See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (20 page)

‘Isn’t there someone else?’

‘There’s a general at the Staff College who knows us all - General XXXXXX. But Mr. Bob, you ask too many questions. Let me ask you one. What would the United States do if we made a coup against Yeltsin?’

Grigor wasn’t looking for a green light, but when I reported what he had told me, headquarters burned up the return lines with a message for Grigor: No coup; Washington fully backs the democratically elected government in Moscow. I’d already anticipated that response. I was just happy that headquarters let me keep meeting Grigor.

I did try to do a favor for him, though. I have no idea where he found them, but at one meeting he produced several brochures for Motorola communications equipment. He asked if I could help him procure a system for his regiment. The response from headquarters was unusually terse : ‘ Inappropriate.’

It was a little after nine on August 9, 1993, and someone was pounding on our office door. It was Grigor.

‘Have you heard the news?’ he asked me, out of breath.

I’d been out all morning with the communicator. We still hadn’t taken traffic.

‘Your man in Tbilisi. He was assassinated.’

 He was temporarily assigned to the embassy in the Georgia capital of the former Soviet republic. Woodruff had been shot and killed the evening before.

‘I know who did it,’ Grigor said. ‘Those bastards in Moscow.’ Grigor, in fact, knew nothing about Woodruff’s killing, but if his suspicions were paranoid, they weren’t necessarily wrong. Fred Woodruff had been shot outside of Tbilisi while riding in the backseat of a Niva jeep driven by Eldar Gogoladze, the head of the bodyguard detail for Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze. There were two female passengers in the car.

Beyond that, things got murkier. The Georgians arrested a soldier and charged him with the shooting. According to the Georgian police, the soldier, drunk at the time, had fired one round from his rifle in an attempt to flag down the Niva for gasoline. The Georgians, however, refused American investigators access to the soldier - at least not until he was on his deathbed several years later, by which time he had recanted his confession.

Other inconsistencies in the Georgian story went unexplained. A militia checkpoint, only a hundred yards from where Woodruff supposedly was shot, heard and saw nothing. Gogoladze said he passed the checkpoint after the shooting but didn’t stop. He couldn’t explain why or why he hadn’t at least alerted the militiamen about the shooting. Nor did Gogoladze seem to be in any hurry: It took him more than two hours to get to the hospital, normally a twenty-minute drive. Gogoladze explained that he gotten lost but couldn’t remember where. This was a man who’d spent his life in Tbilisi.

Not only did Gogoladze’s Niva disappear during those crucial two hours, it stayed gone for more than thirty-six hours after Gogoladze delivered Woodruff to the hospital, and when it did reappear, it had obviously been cleaned up. The embassy security officer found a dent in the Niva’s ceiling, right above the driver’s seat, where the bullet hit after it exited Woodruff’s head. Clearly, the bullet had not left the car, but it was nowhere to be found inside and thus couldn’t be matched to the confessed shooter’s AK-47. There was also no sign of how the bullet entered the car. The rear window was intact, and there was no hole in the metal skin. When the security officer pointed this out to the Georgians, they went away. The next day they came back and announced that they had discovered a small puncture in the seal that held in the rear window’s glass. Indeed there was one, but the embassy security officer was almost certain it hadn’t been there when he first checked the car.

There were other odd details that didn’t add up. Based on the autopsy, Woodruff had been shot with a dumdum bullet - an assassination bullet like the Russian officers showed me that day at the range - yet the shooter had no reasonable explanation why he had loaded his AK-47 with hard-to-come-by assassination rounds.

The FBI spent days going over the gunman’s supposed position but couldn’t find the spent shell casing until the Georgian investigators showed up. One of them grabbed an AK, positioned himself where he believed the gunman had stood, and fired a round in the air. He then followed the trajectory of the spent casing into some bushes. There he found not only the casing from the bullet he’d just fired but a second one as well. ‘Here is the casing,’ he said triumphantly. The FBI agents were incredulous.

Another part of the mystery was that the Russian mole Rick Ames had met Woodruff in Tbilisi shortly before the murder. According to eyewitnesses, they got into an ugly argument, but no one ever found out exactly why. Did Woodruff accuse Ames of being a mole? And what had been in Woodruff’s camera? The female passenger in the front seat said that when Woodruff was shot, she turned around to see the woman in the back opening up the camera to take out the film, but the trail went stone cold from there. None of these anomalies proved a conspiracy, but I found it curious that no one was interested in running them down.

Long after the investigation came to a standstill, rumors and leads surfaced that complicated the Woodruff case still more. The most intriguing came when a Russian military intelligence officer was arrested in a neighboring country carrying a flash suppressor for an assassination rifle. Under interrogation, the Russian claimed he was a member of the team that had assassinated Woodruff. He was released and disappeared before his story could be confirmed, but that wasn’t the only potential link. Although she denied any connection to the murder, one of the female passengers in the Niva was married to a Russian military intelligence officer. Again, no one followed these leads.

Woodruff’s murder was like Pan Am. Part of the problem was that there was no solid proof of a bigger conspiracy. The larger part by far, though, was that Washington didn’t have the stomach for a thorough investigation. Even after it was determined that Russian intelligence had fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the side of our embassy in Moscow on September 13, 1995, the Clinton administration wasn’t interested in confronting Russia or even acknowledging that Russian nationalism was a problem. Incidentally, the FBI agent who hypothesized the Russians were behind Woodruff’s murder was quietly reassigned to a bank-robbery squad in Atlanta.

Tutorials were convincing me that the lash-up replacing the Soviet Union wasn’t going to work. Now he wanted me to take a deeper look by making a trip to the Pamirs. Although a few embassy officers had visited Khorog - the Pamirs’ capital - by helicopter, no American official had ever driven through them. ‘If you want to see what will become of Russia one day, drive along Tajikistan’s border,’ Grigor told me. ‘It’s the best preview of hell you’ll ever have.’

I could only imagine. The Pamirs, which covered about three quarters of Tajikistan, were maybe the most lawless land in the world, ruled by a patchwork of Islamic guerrillas, warlords, bandits, smugglers, and Russian deserters. The only way to make a living in the Pamirs was by trading in weapons and narcotics. Not surprisingly, the ever opportunistic Iranian Pasdaran was having a field day. It had set up a base right on the other side of the border, in Taloqan, Afghanistan, to fuel instability in central Asia. It had even gone so far as to buy a couple of US Stinger surface-to-air missiles and turn them over to the Tajik fundamentalists. The Russians maintained several outposts along the border, but the poor bastards defending them were lucky just to keep their heads. Every now and then, of course, their luck would tail out and the rebels would overrun one of them. The next day the newspaper would feature gruesome pictures of heads detached from bodies.

The danger was certainly part of the lure, but I had other reasons for wanting to spend time in the Pamirs. Ever since I had arrived in Dushanbe, I’d heard rumors about the remnants of an ancient civilization tucked away in a valley high in the mountains. The people who lived there were said to be descendants of the ancient kingdom of Samarkand, which had produced Alexander the Great’s wife, Roxane. Although they now called themselves Yaghnobis, their language hadn’t changed significantly in the last twenty-five hundred years. It was very close to ancient Soghdian, an Indo-European tongue in the Iranian family. The Yaghnobis’ way of life apparently hadn’t changed, either. They lived without electricity or running water. And if the wild rumors were true, the Yaghnobis had even reverted to worshiping fire.

Joseph Stalin had unsuccessfully attempted to efface the culture by scattering the Yaghnobis across the Soviet Union. After the regime fell in 1991, Harvard professor and Iranian scholar Richard Frye - a veteran of the World War II-era OSS - was the first American to hike up into Yaghnob. The window slammed shut again the next year, with the start of the civil war. If I managed to make it up there, I’d be on a very short list of Americans who had ever visited the ancient kingdom of Samarkand.

Basically, I decided to combine two trips in one. The first half would be a drive through the Pamirs, following a two-lane road that ran along Tajikistan’s border with Afghanistan and China. On the way back to Dushanbe, I’d return through the Garm Valley and see if there was a way to walk into Yaghnob. At best, it was an iffy proposition. A fifteen-thousand-foot pass stood between the Garm and Yaghnob valleys, and there was no way to learn from Dushanbe either who controlled the pass or whether it was clear of snow.

The first hurdle was to get through rebel lines. To figure that out, I needed to make a reconnaissance trip to Tavildara, the last town under government control. Since it was safer to travel in pairs, I persuaded the embassy’s economic officer, whom I’ll call Maggie, to accompany me. A newly minted Foreign Service officer, Maggie was looking forward to putting a little war reporting under her belt.

Maggie and I brought along a linguist, an attractive young Iranian girl I’ll call Nell. Nell not only spoke native Farsi, of which Tajik is a dialect; she had also picked up a few East Iranian dialects, including Soghdian, while she was a student at Oxford. But Nell’s talents weren’t limited to languages. She had helped pay her way through Oxford, she told me, by dressing up in a heavy set of clothes wrapped with flashing lights and dancing as a kind of come-on during raves at abandoned airfields. Having never attended a rave, I had to take her word for it, but even though her university dancing days were over, she still didn’t mind dressing the part.

Driving into Tavildara reminded me of the final sequence in Apocalypse Now, when Martin Sheen reaches Marlon Brando’s lair at the river’s end. Tavildara, though, was a hot battlefield. You could see it as soon as you drove into town, or what had once been the town. The only sign that anyone had ever lived there was mounds of rubble. The road was missing, too, replaced by huge craters strung together like a pearl necklace. We stopped to hear if there was any shooting going on, but it was absolutely quiet. If the rebels were in the surrounding mountains, we couldn’t see them.

A burned-out T-72, still smoking and with a tread thrown across the road, marked the entrance to the army’s camp. Shirtless and holding a sniper rifle, a soldier sunned himself on a nearby rock. He shrugged when we asked where his commander was. Ten minutes of poking around the camp finally led us to his billet, in the basement of what must have previously been a house. You had to pull away the camouflage netting and climb down a hole the size of a toilet to get in. Inside was a warren of sandbags, crates of grenades and ammunition, racks of RPGs and light antitank rockets, and stacked assault rifles. If the place took a direct hit, half of Tavildara would go up with it.

A private was sitting on the floor, loading an ammunition belt. The commander, Colonel Sergei, was ‘taking his bath,’ he informed us. The private showed us into Colonel Sergei’s room, which was the size of a big rabbit hutch. He closed the door and left us alone. We sat down on a pair of cots to wait. Nell put on her Walkman and tuned out.

Maggie and I heard Colonel Sergei before we saw him. Drunk as a Siberian pickle, he was belting out some old Volga boatman’s song. I looked at my watch. It was just about noon. Apparently informed by the private that he had guests, Sergei stopped singing. Now we could hear him giggling as he tried to sneak up on us. All was going fine until he bumped his head on the low ceiling and cursed under his breath. The next thing we knew, he had knocked the makeshift door almost off its hinges with his rifle butt and burst into the room. As soon as he saw us, though, Sergei froze. The orderly apparently hadn’t told him his visitors were Americans. I, for one, was every bit as surprised to see him. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-eight or -nine. With his full blond beard, emerald-green eyes, and sheepish grin, he wasn’t my idea of the commander of the farthest outpost of the former Soviet Union.

Once we were all seated, Maggie, who had good Russian skills, asked about the recent fighting around Tavildara, but Sergei ignored her. Instead he shouted at the private through the wall,’ I curse the eyes of your whore of a mother. Why is there never a goddamn bottle of vodka when I need one?’ The private found a bottle, and the day went into a tailspin from there.

Sergei’s second in command, an Uzbek major, showed up with two more bottles of vodka. We were into the first of those when the Uzbek got up, went out, and came back with an American land mine he’d captured from the rebels. No one had bothered to remove the detonator.

‘Here,’ he said, handing it to me.’ This is a present from the great Soviet Union to America.’ Not to be outdone, I went out to the Niva and brought back a surplus US military flak vest. The major loved it. He put it on, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me back outside. Handing me his Makarov pistol, he said, ‘Shoot me.’ Fortunately, I was sober enough to say no. I finally persuaded him to hang the vest on a pole. The major emptied a clip into it and was so delighted when not a single round penetrated the vest that he grabbed an AK-47 and emptied a magazine into it. This time the vest shredded. The major didn’t mind, though. He put the vest back on and wore it for the rest of the party.