OPINION

PHILIP MARTIN: From Searcy to Tbilisi

It is a long way from Searcy to Tbilisi.

Leaving from Atlanta, you can take Delta to Amsterdam Airport Schiphol then fly a Georgian Airlines 737 into Tbilisi International. It'll take about 15 hours and cost you just under $2,000. Cheaper flights are available, but the layovers are longer.

Cobblestoned and poor, the capital of Georgia proudly decks itself out in the rags and architecture empires--Arab, Ottoman, Mongol, and Russian--that occupied but never quite conquered it. I have intrepid friends who have been, but I'll probably never visit the Silk Road crossroads where they sell raw wine in repurposed Coca-Cola bottles on the street as the electricity regularly blinks on and off in the sulfur bathhouses. It's too far to go to have fun.

But if you travel at all, you probably realize that Arkies go everywhere. And so, about 25 years ago, Freddie Woodruff, who played football at Harding University and preached at a small church in Damascus during his college days, found himself riding in the back seat of a white Lada Niva compact 4x4 predecessor of modern crossover vehicles, on dusty Old Military Road near the village of Natakhtari.

Woodruff was a 45-year-old employee of the U.S. State Department. He was on a private trip with friends, including two young women.

Woodruff was an interesting guy, a Bible major at Harding who spoke five or six languages. He married while at school, which may have led him to give up his football career, and after graduation he preached for a while and taught Bible studies and English at Great Lakes Christian College in Lansing, Mich. He divorced his first wife and joined the Army as a Russian translator in 1971. In 1978, he was assigned to the State Department. By then he'd remarried--to a CIA agent.

Woodruff's death car was being driven by Elgar Gogoladze, a veteran Soviet security officer who at the time was head of Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze's security detail. Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister under Mikhail Gorbachev, had become the putative head of the new republic created after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But his position was tenuous because, as usual in Georgia, nothing was really settled. The bosses of various crime syndicates really ran most of the country. And the Russians wanted back in. Georgia was one of the most dangerous places in the world.

So it seemed possible that, when Woodruff was shot in the head and killed on that trip, that it might simply have been bad luck. A drunken 19-year-old soldier, Anzor Sharmaidze, fired a shot in the direction of the Niva after Gogoladze had ignored his wave for help with his own broken-down car. He didn't really mean to hit anything.

But spinning lead that isn't necessarily meant for anyone still has to come down somewhere. It could, perhaps, squeeze through the rubber seal around a car door and hit you in the head. An angry drunk might commit manslaughter. That might be all there is to it. Sometimes, maybe more times than our sense-seeking natures believe it, things happen just this way.

Not this time.

Woodruff was actually the CIA's station chief in Georgia; the State Department job was a cover story. CIA director James Woolsey, coincidentally in Moscow at the time of Woodruff's killing, flew home with his remains. Woolsey eulogized Woodruff at his funeral.

Michael Pullara, a Houston attorney, knew the Woodruff family when he was growing up in Searcy, especially Freddie's younger sisters Jill and Cherry. He remembered Freddie as an undersized flanker on the Harding Bisons, and he studied under Freddie's father, George, a biology professor who often "was called upon . . . to teach young believers how to resolve the dissonance between ecclesiastical faith and evolutionary fact."

Pullara closely followed the reporting on Woodruff's death in Tbilisi. After Sharmaidze was sentenced to prison despite recanting his confession and claiming he'd been tortured, Pullara--whose family had been misled by the U.S. government after his father died in southeast Asia in 1967--decided to investigate.

"I wondered what I could do with a law license, a passport, and a credit card."

Eventually that curiosity would lead to a book, The Spy Who Was Left Behind (Scribner's, $28) published earlier this month.

Pullara began filing Freedom of Information Act requests; slowly the heavily redacted documents started arriving. He was able to figure out the Georgia trial was a show trial, and that there are plenty of alternative theories about Woodruff's death that seem far more plausible than the official version. Maybe the Russians wanted Woodruff dead because he was providing Shevardnadze with intelligence on their military support to Russian separatists within the country. Maybe Woodruff had learned too much about certain individuals involved in smuggling heroin through Georgia to the West.

But the most intriguing revelation of Pullara's book is that shortly before his death, Woodruff met with Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer who would be exposed as a KGB double agent six months later. Near the end of his book, Pullara presents a credible theory of events offered by a retired CIA public affairs officer named G. L. Lamborn: when Ames met with Woodruff he got drunk and said too much. Maybe he confessed that he was spying for the Russians. Maybe he tried to recruit Woodruff.

In any case, Ames woke up the next morning believing he'd made a grave mistake. One that Freddie Woodruff could not survive.

It seems credible to me, and to Pullara, though writers cannot help but root for the story. Someday we might know for sure, but I doubt it. Sharmaidze was quietly released from prison in 2008. In 2013, Thea Tsulukiani, the Georgian Minister of Justice, admitted the case was never "properly investigated."

Not by authorities anyway. It wasn't in anybody's interest. That made a certain Texas lawyer, a certain Harding grad, curious.

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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.

Editorial on 11/27/2018

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