Intelligence and trafficking

Episode 08 · Period covered: 1960–1989 · Reading time: 5 min

Companion article to episode 08 of the Cold War Bulgaria podcast.

One of Bulgaria's most important and most discreet roles during the Cold War was that of the Soviet Union's specialised relay in the Third World. Moscow supplied the ideological and military framework; Sofia carried out the work: arms deliveries, training of guerrilla movements, humanitarian intervention in conflict zones.

This division of labour allowed the USSR to retain a measure of plausible deniability while equipping its allies.

KINTEX

To organise its international military trade, the Bulgarian state created KINTEX (КИНТЕКС), a structure placed under the direct control of State Security.

KINTEX was not an ordinary trading company. It was a platform for special arms deliveries to nearly forty countries. Its official status as a foreign trade enterprise gave it access to legal commercial circuits; its attachment to the services gave it its real instructions.

Bulgarian involvement was particularly intense in the Near East. During the Six-Day War in 1967, and then during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Bulgaria carried out an operation delivering more than 3,700 tonnes of armaments to the Arab countries in a single month, to counter American influence in the region.

Todor Zhivkov's personal archives reveal that he himself acted as a high-level intermediary for Soviet arms deliveries to leaders such as Hafez al-Assad in Syria and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Bulgaria did not supply materiel alone: it also provided technical expertise, building airfields and military depots in Syria and Iraq.

Algeria

In Africa, the Bulgarian contribution was decisive for several national liberation movements.

During the Algerian War, between 1958 and 1962, Bulgaria served as the central headquarters for the delivery of armaments from across the socialist bloc to the FLN. The ship Bulgaria carried weapons clandestinely along secret sea routes to North African ports.

This experience made Bulgaria a trusted partner for African revolutionaries, which translated into the training of hundreds of Algerian, Mozambican and Angolan cadres in its military academies.

Asia

In Asia, involvement ran chiefly through Vietnam and North Korea.

Between 1965 and 1975, Bulgaria adopted seventeen secret resolutions on military aid to North Vietnam: thousands of firearms, anti-tank weapons, and credits totalling 60 million roubles. State Security additionally provided military training and intelligence support to the Viet Cong.

In North Korea, the contribution was of another nature, at once humanitarian and industrial. After the Korean War, Bulgaria sent a medical mission of fifty people, the largest from any Eastern European country, which ran hospitals totalling five thousand beds and treated some 40% of wounded North Korean soldiers. Bulgarian engineers moreover built two major factories for the reconstruction, worth 80 million roubles.

The financial scale

Confidential Bulgarian government files, notably fond 136, inventory 86, document free military and financial aid to more than forty countries and political organisations in the Third World.

This "special materiel" (a euphemism for weapons and ammunition) reached its peak in the mid-1970s. For the year 1976 alone, the Party approved the dispatch of thirty mortars, twenty thousand rifles and forty thousand shells to various political fronts. The total value of this aid over the last decade of the Cold War is estimated at more than 243 million leva, roughly 120 million dollars.

This trade was not merely a source of revenue. It was a strategic instrument intended to destabilise Western interests and to extend the influence of the Warsaw Pact.

Technological espionage

The second strand of this clandestine activity targeted the West itself.

The West had established COCOM, the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, to prevent the transfer of high technology to the Eastern bloc. Bulgaria built an organisation dedicated to circumventing these restrictions.

The volumes are documented. In 1981, thirteen thousand five hundred scientific documents were transmitted to the Soviet bloc, together with three thousand physical samples of Western technology. In 1982, ten thousand items of information and four thousand samples. The "Electronics-S" programme alone, between 1970 and 1980, produced more than thirty-eight thousand pages of technical drawings for integrated circuits.

Japan constituted a favoured target. Bulgarian officers posted to Tokyo, under diplomatic cover, specialised in recruiting Japanese engineers who were less well paid than their Western counterparts, in the fields of robotics, electronics and chemical engineering.

A front company, INCO, was charged with the illegal acquisition of components. Through these channels, Bulgaria obtained plans and samples of integrated circuits and microcomputers from the United States, West Germany and Japan, which enabled factories such as IZOT and DZU to become the principal computing suppliers of the Soviet bloc.

What remained of it

These networks did not dissolve with the regime.

The clandestine trading structures, the logistical circuits and the address books built up over forty years were partly repurposed after 1989. Several academic studies establish a link between the "special trade" networks of the communist era and the emergence of Bulgarian organised crime in the 1990s.

It is one of the most problematic legacies of this period, and one of the least readily documented: the relevant archives having been, in part, destroyed at the time of the transition.

Sources

• Declassified Bulgarian government archives
• Files of the Dossier Commission (КОМДОС), Sofia
• Academic work on Bulgarian "special trade"

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