by Douglas Boyd
In overall charge of the camps was Vice-Minister of the Interior Mircho Spasov, who not only visited them, to see conditions for himself, but threatened guards whom he considered not to be brutal enough. Many infants arrested with their parents were simply killed in transit or on arrival at the camp; those who survived spent up to the first ten years of their lives there, witnessing scenes of violence and murder. Many emerged with lifelong physical or psychological problems, to find themselves debarred from higher education. Some of these victims later banded together under the banner ‘Children of the Camps’ to demand compensation from the post-Communist governments, but this has so far been refused on the grounds that they were too young to suffer from the experience.9
In addition to those sent to the camps, some 25,000 people were forcibly exiled to remote corners of the country. As to how so many ‘enemies of the people’, and ‘counter-revolutionary elements’ were identified in the first place, in 1972 the author was directing a BBC TV film in and around the Black Sea resort of Slunchev Bryag – Sunny Beach, in English. Inside the beautifully laid-out turisticheski compleks itself there were no indications that one was in a country ruled by a totalitarian regime; indeed Bulgarian law had wisely been suspended in the resort to encourage Western visitors to come and enjoy themselves in an atmosphere without ubiquitous fear. However, as the BBC team found when filming outside this privileged area, life was very different for the locals. The film crew was accompanied everywhere by a French-speaking ‘liaison producer’ from Bulgarian Television, who wrote a report of where we had been and what had been done at the end of each day. I had a certain sympathy for him, trying not to be obstructive to us and yet please his masters. When setting up for a shot of the endless sandy beaches, open sea and blue skies, he would say, ‘Do not point the camera north. That is forbidden,’ or ‘We cannot stop here. It is better to drive on a few miles.’ As to why filming to the north with a 20:1 zoom lens was not a good idea, the reason may have been a forced-labour camp reputed to be somewhere in that direction, whose 250 inmates worked and died in a quarry, breaking rocks for the construction of a luxury villa for party fat cats to take their holidays in. On another day, after recce-ing some ancient ruins outside the resort, the author noticed a plaque on a house wall in the nearby village. Able to read Cyrillic script, he asked what exactly it meant. There was an embarrassed pause until the ‘liaison producer’ said, ‘This is the house of a BKP member.’
‘I understand that, but why does it need a plaque on it?’
Another embarrassed pause, then, ‘So that people can tell him if their neighbour has done something wrong.’
… or thought or said ‘something wrong’, which might land them in a camp.
The system was exactly like that of the Blockleiter in each city block of Nazi Germany, who snooped on everybody for the Gestapo. The ‘crimes’ that justified being sent to a labour camp included what the BKP regarded as cultural aberrations by the writer Dimiter Talev, the poet Yosif Petrov and the pianist Trifon Silyanovski. Internationally acclaimed jazz singer and recording artist Lea Ivanova was sent to a camp for allegedly promoting retrogressive sound and obscene behaviour on stage.10
After Stalin’s death, Chervenkov’s repressive regime weakened, amnestying 10,000 political prisoners in 1955 when the party denounced Stalinism and caused Chervenkov’s resignation. Todor Zhivkov then took supreme power with a programme of ‘modified socialism’. He was the epitome of the grey apparatchik, slavishly following the Moscow line and leading his country into economic meltdown with its Soviet-style central planning of everything from steel production to agriculture.
In 1964 a Bulgarian Smersh was formed, known as Service 7 and headed by Colonel Petko Kovachev, who despatched teams to assassinate or kidnap dissident Bulgarians living in Britain, France, Denmark, West Germany, Italy, Turkey, Sweden and Switzerland. The best-known example in Britain was that of 49-year-old playwright, novelist and broadcaster Georgi Markov, who was stabbed on Waterloo Bridge on 7 September 1978 with the point of a specially modified umbrella that injected a microscopic ricin pellet below the skin of his heel. This assassination on the sixty-seventh birthday of Todor Zhivkov was intended as a present for him. After walking across Waterloo Bridge on his way to Bush House, Markov felt a sharp pain like a wasp sting on his right heel. He looked round to see a man picking an umbrella off the ground and hurrying away. On arriving at work, Markov mentioned the incident to a colleague. That evening he was admitted to hospital with a raging fever, and died there three days later.
The assassination operation was overseen by KGB General Oleg Kalugin. The umbrella, the pellet and the ricin within were supplied by the KGB’s high-security toxicology laboratory in Moscow, designated Laboratory X, which refined and supplied poisons for many other Smersh-type assassinations after first experimenting with them on condemned prisoners. This method of assassination being unknown in Britain, there was no antidote available. Markov died before any proper diagnosis could be made or any effective treatment given.
The ‘crime’ for which he had been condemned in Sofia was rejecting the invitations of party boss Todor Zhivkov – former head of Narodna Militsiya, the people’s militia – to become a state-salaried ‘socialist writer’. This was during the period when the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture was slavishly following the Moscow line of zhdanovshchina propounded by alcoholic Soviet Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov, which ruled that the only valid function for creative artists was to reflect an exclusively Marxist view of life and the world, as interpreted by the party. Like many self-taught people, Stalin was an avid reader and considered himself a discerning critic, sending handwritten notes to authors, composers and playwrights with advice they could hardly reject. On 26 October 1932 he had called a meeting of Russia’s fifty most influential writers, including his favourite, Maxim Gorky. They were informed by him without equivocation, ‘The artist ought to show life truthfully. And if he shows our life truthfully, he cannot fail to show it moving towards socialism. This is, and will be, Socialist-Realism.’11
The idea of becoming a BKP hack revolted Markov, who described Bulgarian society in terms that applied to a greater or lesser extent to all the satellite countries 1945–89:
Today, we Bulgarians present a fine example of what it is to exist under a lid which we cannot lift and which we no longer believe someone else can lift ... And the unending slogan which millions of loudspeakers blare out is that everyone is fighting for the happiness of the others. Every word spoken under the lid constantly changes its meaning. Lies and truths swap their values with the frequency of an alternating current ... We have seen how personality vanishes, how individuality is destroyed, how the spiritual life of a whole people is corrupted in order to turn them into a listless flock of sheep. We have seen so many of those demonstrations which humiliate human dignity, where normal people are expected to applaud some paltry mediocrity who has proclaimed himself a demi-god and condescendingly waves to them from the heights of his inviolability.12
In 1969 Markov emigrated and satirised the communist regime of his country in many broadcasts over the BBC Bulgarian Service, RFE and Deutsche Welle, thinking himself safely beyond retribution. In 1972 Markov’s membership of the Union of Bulgarian Writers was suspended and he was sentenced in absentia to six years and six months in prison for defection. His sense of humour still intact, Markov used In absentia as the title for his weekly broadcasts on RFE commenting on life in Bulgaria and criticising Zhivkov. As reward for the success of the joint KDS–KGB operation, Kalugin was awarded a medal and received a Browning automatic pistol as a present from KDS. Since the whole story was well known in intelligence circles, when Kalugin visited London in 1993 he was arrested at Heathrow Airport and detained at Belgravia police station for twenty-four hours. He denied the charges of implication in Markov’s murder and was released when the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was not enough evidence to begin proceedings against him in an English court.13 What was not commo
nly known was that there had been two previous Service 7 attempts on Markov’s life: to poison his coffee during a visit to RFE in Munich and a more dramatic scenario that had to be aborted while he and his family were holidaying on Corsica.
The murder of Markov was far from being the only KGB-style mokroe dyelo or ‘wet job’ undertaken against émigrés by KDS. Vladimir Kostov was posted to France in April 1974 as Paris correspondent of Bulgarian Radio and Television. He held the rank of major in KDS and the broadcasting role was a cover for his intelligence work. Three years later, in July 1977, he and his wife, Natalya, defected and were granted political asylum in France. He was immediately given the code-name ‘Judas’ in Sofia. In May 1978 he was sentenced to death in absentia; his wife, Natalia, was also sentenced to six and a half years’ imprisonment as a ‘traitor to the motherland’.
In order to have plausible denial, a French-speaking KDS Service 7 sleeper in Algeria was ordered to execute the sentence on her husband. On 26 August 1978 as Kostov was stepping off an escalator in a crowded Paris Metro station he felt a violent blow in the small of his back on the right side. Suspecting a KDS attack – had he already learned of this method of assassination in the course of his duties? – he consulted a doctor two hours later, but was told he might have been stung by a wasp. For two days, his condition steadily worsened with fever and a swelling where he had felt the blow. Kostov reported the incident and his suspicions to Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), the French counter-espionage service, but no trace of any toxin known to French doctors could be found in his body. After Markov died on 11 September, Kostov called a contact in the BBC Bulgarian Service, who told him Markov had repeatedly said in his last days that he had been poisoned by KDS.
Fortunately for Kostov, the 2mm pellet had in his case been lodged between layers of skin where there was little blood flow and the skin temperature was not high enough to melt the wax plugs in the pellet’s microscopic holes, so the full effect of the ricin was never released. Scotland Yard detectives investigating the murder of Markov travelled to Paris, where a surgeon removed a thumbnail-sized piece of flesh from Kostov’s back including the platinum and iridium pellet, which was taken back to London for analysis, to reveal the truth about Markov’s death. Ricin was also the poison of choice used by the KDS against Vladimir Kostov, a Polish double agent in Virginia. Other assassinations attributed to the organisation were of a Bulgarian scientist working in Vienna and the editor of an émigré newspaper.14
Some stories never end. After Scotland Yard officers went to Sofia following the collapse of Communism, seeking information about Markov’s death, on 21 September 2008 the London Times carried a story about ‘a Danish-nationality petty crook [named Francesco Gullino and] codenamed “Agent Piccadilly” [who] used to travel around Europe in a caravan pretending to be an antiques salesman’. He was said to be the prime suspect. Why would a KGB-linked state security organisation need to use a foreigner for such a job? The answer may lie in the modus operandi of a far higher-profile KDS assassination project.
This was the wounding of Polish-born Pope John Paul II at Vatican City on 13 May 1981 in an assassination attempt by convicted Turkish bank robber and hit-man Mehmet Ali Agca. Agca had ‘previous form’, as they say in police circles. On 1 February 1979 in Istanbul, with another member of the Grey Wolves Turkish terrorist organisation, he shot and killed Abdi Ipekçi, editor of the national daily Milliyet. He was caught and jailed, but escaped from a military prison with the help of the Grey Wolves and fled to Bulgaria. Before the attack on the pope, he travelled widely in the Mediterranean area to muddy his tracks.
Hit by four bullets in the attack, the pope lost much blood but survived. Agca was sentenced to life in prison for the attempt; he was released in June 2010 and deported to Turkey, where he was imprisoned for the murder of Ipekçi and other crimes previously committed there. Although one theory about the assassination attempt was that the KDS had been ordered by the KGB to train a deniable assassin to kill the pope as punishment for his support for the Solidarnosc movement in Poland, for reasons of diplomacy the Vatican did not wish details of Agca’s connection with Service 7 to be publicly proven.
The umbrella murder on Waterloo Bridge was the most dramatic act of KDS in Britain, but at least some of the Bulgarian diplomats in London were also here for the purposes of collecting intelligence. The author’s filming at the Black Sea coast song festival was made possible through the ‘tourism counsellor’ of the embassy. The image of that title conjures up a smiling, genial guy with a mission to make great holidays for people and earn foreign exchange for his country, but the reality was a hard-faced ‘diplomat’ who never smiled and was constantly looking behind him.
For many years before the end of Communism, KDS officers supplemented the organisation’s funds by trafficking in arms, illicit drugs, cigarettes, precious metals and other commodities. Many people believe that after the end of communism in 1989 the same men who headed organised crime gangs grew rich on this trade and by money laundering. According to globe-trotting US author Jeffrey Robinson, for much of Zhivkov’s year-long tenure of office the KDS ran an import–export company named Kintex, which laundered the proceeds of selling heroin and morphine base to Turkish drug rings and other illicit activities through Swiss banks and used the deposits to finance a large-scale illicit arms business that netted as much as $2 billion annually in much-needed hard currency.15 Kintex was also thought to have discreetly supplied small clandestine mercenary units, modelled on the Soviet Spetnaz forces, to clients in a number of countries.
Although talking about glasnost and perestroika in line with Gorbachev’s reforms, Zhivkov was overtaken by events, still stuck in the past, when a Human Rights Committee was formed in Sofia. This was in January 1989. Next came a Bulgarian ‘Eco-Glasnost’ movement protesting against the nationwide industrial pollution. In October 1989 and again in November, the KDS broke up their peaceful demonstrations – embarrassingly in the presence of foreign ‘green’ delegates. But the dam could not hold: on the day following the fall of the Wall, Zhivkov was ousted and charged with corruption, and the BKP changed ‘Communist’ in its title to ‘Socialist’.
After the regime collapsed in January 1990, the official government line was that the KDS files had all been sealed and were open only to the new president’s immediate staff, to be consulted before appointment of politicians and others to important positions, so that ex-secret policemen did not regain power. However, some people allege that KDS officers removed and destroyed many files that could have exposed them to prosecution. In particular, the former Interior Minister General Atanas Semerdzhiev was believed to have authorised destruction of 144,235 files from the KDS archives, to prevent prosecutions of officers who had simply ‘done their patriotic duty’.
In January 2005 the Interior Ministry Chief Secretary Lieutenant-General Boyko Borissov – who later became prime minister – stated that many people in Bulgaria and outside the country were being blackmailed and manipulated under the threat that their KDS files would be made public. He said that the officers of KDS 1st Department (general espionage) and 4th Department (specialised industrial espionage) who died in the line of duty should be recognised as loyal servants of their country, and also maintained that those still alive should not be blackmailed by what he called ‘the coyotes of the 6th Department [sic]’ blowing their cover. Borissov said that it was necessary to destroy the KDS archives to put an end to this state of affairs. Well, maybe that has been done.
Notes
1. M. Gilbert, The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust, London, Routledge 2009, p. 230
2. Dallas, Poisoned Peace, p. 361
3. Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, p. 233
4. T. Todorov, Voices from the Gulag, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press 1999, pp. 39–40
5. Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, p. 233
6. Brogan, Eastern Europe, p. 197
7. Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, p. 198
&n
bsp; 8. Brogan, Eastern Europe, p. 198
9. Kassabova, Street without a Name, pp. 315–16 (author’s italics)
10. See http://www.decommunization.org/Testimonies/Svideteli.htm. More eyewitness accounts may be found in E. Boncheva, E. Sugarev, S. Pytov and J. Solomon, eds, The Bulgarian Gulag, Eye-Witnesses: A Collection of Documented Accounts of Camps in Bulgaria, Sofia, 1991
11. Montefiore, Stalin, p. 96
12. G. Markov, The Truth That Killed, New York, Ticknor & Fields 1984
13. Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, pp. 282–3
14. Dobson and Payne, Dictionary of Espionage, pp. 214–15
15. For further details see ‘Jeffrey Robinson’, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Robinson
20
A DIFFERENT UMBRELLA
IN BUCHAREST
