by Michael Pullara, Scribner, New York, 2018
Reviewed by Joseph Augustyn
There are currently 129 stars carved into the white Alabama marble wall in the lobby of CIA Headquarters, each star representing a CIA employee who died in service to their country. One of those stars is for Freddie Woodruff, who on a Sunday evening on August 8, 1993, was killed by a single bullet not far from Tbilisi, Georgia.
Freddie and three Georgian acquaintances were returning from a leisurely day of sight-seeing and picnicking when he was shot in the head while sitting in the backseat of a car.
Woodruff was in Georgia to help train then-Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze’s security forces. As a fellow member of the Agency’s Clandestine Service, I had met Freddie, but did not know him well. What I do remember well on learning of his death is the gut punch that all CIA officers feel when a colleague has fallen in the line of duty.
The Georgians, under tremendous international diplomatic and political pressure to resolve the case quickly, claimed the death was an accident. Within 24 hours, they charged Anzor Sharmaidze, a lowly drunken former Georgian soldier, with the crime, a politically expedient decision certainly cleared at the highest levels of the Georgian government. According to the official crime scene report, Woodruff was killed by a stray bullet fired by Sharmaidze when the driver of Woodruff’s car failed to stop to assist Sharmaidze and two of his colleagues who allegedly needed roadside assistance.
Then-CIA Director James Woolsey flew to Tbilisi to retrieve Woodruff’s body. He met with President Shevardnadze, and accompanied Woodruff’s flag-draped coffin back to Washington, DC. For all intents and purposes, the tragic event of August 8, 1993 was concluded, the memory of Freddie Woodruff forever in the hearts and minds of those who knew him, and forever memorialized on the Agency wall, but largely forgotten elsewhere.
But could the death have been as simple as the Georgians insisted? As in most matters related to the murky world of intelligence, the answer is a resounding no. There was much more. There was intrigue, forced confessions, conspiracy theories, lies by witnesses, political manipulation, counterintelligence implications, and questions that needed to be answered for the Woodruff family, who never truly believed that Freddie was struck down by a random bullet on a lonely road near Tbilisi.
In his book, The Spy Who Was Left Behind, Michael Pullara, a U.S. trial lawyer from Texas and a close friend of the Woodruff family, has written the most comprehensive and exhaustive account to date, of what really happened to Freddie Woodruff and why. He has done this with aplomb, utilizing his trial lawyer and analytical and networking skills to piece together a detailed and very readable play-by-play account of his quest for the truth, detailing the events that point toward a cover-up of Woodruff’s assassination.
Pullara spent twenty years, mostly at his own expense, traveling back and forth to Georgia, seeking the truth. He sought out eye witnesses to the event, U.S. and Georgian government officials, Russian and American intelligence officers and news reporters, all with the aim of discovering what really happened to Woodruff. Pullara too, was working at the behest of Freddie’s older sister, Georgia Woodruff Alexander, a deeply religious and forgiving individual who sought the release from prison of the wrongly convicted and framed Anzor Sharmaidze who, she was convinced, was serving a fifteen- year sentence for a crime he did not commit.
Pullara makes a very strong case that Woodruff was assassinated by the Russians (probably the GRU), and that the Shevardnadze regime covered up the crime. They did so, he argues, as a political necessity to ensure Georgia’s survival given the precarious standing the country had with the Russians at the time and, concurrently, Georgia’s reliance on Western financial and military aid. Simply put, Georgia could not leave the case in limbo. But to this end, Pullara argues that the United States, and specifically the CIA, were much too willing to accept the fabricated depiction of events, and in doing so, made Freddie Woodruff expendable, and, at the same time, made themselves irresponsibly complicit in the sentencing of an innocent Georgian man.
To the issue then of why the assassination, Pullara posits two theories. First, he says, the Russians were becoming increasingly worried that Woodruff had discovered, and was tracking, their cocaine and heroin trafficking routes in the Caucasus, thus threatening Russian drug smuggling operations. While Pullara believes this is plausible, he concludes that this was not the reason. He theorizes instead that the murder was related to Aldrich Ames, the CIA officer turned Russian spy who, at the time of the murder, was working in the CIA’s Counternarcotics Center and following illicit drug trafficking in that part of the world.
Pullara recounts how Ames traveled to Georgia in July 1993, two weeks before Woodruff’s assassination, and met with his old friend and CIA colleague Woodruff in a piano bar at the Sheraton Hotel In Tbilisi. In a possible, but not provable, recounting of a late-night drinking session between the two, Pullara confidently speculates that a very drunk Ames confided in Woodruff that he was working with the Russians, and that perhaps Ames may have even attempted to recruit Woodruff to help. If this is in fact, what happened, the Russians then had no choice but to eliminate Woodruff who, they believed, would report the incident.
The Spy Who Was Left Behind is really two stories in one. It is about one man’s search for the truth about the apparent murder of a CIA officer whose whole story has never been accurately told, or thoroughly investigated, until now. To this end, Pullara has made a substantial and very credible contribution to the historical record of CIA. At the same time, this is a book about Pullara himself, and his personal mission, drive, perseverance and ambition to prove his mettle as a skillful and experienced trial lawyer working in a foreign environment, and within the complex intelligence discipline of which he knew nothing about when he started.
Pullara can be self-serving on occasion, often pointing out his cleverness and skillful lawyerly qualities as he maneuvered through both the U.S. and Georgian bureaucracies, dealt with uncooperative witnesses as well as resentful and revengeful Georgian characters of all types. He can also at times, be too self-effacing when, for example, he describes how he encountered and questioned former CIA officers who he was convinced were skillfully manipulating him and controlling every meeting.
While I am not totally persuaded, nor completely understand why Pullara views Woodruff as The Spy Who Was Left Behind, I am convinced that Pullara’s book is worth reading, and that it adds additional substance and meaning to yet another of the 129 stars etched on the Agency’s most hallowed memorial.
The Spy Who Was Left Behind earns a rating of 3.5 (out of four) trench coats.
*Joseph Augustyn is a 28-year veteran of the CIA’s clandestine service
