In August 1993, CIA agent Freddie Woodruff was murdered in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

He was shot through the head in the back seat of a car on a remote road near Tbilisi. He is likely someone you’ve never heard of and his mission a long-forgotten tale of Bush 41-era intrigue that carried over into the Clinton years.

Freddie Woodruff’s story, while a somewhat lost chapter in intelligence and diplomatic circles, makes for fascinating reading in a new and first book by Michael Pullara, a trial lawyer originally from Mr. Woodruff’s hometown of Stillwater, Okla. Mr. Pullara’s take on this vast mystery in a remote and dangerous part of the world is what makes “The Spy Who Was Left Behind: Russia, the United States, and the True Story of Betrayal and Assassination of a CIA Agent” such a riveting read.

In journeying mostly by himself to such an unstable part of Eastern Europe to investigate, Mr. Pullara interacted with everyone from unstable former soldiers and dubious Russian intelligence sources to the U.S. and Georgian presidents themselves.

He interviews CIA and FBI agents who looked into the killing and found their own evidence, mostly ignored by powerful people who ultimately railroaded an innocent man for the crime. His bold examination of an almost laughable Georgian murder investigation and its cover-up at the highest levels bespeaks of someone who’s looking to get himself killed. As comical as it is frightening, it’s one of the things that makes this book all the more interesting.

Mr. Pullara’s interest in this tale of woe sprang from his knowing the Woodruff family in Stillwater and becoming motivated to solve what that family felt was a bizarre and unbelievable situation surrounding Freddie Woodruff’s murder and the investigation that quickly led to an innocent man’s incarceration in a harsh Georgian prison.

His examination of the Georgian and Russian probes, as well as the subsequent trial, exposes an implausible-sounding but accurate look at the instability that passed for a government after the Soviet Union broke apart.

Mr. Pullara’s story takes us from lonely and dangerous stretches of road in a mostly lawless former Soviet republic to the offices of high-ranking U.S. diplomatic, intelligence and law enforcement officers, and even White House press rooms. He brings to his story disparate people whose lives and character, shadowy and untrustworthy as they are, intertwine with Mr. Woodruff’s in sad and scary ways.

Mr. Pullara was fortunate enough to find some very good assistance along the way, people with the language skills to help with translating as he spent years putting together a picture of vast corruption, violence and spymasters of the most cold-blooded type. Indeed the latter is none other than Aldrich Ames, one of the most damaging people who spied against the United States in modern history.

The author’s use of the Freedom of Information Act brings us, despite a great deal of redacting by governments east and west, a mountain of material that only an adept lawyer could decipher. In that regard, Mr. Pullara delivers. “The Spy Who Was Left Behind,” while telling Freddie Woodruff’s tragic story, also displays what a real investigator can uncover among complex documents, details and personalities. This investigative journey will draw readers in.

Perry Munyon is a Pittsburgh-based freelance writer.

First Published: December 10, 2018, 2:15 a.m.
Updated: December 10, 2018, 2:22 a.m.