In the summer of 2008, as Russian tanks rolled toward Tbilisi, the woman who is today the symbol of Georgia’s pro-Western opposition was writing the book that Russia would later carry into a courtroom in The Hague and read aloud against my country.

That sounds like a polemic. It is a matter of record, and it explains something Washington keeps getting wrong about Georgia.

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Salome Zourabichvili was born in France, the granddaughter of Georgian emigres, and had a real diplomatic career in Paris. After the Rose Revolution, many of us were intoxicated by the idea of bringing our emigres home and handing them the state to rebuild. In 2004, President Mikheil Saakashvili detached her from the French foreign service and made her Georgia’s foreign minister. Her appointment was read as a signal of Western intent.

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I was not reading that signal from abroad. I read it from a desk in Tbilisi, as a serving counterintelligence officer, when she was appointed in 2004 and again when she was dismissed in 2005 — and a foreign ministry is watched closely, from the inside as much as the outside.

In 2008, the year of the war, she published “La tragédie géorgienne, 2003-2008” in Paris, a memoir of disillusion with the government she had served. As literature, that was her right. Here is what happened to it next.

On Aug. 12, 2008, Georgia filed suit against the Russian Federation at the International Court of Justice, accusing Moscow of ethnic persecution in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. On Dec. 1, 2009, Russia filed its preliminary objections. And in that filing — pages 31 to 32 and 34, a matter confirmed by Georgia’s own fact-checking organization........

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