about the unofficial AK-74 and whether he was aware of an obligation to report it. And that was all.

  It troubled me that the court-appointed defense lawyer did not ask about the circumstances of Sharmaidze’s confession. This was the central piece of evidence in the case, and Inashvili did not attempt to impeach it by raising the specter of coercion. Even the American witnesses acknowledged the excesses of Georgian interrogations. In her daily summary Vice Consul Whitlock wrote, “We would not rule out that the defendant was beaten while under detention. Such abuse is a common phenomenon in the Georgian criminal justice system.”

  If the Americans could see it, why couldn’t Sharmaidze’s lawyer?

  Eldar Gogoladze, the driver of the car, was the next person called to testify. The chief of Shevardnadze’s personal protection force was relaxed and aloof, clearly not intimidated by the process.

  He said that the quartet of two men and two women had traveled to the village of Arsha on August 8 for lunch at the home of his relative. None of the four consumed alcohol during the meal. Freddie wasn’t feeling well and the group left during daylight. They stopped several times on the way back to take photographs.

  By the time they reached the village of Natakhtari, it was dark. He observed three men in the glare of his headlights. Although one of the men was holding a rifle, the security officer did not accelerate or slow down. He heard a shot when the Niva was fifteen or twenty meters past the men. That shot struck Woodruff.

  He took the wounded American first to the hospital in Mtskheta and then to the Kamo Street Hospital. It was 9:30 p.m. when they arrived in Tbilisi.

  He had radioed the ministry duty officer while on the way, and members of the bodyguard service were waiting for him when he arrived. Accompanied by these men, he returned to the scene and arrested Sharmaidze.

  The chief judge again asked Gogoladze whether Woodruff had drunk any wine at lunch and then excused the witness.

  It was the kind of performance that makes a real trial lawyer itchy. The questions were general and the answers were vague. And there was no cross-examination.

  No comparison of the witness’s current testimony to prior inconsistent statements. No exploration of Gogoladze’s failure to shoot back or close the road. No inquiry about his unexplained trip home after off-loading Woodruff’s body. No interrogation concerning his failure to preserve his own bloody clothes for spatter analysis. No questions regarding his five-hundred-meter error in identifying the location of the murder. No impeachment of his claim of “no drinking” when the Georgian pathology report said that Woodruff had a .07 blood alcohol level. No examination about the weapons he was carrying on the day of the murder. No consideration of security protocols violated by traveling alone with a US diplomat. No scrutiny of the reasons why he had been fired as head of Shevardnadze’s personal protection force.

  And most important, there was no detailed development of the time line. In order for Anzor Sharmaidze to have killed Freddie Woodruff, the shooter and the victim would have had to be at the same place on the Old Military Road at precisely the same time. If Inashvili could prove that Woodruff arrived earlier or that Sharmaidze arrived later, then his client had to be innocent.

  But the court-appointed defense counsel did not ask the witness any of these questions. Instead, Gogoladze was permitted to leave the courtroom with his testimony unchallenged and his aura of professional competence intact.

  The depth of analysis did not improve in the direct examination and cross-examination of the female passengers. Elena Darchiashvili, a married woman, testified that she had been invited on the outing by Gogoladze and that she sat in the front passenger’s seat next to him. The court was tactfully disinterested in the nature of her relationship with the security chief but did ask about her association with Woodruff. It was the first time she’d met the American, she said. He sat in the back seat directly behind her. She thought he looked a little pale at lunch but did recall that he drank wine with the meal. She claimed that her eyesight was weak and as a consequence, she couldn’t tell the court any
thing about the shooting.

  Marina Kapanadze, the English-speaking barmaid also in the car, was similarly unhelpful. She was sitting in the back seat of the Niva, behind Gogoladze and next to Woodruff. She admitted that she saw a group of men standing on the side of the road and that one of them had a gun. But she claimed to have become hysterical when Freddie was shot and so could offer no useful evidence.

  This was the core of the prosecution’s case: a suspect confession and the testimony of two spies and a seemingly adulterous housewife. It would have been red meat to a vigorous advocate. But Inashvili ended the day as tamely as he had begun. I was beginning to get frustrated.

  The trial adjourned for the long holiday weekend and reconvened the following Tuesday. The panel turned its attention to witnesses whose testimony was peripheral to the issue of guilt. The father of the dead White Eagle comrade testified that he met Sharmaidze at his son’s grave. The defendant and his companions were drunk and the witness invited them home for food and more alcohol. The mother of the dead comrade could not specifically recall Sharmaidze; however, she did recollect that three people had come to her house for wine on August 8. She denied that her son had been a member of any military unit. He died, she said, when he was hit in the head by a stone.

  The cross-examination of these witnesses was again disappointing. The defense lawyer did not attempt to use them to establish exactly when Sharmaidze left the family’s house or exactly how long it would take to drive from their house to Natakhtari. The assumption that the defendant had departed in time to shoot Freddie Woodruff was allowed to stand without critical examination.

  The deputy chief of Sharmaidze’s battalion was summoned to testify. He said that the defendant was a good soldier during the fighting in Abkhazia but that he had broken army regulations by failing to register a weapon found on the battlefield. Predictably, the commander was not asked how an alleged violation of military law came to be prosecuted in a civilian court.

  The panel called three of the presidential bodyguards to testify. They had been in the ministry offices on the night of August 8 and heard Gogoladze’s radio report of the shooting. They raced to intercept their commander’s car but missed him along the way. He had already unloaded Woodruff’s body by the time the subordinates caught up with him at the Kamo Street Hospital. The assembled contingent of security men drove to the scene of the murder. They stopped at the Nerekvavi police post, near the turnoff to the Old Military Road, where the authorities had detained three drunken men for extorting gasoline from passing cars. Gogoladze recognized the men immediately and they were arrested. One of them was armed with an AK-74 assault rifle.

  It was an admirable account of professional competence, but the devil (along with the truth) is in the details. And Inashvili did nothing to expose either one.

  He did not fix the time of Gogoladze’s radio message or his arrival at the Kamo Street Hospital. He did not inquire whether the bodyguards inspected the Niva or Woodruff’s corpse and (if so) whether they found a bullet hole in one and rigor mortis in the other. He did not explore Gogoladze’s furtive trip home or confirm that the security chief had showered and changed clothes. He did not inquire if Gogoladze appeared drunk or if he correctly identified the murder site. He did not confirm which of the three young men was holding the AK-74 at the time of their arrest. And he did not establish that on the night of the murder the bodyguards considered Gogoladze to be a legitimate suspect in the crime.

  It was a less than inspiring performance.

  On the fourth day of trial the panel called a ballistics expert from Georgia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs. He testified that the fatal shot was fired from outside the car and at a distance greater than two meters. He could not identify the caliber of the bullet; however, he opined that the tip end of the unknown bullet had been cut off, causing it to explode on impact with Woodruff’s skull. He claimed that this cut bullet had penetrated the car through the rubber molding around the rear window; that the hot projectile had melted the rubber on contact; and that after the bullet had passed through the molding the melted rubber had resealed with no obvious scar.

  I paused to consider the foundation for this fantastic explanation. A bullet of unknown size, shape, weight, speed, and temperature strikes a molding of undetermined width, depth, density, and composition, causing the molding to instantly melt. This molding—which seals the interface between the body of the metal hatch and the rear window glass—is presumed to be the only thing that the bullet must pass through in order to reach the victim. It is simply assumed that the molding does not overlap glass or steel. So the first “hard” thing the cut bullet encounters is the victim’s skull, at which point the blunted projectile shatters into numerous infinitesimal (and unidentifiable) pieces. The mechanics of this theoretical process were never reproduced in a laboratory, nor were they ever observed in practice. The witness simply speculated the theory into existence and then proclaimed it to be a fact.

  I fantasized how this so-called expert would have responded to a methodical series of simple questions from a Texas lawyer. The exercise made me depressed.

  The fragment of bullet recovered from Woodruff’s head was too small to allow the expert to definitively associate it with Sharmaidze’s weapon. However, according to the expert, the fragment had deformed in the manner characteristic of a cut bullet striking a hard object. And, the expert noted, at the time it was confiscated the AK-74 had a cut bullet in the chamber and twenty-three uncut bullets in the magazine.

  Twenty-four bullets in all.

  I felt like I’d been shot with a Taser. The number ricocheted through me like an electric pulse. I quickly searched the trial testimony and found independent confirmation from the security officer who had taken possession of the weapon at the time of the arrest: one bullet in the chamber and twenty-three in the magazine.

  The FBI is very good at many things. One of them is keeping an accurate inventory of evidence. I had read the Bureau receipt several months before and tucked it away in my mind as an extraneous detail of no immediate importance. Now it mattered. The AK-74 received by the special agents and examined by the FBI lab had one cut bullet in the chamber and twenty uncut bullets in the magazine.

  Twenty-one bullets.

  Three bullets had disappeared from the AK-74 between the time the authorities seized the rifle and the time they delivered it to the FBI. This was direct proof that the Georgians had tampered with the physical evidence. And it was compelling circumstantial proof that they were responsible for the bullet hole in the Niva and the shell casing at the (alleged) murder site. But Inashvili did not ask about it.

  The next day Sharmaidze’s parents hired a new lawyer to represent their son.

  A court-appointed lawyer could only be removed for cause, and the panel of judges could see no reason to terminate Inashvili’s services. Nevertheless, the chief judge permitted Sharmaidze to engage the second lawyer. The case would go forward with two attorneys representing the defendant: the court-appointed Tamaz Inashvili and the privately retained Avtandil Sakvarelidze.

  I was excited. Sakvarelidze was more experienced, more aggressive, and not beholden to the chief judge for his employment. The cavalry had finally arrived.

  The new lawyer was given six days to familiarize himself with the case. When the trial reconvened, the panel called the Georgian pathologist who had performed the first autopsy. He testified that a bullet entered Woodruff’s body on the right-hand side of the forehead and exited the body from the back of the head. He testified that the wound canal ran from front to back, slightly from bottom to top, and slightly from right to left. He testified that the nature of the damage indicated that, at the moment of penetrating the body, the ballistics of the bullet had been altered, and as a result the massive exit wound was caused by the side surface of the bullet.

  And he was wrong about everything.

  Lynn Whitlock noted the error in her summary of the daily trial proceedings. “As the embassy is aware,�
� she wrote, “according to the FBI autopsy, the bullet entered the rear/top of the skull and a small fragment exited the forehead area.” Nevertheless, neither the vice consul nor the government she represented informed the Georgian court of the mistake. Apparently, the United States was content to see Sharmaidze convicted on the basis of false evidence and inaccurate conclusions.

  The next witness, an expert in juridical psychiatry, testified that Sharmaidze was cognizant of his actions and competent to stand trial. Although the defendant did exhibit some psychopathic traits, he did not have a mental disease that would excuse him from the legal consequences of his acts. In response to questions from the new defense lawyer, the expert admitted that Sharmaidze’s participation in the Abkhaz war could have influenced his psychology. However, the witness said, the effects were not sufficient to allow the defendant to avoid accountability.

  Defense attorney Sakvarelidze was making his presence felt. He asked the chief judge for permission to reexamine the defendant. Sharmaidze told the panel that he had planned to surrender the AK-74 to the army quartermaster, but since he’d intended to return to Abkhazia in a few days he decided to keep it. He denied that he had cut the bullets. They were, he said, given to him during the terrible battle for Sukhumi, the bloody first engagement in Georgia’s war with Abkhaz separatists.

  The new lawyer was subtly focusing the court on the difficulty of judging a military man by civilian standards. Would the court really convict a soldier for carrying an unregistered rifle and cut bullets to a battle for Georgian sovereignty?

  Sharmaidze told the panel that on the night of the shooting he was afraid that the Niva was going to hit him. He got angry, lost control, and fired his weapon. But he did not intend to shoot the car or its occupants. Otherwise, he said, he would have fired more than one shot and not lingered at the scene.