Pullara - The Spy Who Was Left Behind: Russia, the New Cold War, and the True Story of the Assassination of a CIA Agent

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This book is dedicated to my father, Captain Angelo Pullara, USAF.

He died so that someone else could live.

At first glance it might seem like almost everybody in Georgia is related because their names sound so similarall those -dzes and -shvilis. However, these suffixes are merely the Georgian equivalent of the Western -son (as in Ericson, which originally meant Erics son).

The suffix -dze is Old Georgian for son and the suffix -shvili is Old Georgian for child. Whether someone is a -dze or -shvili depends on which side of the country his or her family comes from: the -dze (like Eduard Shevardnadze) are from western Georgia and the -shvili (like Mikheil Saakashvili) are from eastern Georgia.

When a Georgian name is rendered into Latin script, it is written phonetically. You pronounce each letter and place the accent or stress on the suffix. For names ending with -dze, the e is stressed (e.g., sheh-vard-nad-ZEH); and for names ending with -shvili, the first i is stressed (e.g., sah-kash-VEE-lee).

M r. President, I am an American lawyer and I represent surviving family members of a US diplomat who was murdered near Tbilisi in 1993.

It was November 2004 and Mikheil Saakashvili had just finished two hours of remarks in the Tbilisi State University auditorium. Twelve months earlier this thirty-six-year-old former justice minister had scrambled to the front of a popular revolt in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. In a made-for-TV moment, he handed his predecessor a rose and demanded that the old man quit elected office. Riding a wave of patriotic euphoria, Misha (as he was popularly known) had been elected president of the tiny Eurasian nation and given a mandate to lurch toward the West.

The young chief executive felt comfortable with the invitation-only crowd and agreed to take a few questions from the audience. I had tagged along with two guests in hopes of having a few minutes with a minor government official. The opportunity to talk to the president himself was too good to pass up.

The murdered diplomat was Freddie Woodruff, a forty-five-year-old former preacher with a gift for languages. I remembered him mostly as the strawberry-blond older brother of one of my junior high classmates. He was a Bible major who played college football and (in my world) that made him a Samson-like hero. But those who knew him better recalled a more complicated character. As one of his friends told me, Freddie was an extraordinarily outgoing individualseductive on many different levels. He had an intuitive sense of what people wanted and he used it to manipulate them. But somehow, with Freddie, you just didnt mind.