Did Russia Really Bomb the U.S. Embassy in Georgia?

When I first contacted journalists and NGO workers in Georgia about coming to this country in the summer of 2009, most said that it was poor timing.

“Everyone’s on vacation, it’s too hot to work, so, nothing really happens in Georgia in the summer,” they said, “except the occasional war.”

Still that was enough for me to buy the one-way ticket and I am now moving into my third eventful summer in the South Caucasus.

This year, while the Western world was gearing up for barbeques and summer movie blockbusters, Tbilisi was host to a fascinating spy scandal involving three freelance Georgian photographers. Two of them worked directly for the government, including one who was the president’s personal photographer. They were accused of being paid to transmit sensitive government documents – including the minutes of ministerial meetings, blueprints of government buildings, official itineraries, etc. to another country.

Meanwhile, more details emerged about a series of mysterious explosions the previous fall that had rocked Tbilisi – actually “rocked” is a bit of an overstatement. All of the devices were small, causing hardly any damage and no one in Tbilisi seemed to pay much attention to them.

Either way, it has been an interesting, if swelteringly hot, couple of months.

On the explosions, I actually happened to be at the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi to interview the ambassador the day after the strange explosion occurred outside their walls. Although I was there to discuss IDP issues, I asked every aide and employee at the place what they thought it was all about. Most shrugged, figuring it was some local digging for copper, who accidentally struck a natural gas line, or perhaps some sort of odd practical joke. Who knows.  These things happen in Georgia (in March, a Georgian pensioner allegedly cut off the internet for a significant portion of the South Caucasus – including nearly all of Armenia – while scavenging for buried cables).

But then, a few more devices were found, and one exploded outside the headquarters of the Georgian Labor Party, killing a woman several hundred meters away who was watching TV and happened to catch a stray piece of shrapnel directly in the heart. Rumors began swirling. Who was setting these bombs? Terrorists? Georgia does have about 1,000 troops in Afghanistan, but this seemed too amateurish to be al-Qaeda’s work. The Russians? No, they’re not that crazy. The government? Maybe, but are they really that crazy?

Then the spy scandal broke, with five photographers rounded up, including a stringer for the Associated Press who was later released along with the wife of the president’s photographer. Another one of the arrested Georgian photographers worked for the European Pressphoto Agency.

The Georgian media immediately cried foul, and launched a series of protests outside Interior Ministry buildings and running blank photos in their publications with captions reading, “No photo available, the photographer is in prison.”

I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I was stunned by the number of Georgians that I consider to be rational and levelheaded, who said this was clearly a government attempt to silence the press. A month earlier, the government, which tries its darnedest to live up to its billing as a “beacon of democracy,” had overreacted to an opposition demonstration, sending riot police to bludgeon protester and journalist alike in downtown Tbilisi. In the aftermath it faced considerable Western criticism as photos of and videos of bloodied picketers showed up on TV screens and newspapers worldwide. All of the photographers detained on spy charges were present and snapping away at the protest dispersal.

In the same way, even after arrests were made in the bombing mystery, and the government released the confession of a Georgian who supposedly planted the devices after being blackmailed by a Russian intelligence officer, people in my social circle seemed split 50-50 on whether the government version was believable. True, it did seem to have some holes, and fit a bit too well into Georgia’s narrative that Russia is actively trying to disrupt the country in all manner of irrational ways to drag it back into its pre-1991 orbit, but the only alternative to the government version is that Tbilisi is actively playing Orwellian mind games with its public, even bombing its own people to maintain an atmosphere of fear.

The result of the photographer’s spy scandal did nothing to dissuade the skeptics.

While insisting publicly that the photographers had transmitted sensitive information to Georgia’s enemies, Georgian officials were also reassuring foreign diplomats that they never had access to anything secret. Information about the case remained spotty and rather than waiting for trial, the Georgian Interior Ministry released tapes of the accused vaguely discussing money transfers over the phone. Then, despite one of them initially engaging in a hunger strike, all three confessed to their crimes within a week of one another. What was the punishment for their alleged treason? Probation.

Probation? In the U.S., treason is a capital offense and convicted spies generally only avoid the electric chair by ratting out their colleagues as a part of a plea deal. After several closed-door meetings between Georgian officials and Western diplomats, these guys walked.

In the case of alleged Russian state-sponsored terrorism, the reported motive of the Georgian bomber, whose family lives in the disputed territory of Abkhazia, was that he was blackmailed by a Russian officer who threatened his family with retribution if he did not bomb several targets in Georgia. Many gaps in that story also remain, however, the Georgian government was given a boost when it became public that as of December 2010 American intelligence generally agreed with the Georgian investigation that a Russian intelligence officer had been involved in organizing the attacks.

Now, I could do an entire side-column about the fact that the U.S. has wrongly and naively given Georgia the benefit of the doubt in the past (namely during the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, as revealed by WikiLeaks), and there have been plenty of instances in the last decade where American intelligence has been dead wrong in general (see Iraqi WMD’s), but that argument misses the point.

We honestly don’t know what happened in either of these cases, and that’s the problem. But, while Georgians do tend to lend a bit too much credence to rumors and are known be a passionate people, the nearly universal reaction of Georgia’s independent media, and the split opinions of everyday Georgians in these two cases show that the government has a serious credibility issue – and one they have not done much to grapple with.

When international pressure built for a transparent trial for the accused photographers, rather than open it to the public, the prosecution instead brokered deals with the defendants stipulating that they would admit their guilt and walk free, provided they keep all details of the investigation and plea negotiations confidential. Meanwhile, when the Washington Times published the eight-month-old U.S. intelligence report that discussed a link between the Tbilisi embassy bombing and Russian agents, Georgia reacted with a glee of vindication that admitted their insecurity about their case’s plausibility.

In the end, after a summer of intrigue fit for an airport-terminal espionage novel, the picture for objective Georgia analysts and observers is more cloudy now than perhaps ever before. While there is no doubt that Georgia and Russia maintain a rancorous and acrimonious relationship, both of these cases were simply too weird and murky to be taken on face value. And, even if the all of the Georgian government’s claims turn out to be true, it may indeed become a pyrrhic victory. Georgia may have just won the capture of a few minor agents at the cost of the trust of the media and international community.