State Security and the Markov affair

Episode 07 · Period covered: 1925–1990 · Reading time: 10 min

Companion article to episode 07 of the Cold War Bulgaria podcast.

Among the intelligence services of the satellite states, Bulgarian State Security (Darzhavna Sigurnost, Държавна сигурност, the DS) occupied a position of singular intimacy with the KGB. Where the East German Stasi or the Czechoslovak StB retained a measure of professional autonomy and national identity, the DS functioned in practice as a regional branch of the Soviet service.

The integration was so far-reaching that Todor Zhivkov readily described the DS as a "worthy branch" of the Soviet apparatus. This relationship allowed Bulgaria to serve as a relay for Soviet active measures worldwide: from high-technology industrial espionage in Japan and the United States to the most famous political assassination of the late twentieth century, in the middle of London.

The architecture of the shadow state

State Security had been founded in 1925, but its modern form was forged by the communist seizure of power in 1944. From its birth to its formal dissolution in 1990, it was structured on the Soviet model. It was not a mere espionage service: it was the "shield and sword" of the Bulgarian Communist Party, responsible for the regime's domestic stability as much as for the projection of its power abroad.

The DS was organised into main directorates, each responsible for a pillar of state security:

The subdivisions of the Sixth Directorate show how fine the mesh was. Its First Department was devoted to the intelligentsia, watching artists and writers to keep their work within the limits of socialist realism. The Second targeted youth, infiltrating the universities to identify potential ringleaders. The Third handled the "religious question", placing informers in the Orthodox Church and monitoring the Jewish and Armenian communities. The Fourth, finally, dealt with ethnic nationalism, in particular pro-Turkish sentiment, which in the 1980s led to the "Revival Process", the campaign of forced assimilation of the Turkish minority.

A formalised subordination

The link between the DS and the KGB was not one of mere mutual interest but of complete institutional subordination, formalised by top-secret agreements revealed only after the fall of the regime.

On 8 April 1972, the DS and the KGB signed in Moscow a long-term framework agreement and a plan of interaction in intelligence matters. It was the first time the KGB had concluded a formal agreement of such scope with a "fraternal" service, a mark of Bulgaria's status as the USSR's most reliable ally.

The agreement codified the principles that governed cooperation until the end of the Cold War. The DS systematically transmitted to the KGB information on each of its operations, domestic and foreign alike, on its contacts and on its agents. In Sofia, a KGB general (such as the three-star Ivan Savchenko) held the post of chief adviser to the DS, in effect supervising its activity and reporting directly to Moscow.

This integration allowed the KGB to use the DS for active measures where a direct Soviet presence would have been politically delicate or too easily detected. The two services practised a "division of objectives", assigning the Bulgarians specific geographical areas or technical fields, according to their regional expertise or their existing networks. This was particularly marked in the Balkans and the Near East, where Bulgarian diplomatic and commercial missions offered ideal cover.

Notably, the Bulgarian leadership saw in this no loss of sovereignty but a source of power. Zhivkov's repeated proposals to join the USSR as a sixteenth republic found their echo in the image the DS had of itself. By aligning itself so closely with Moscow, it gained access to Soviet training, advanced technical equipment and a worldwide network of scientific and technical intelligence that a small country could never have built alone.

The Balkan Cyberia

One of the deepest successes of this DS–KGB partnership was played out in scientific and technical intelligence. The West had established COCOM, the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, to prevent the transfer of high technology to the Eastern bloc. To circumvent these barriers, the DS mounted an industrial espionage operation that made Bulgaria the computing hub of the socialist world.

Zhivkov openly admired the Japanese economic model and wanted to make his country a "Japan of the Balkans". In 1964, the DS created within its First Main Directorate a Seventh Department specifically dedicated to scientific and technical intelligence. Japan, in the midst of its technological growth, became a priority target.

The volumes give the measure of the effort. In 1970, 161 items of information, of which 27.6% were judged valuable or extremely valuable. In 1981, thirteen thousand five hundred scientific documents transmitted to the Soviet bloc, and three thousand physical samples of Western technology acquired. In 1982, ten thousand items of information and four thousand samples. The "Electronics-S" programme alone, between 1970 and 1980, delivered more than thirty-eight thousand pages of technical drawings for integrated circuits.

Bulgarian officers, often posted under diplomatic cover in Tokyo, specialised in identifying and recruiting Japanese engineers, less well paid than their Western counterparts. Robotics, electronics, chemical engineering: the information gathered did not serve Bulgaria alone, a large share went up to the KGB to feed the Soviet military-industrial complex.

To get around COCOM, the DS relied on a network of front companies, of which the best known, INCO, was charged with the illegal acquisition of Western components. Through these channels, Bulgaria obtained plans and samples of integrated circuits and microcomputers from the United States, West Germany and Japan. Factories such as IZOT and DZU were thus able to become the principal suppliers of memory disks and computer systems for the whole Soviet bloc.

Waterloo Bridge

The most enduring symbol of the DS's lethality remains the "Bulgarian umbrella", the weapon used in 1978 against the dissident writer Georgi Markov in London. A formerly successful author in Bulgaria who had become a scathing critic of the regime through his broadcasts for the BBC and Radio Free Europe, Markov was a personal target of Todor Zhivkov.

On 7 September 1978, Zhivkov's sixty-seventh birthday, Markov was crossing Waterloo Bridge when he felt in his right thigh a sting like that of a bee. Turning round, he saw a man picking up an umbrella; the stranger apologised in a strong foreign accent before getting into a taxi. Markov developed a high fever that same evening and died four days later at St James's Hospital in Balham.

The British forensic investigation, conducted notably by the scientists of the Chemical Defence Establishment at Porton Down, revealed a level of technical sophistication that could only be the work of a state service with the resources of the KGB.

The pellet

At the autopsy, a microscopic metal pellet was discovered in the tissue of the thigh. So small (1.7 millimetres in diameter) that it initially escaped detection by X-ray.

The cavities were in all likelihood drilled by electrical discharge machining or by laser, the platinum-iridium alloy being too hard for conventional machining. The choice of ricin was strategic: this toxin disappears almost entirely within the organism after causing massive organ failure, which makes it virtually undetectable at autopsy. To confirm the cause of death, the Porton Down scientists injected a comparable dose into a pig, which died with identical lesions.

Vladimir Kostov

Ten days before Markov, another Bulgarian defector, Vladimir Kostov, had been attacked in the same way on the Paris metro. He survived: the pellet, which entered his back, had not penetrated deeply enough into the muscle. His thick winter clothing had slowed the projectile, and the waxy sealant had not entirely melted, preventing the full release of the ricin. The recovery of an identical pellet from his back provided the decisive evidence linking the two attacks and confirming the existence of a state assassination bureau.

Active measures

Beyond physical eliminations, the DS and the KGB wielded active measures: clandestine operations intended to influence opinion and destabilise Western institutions, subtly mixing truths, half-truths and lies to produce disinformation that was hard to refute.

Operation Denver. In the mid-1980s, the KGB launched one of its most effective campaigns, codenamed Denver by the Stasi and strongly supported by the DS: to spread the idea that the AIDS virus was not a natural phenomenon but a biological weapon developed by the United States at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The Bulgarian KOMDOS archives provide the material proof: a KGB telegram to the DS, in September 1985, explicitly requests help in disseminating "theses" on the artificial origin of AIDS in order to arouse anti-American feeling on a global scale. The DS mobilised its press relays and its front organisations in the Third World; the accounts were then picked up by Western media, leaving a lasting trace of distrust towards medical science.

The Antonov affair. On 13 May 1981, Mehmet Ali Ağca attempted to assassinate John Paul II. The Italian investigation implicated the DS, and more precisely Sergei Antonov, an employee of the Bulgarian airline in Rome. The affair became a major geopolitical scandal. The West suspected a Soviet plot to eliminate a Polish pope who supported Solidarity; the internal documents of the DS and the KGB suggest rather a reaction of panic. The KGB was furious that the DS had found itself caught up in the scandal, fearing it would discredit the entire socialist world. The meetings between Zhivkov and the Soviet advisers reveal that the DS had indeed been in contact with Ağca during his stay in Sofia, but that it had neglected to check his profile, through professional incompetence rather than participation in a plot. The DS was nonetheless ordered to use every means to convince the world that the "Bulgarian trail" was a provocation inspired by the CIA.

A global relay

As the USSR's most loyal satellite, Bulgaria played a central role in supporting Soviet interests in Asia, often serving as a channel for military aid and intelligence sharing with the other communist regimes.

It was the second country in the world to recognise the People's Republic of China, on 4 October 1949. During the Cold War, the relationship between Sofia and Beijing largely followed the state of Sino-Soviet relations; during the split of the 1960s, Bulgaria remained firmly on Moscow's side, while maintaining a pragmatic and non-ideological approach to trade and agricultural cooperation.

During the Vietnam War, Bulgaria was a major contributor of "special equipment" (the Soviet euphemism for weapons) to North Vietnam. The aid was not merely fraternal: the DS provided military training and intelligence support to the Viet Cong, while Bulgarian ships were used to move weapons clandestinely through international ports.

Recent multilateral projects have identified more than thirty thousand pages of Bulgarian archives relating to the two Koreas between 1945 and 1995. They show that Bulgaria served as a medical and humanitarian hub for North Korea during and after the war, taking in more than five hundred Korean orphans and sending medical missions to Pyongyang. The relationship was nonetheless unstable: in 1962, diplomatic ties deteriorated sharply for ideological reasons, before normalising at the end of the decade.

Sources

• Archives of the Dossier Commission (КОМДОС / Комисия по досиетата), Sofia
• British investigation reports on the Markov affair (Metropolitan Police, coroner)
• Declassified DS and KGB documents

Translations of the documents cited are the author's own.