The official version of how a CIA officer was shot and killed in this former Soviet republic last summer is as follows:
The officer, Fred Woodruff, was returning to the capital from a Sunday outing when a man whose car had run out of gas tried to flag down Woodruff's vehicle on a two-lane highway 20 miles north of here.When the vehicle, which was being driven by the Georgian president's chief of security, did not stop, the man fired off a round from his assault rifle. Woodruff, who was riding in the back seat, was hit in the forehead.
While this account spawned a number of conspiracy theories, the case seemed closed in late January when Anzor Sharmaidze, 21, was convicted of having fired a wild but fatal shot at the vehicle and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Now a new crop of conspiracy theories is arising after the arrest of Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer who is accused of spying for Moscow.
Ames, it turns out, was in Tiblisi, the capital, shortly before Woodruff was killed on Aug. 8, and the timing heightened suspicions.
Was Woodruff killed because he had stumbled onto intelligence about Ames, who came to Georgia on assignment in July, perhaps because Ames had met with Russian contacts while he was here?
That is the question that Alex Rondeli, a professor of international relations at Tbilisi State University, is asking.
During a traditional Georgian meal, Rondeli said he had initially doubted the government's account of the shooting.
Another guest at the table offered an auxiliary theory: Ames, who most recently worked in the counternarcotics section at the CIA, had come to Georgia because it was a major conduit for hashish and opium from Asia to Europe and the United States.
Had Woodruff told Ames about the involvement of Georgian officials in the drug trafficking and Ames then passed it on to those implicated, who had Woodruff killed?
Yet another plot has been circulated: that Woodruff's killing was carried out by a companion, Marina Kapanadze, who was riding in the back seat with him, and that she was working for the KGB, which, as this idea goes, does not want the CIA meddling in Russia's neighborhood.