Shownotes Transcript
It's August 1978, and Georgy Markov is in his London flat when the phone rings. He's greeted by the sound of a cold and distorted voice. "Georgy Markov, you come to die." Markov is used to these death threats. He could set his watch by them. And so he replies in his usual laconic way: "Killing me will only make me a martyr."
He's about to hang up, but for once, the voice has a comeback. Not this time. This time you will not become a martyr. It will look as if you died of natural causes. You will be killed by a poison that the West can neither detect nor treat. A month later, Markov would be dead. But little did the murderer know that by giving Markov this warning, they would turn what looked like a natural death into a full-scale murder inquiry.
it would become the most famous assassination of the Cold War. And yet to this day, no one has been charged with his murder. However, recently declassified documents may shed light on who was responsible and uncover the shadowy work of a mysterious organization known as Service 7, or more bluntly, the Murder Bureau.
The murder bureau was a top secret cell within the Bulgarian secret service that was tasked with carrying out assassinations throughout the world. They pursued more than 10 Bulgarian defectors to try to poison them, to kill them, to kidnap them. They were under complete control of the Russian KGB and all operations were coordinated by Moscow.
There were spies, super spies, and the whole damn thing could have, for want of a better word, blown up big time into World War III. You're listening to Forbidden History, the podcast series that explores the past's darkest corners, sheds light on the lives of intriguing individuals, and uncovers the truth buried deep in history's most controversial legacies. I'm Janine Harony, and this is The Murder Bureau.
In the latter half of the 20th century, the world is in the midst of the Cold War. The capitalist West and the communist East exist in an uneasy truce.
The world's leaders gaze at each other warily with the most powerful weapons in history at their disposal. And their people live with the specter of the nuclear Armageddon they could deliver. But what few people realized is that on their streets and hidden in plain sight, a covert war is underway. Guy Walters is an author and historian. There are spies running around the world
bumping each other off, literally bumping each other off, just as we see in Len Dayton books, Ian Fleming books. Those books may be fiction, but they describe a lot of very true type of events in which spies are using skullduggery to outwit each other. People are being poisoned, shot, stabbed. They're being seduced by Romeo or honey trap methods. The intelligence world is very much a very dark counterpoint
to the kind of gaudy flower power that we tend to associate with that time. It is to this secret war that Georgi Markov becomes a victim a month after the phone call warning him of his impending death. Historians Guy Walters and Richard Felix talk us through Markov's final moments.
He was standing on a street near Waterloo Bridge. And he waits by the bus stop just at the top of the bridge to get his bus to the BBC. Suddenly he feels this prick in the back of his thigh. Thought he'd been stung. Nothing more than that. And he turns around, you know, bewildered as you might be, to see a man who's dropped an umbrella, then races across the road and gets into a cab and scuttles off.
Little red pimple turned up. He started to feel ill. Over the next few hours, he begins to feel more and more sick, more and more unwell. Made a comment when he went home that he thought he may have been poisoned. Off to hospital. No-one knows exactly what is happening to him. Four days later, he was dead.
Were it not for the phone call threatening his impending death and the claim that the method would make it look like natural causes, no further action would have been taken. But Markov had told the doctors treating him that he believed himself to have been poisoned. And so his death becomes a murder inquiry. And at his post-mortem, the London Metropolitan Police discovered just how sophisticated his assassination had been.
A forensic scientist removes a tissue sample from Markov's leg and sends it to the chemical weapons laboratory in Porton Down. There, they find a tiny pellet in the sample, less than 2 millimeters in diameter, with two holes drilled into it. Further examination cannot detect any trace of poison inside the cavities. Through process of elimination, they determine that it once contained the deadly poison, ricin.
This, combined with Markov's testimony, enables them to build a picture of events. Astonishingly, they believe that an assassin fired the ricin pellet into Markov's leg, using a weapon disguised as an umbrella. The news hits the headlines, and the assassination captures the world's imagination.
sparking endless speculation about who was responsible. And yet, to this day, the case remains open. So who ordered Markov's assassination? Who invented such a sophisticated weapon? And who pulled the trigger? The answer to the first question lies in Georgy Markov's past and his rapid turnaround in fortunes.
Georgi Markov is born in Bulgaria in 1929 and becomes one of the country's success stories. Educated as a chemical engineer, he pursues his passion for writing in his spare time.
His work strikes a chord with the people of Bulgaria and propels him to fame as one of the country's leading novelists and playwrights. With fame comes patronage. Markov is indicted into the inner circle of Bulgaria's president, Tatar Zhivkov himself. The pair are known to have dinner together and go on hikes through the Bulgarian countryside.
But there is a ruthless streak in Markov's patron. And evidence of it can still be seen today in the capital, Sofia, the building that once housed the headquarters of Bulgaria's Committee for State Security, known as KDS. Bulgarian journalist Aleksenia Dimitrova has agreed to show us around today.
We enter into a clean marble-walled lobby. But Aleksenia takes us through a door and down a staircase into the bowels of the building itself: Guy Walters.
These are, from the outside, just normal office blocks. They're just in that sort of structural, you know, sort of brutalist architecture we associate with that period. Yeah, they look pretty grim, but, you know, they look like any office from that period. They have desks, they have telephones, they may have had a picture of a leader somewhere in the office. But it's when you go into the basements that things look very, very, very different indeed.
The gleaming walls of the atrium give way to dank, dark corridors with a grim past. Alexenia takes us into a small room off the corridor. The walls are covered in grime and the lighting is dim. Alexenia. They kept prisoners here and they tortured them and they beat them severely to extract some evidence from them.
We asked historian Richard Felix about the interrogation methods the KDS employed. In that basement, obviously a chair, you'd be sat there, you'd be interrogated, probably beaten, but also still preserved, there are two boxes, electrical boxes from the 60s that are not connected in any way now, but were originally connected to a metal bed. People would be strapped to the bed, all manner of
Electrocution to various parts of the body would be carried out. No one was ever brought in through the front door. They were always brought downstairs and brought in the back. This was a dirty war. Cruel, slow death awaited those who were taken here, and Guy Walters believes that the building is evidence of how torture and death were routine under President Zhivkov's regime.
These are office blocks designed to terrorize. The methods they use are a classic example of the bureaucratization of murder. It's kind of an everyday experience for the Secret Service going to the office and for the people in the basement, it is something truly terrifying. This was life under President Zhivkov. He therefore seems strange company for a creative writer like Georgy Markov.
But perhaps predictably, Markov has little choice. Literature, much as the KDS, is a tool of Zhivkov's regime. And the reason for this lies in Bulgaria's past. In the late 19th century, Bulgaria was liberated from Ottoman rule, and in the turbulent years that followed, literature became a means by which Bulgaria forged its own national identity.
And in the 1960s, Zhivkov began to use literature to help prop up his own regime. Writers like Markov are coerced into using their talents to bolster their president's credibility. Markov, however, is not willing to completely abandon his morals. And through thinly disguised language, he remains critical of the system under which he works. For a time, this was tolerated.
But it's a dangerous game to play, because Zhivkov answers to a higher power. Boris Volodarsky was once an officer in Russian military intelligence, and he tells us of the closeness between Bulgaria and his former homeland. Bulgarians
used to be like brothers and there were talks about making Bulgaria 16th Soviet Republic. So they were always treated like the closest allies in everything. Due to the ties between the Soviet Union and its very much junior partner, Zhivkov's policies mirror those of his overlords. And events in the Soviet Union are about to alter the fate of writers like Georgy Markov.
In October 1964, Leonard Brezhnev comes to power in the Soviet Union. The years of comparative openness under Khrushchev are at an end. Brezhnev adopts a far more conservative line than his predecessor, and his reactionary politics soon trickle down to Bulgaria. Markov continues to write: "Each work is ever more accomplished than the last, but the political obstacles grow.
One by one, his plays are banned. And with his life's work fading away in front of him, he makes a dramatic decision: to leave Bulgaria. But if his writing puts him at odds with the regime, defecting would be far more dangerous, as dissidents are not tolerated by President Zhivkov. Guy Walters.
We tend to think that all these regimes within the Soviet bloc had absolute control, absolute power. But of course, the guys running these regimes knew there were an enormous number of dissidents who were managing to escape on a regular basis, who were then promulgating more liberal democratic values in the West and represented, in the eyes of the totalitarian regimes, a serious threat. Markov flees first to his brother in Italy, and from there he moves to Britain.
But not only is he a dissident, he's also a critic. And he will turn his creative flair upon his former patron. We asked Boris Volodarsky about Markov's activities in Britain. He immigrated to Britain and he started working for Radio Liberty and other organizations that were
using propaganda as a tool against the communist regime of the country. And he was very active. He was accusing the president of many things. He was saying that he is a low profile party apparatchik, a bureaucrat, not intelligent and things like that. He was accusing him of different things. And Todor Zhivkov did like that, naturally. Back in Bulgaria, Zhivkov reads through transcripts of Markov's broadcast as soon as they arrive on his desk from the KDS.
In one, Markov calls him "some paltry mediocrity who's proclaimed himself a demigod." Zhivkov concludes that Markov must be silenced once and for all. But how could he accomplish this? KDS, after all, was an internal security service. Surely it could not liquidate Markov in London.
It's only recently that this question has begun to be answered. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of the archives of the USSR's former satellite states, journalist Alexenia Dimitrova began to read through the documents of the KDS archive. And it was there that she made a discovery: a section within the KDS called Service 7. Alexenia.
Service event was not so big in the beginning. When I established it in 64, I read in the documents that there were only seven people and I even have the list of the people. But it's late 60s, they become 20, even more, because they need more personnel to carry on these tasks.
Leafing through the documents, Alexenia discovered that Service 7's mission was to eliminate people like Markov, dissidents who'd left Bulgaria for the West.
Richard Felix. Their targets were mainly emigres from Bulgaria, people that were dissidents that had left the country. Some of them were genuinely anti-Soviet and communism, and the whole idea was to eliminate them. One hell of a deterrent to stop anyone else from leaving Bulgaria and going to the West.
Eliminating dissidents on foreign soil at a time when relations between East and West were close to breaking point was a very dangerous task. And the fact that the very existence of Service 7 has only recently come to light is due to the utmost secrecy in which they carried out their operations. Guy Walters
Normally we think of intelligence agencies, you know, bumping off people as simply a sort of fictional thing like the 00 agents in the Ian Fleming novels who've got a license to kill. But Service 7 actually did have a license to kill from the very top echelons of the Bulgarian government.
And so therefore it had to be kept very, very secret because of course it's probably breaking technically Bulgaria's own laws and of course every law going everywhere else in the world. All its documentation is written in this highly deniable style. So instead of having, you know, go and kill someone, it was go and carry out what was called a sharp measure, which is this sort of fantastically sort of dark euphemism for literally ordering someone's death.
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In order to discover more about what these so-called "sharp measures" entailed, we met a woman called Natalia Meneva in a park in Bulgaria's capital, Sofia. Like Markov, Natalia's father, Trecho Belopapsky, fled Bulgaria for the West in the early 1960s, and by 1964, Service 7 were ordered to eliminate him. Natalia.
He was originally a student at a military school for translators. There he met my mother. After that, work began at the Ministry of Interior. He began to engage in intelligence and was sent on a mission to Cambridge.
Trecho had been an officer in Bulgaria for the KDS, and Natalia believes his posting to Cambridge led him to see the realities of the regime back home.
Maybe he was much more awake and he saw what we saw in 1989. He saw it and understood the difference between West and East. That the East really, as he says in his letter, is thrown into hell.
is doomed. Maybe that's why he decided to flee to England. But Trecho, perhaps due to his first-hand knowledge of KDS operations, lived in fear.
Much later, through other acquaintances, I learned that he was afraid. He was convinced that they wanted him to be killed, even in London. He put bars on his window in his apartment and claimed to his relatives that they really were trying to kill him.
And sure enough, his fears proved to be founded. Natalia tells us that Service 7 sent Trecho's father to England under the guise of persuading his son to return to Bulgaria. But they also gave his father a piece of salami to give to his son as a gift. But when they met, Trecho becomes suspicious and gives the meat to a dog.
His fears were soon confirmed. The dog died in agony. Trecho had therefore survived, but from then on, he would live in fear of further attempts on his life. Natalia's testimony is compelling because it's evidence that Service 7 did have the capacity to attempt assassinations in the West. And like Georgi Markov, they'd used poison in their attempt to kill Trecho.
We asked Guy Walters to speculate why poison was their weapon of choice.
For two reasons, I suggest. The first is simply stealth. It's easier to get something like that through customs than it is a sniper rifle or a handgun or a hand grenade or a bomb. That's the obvious thing. The other thing is it's all about fear. It is not a humane death, and this is why it's used. It's to instill terror. Terror is something that the Eastern Bloc is very good at promoting, and what better way to terrorize your enemies than say, "You're going to die, and you're going to die horribly, and it's going to take days."
There are, however, clear differences between the two cases. Markov was apparently murdered by a real agent on British soil. The attempt on Trecho's life came from poison delivered by an innocent relative. The man that killed Markov used a far more sophisticated means of delivery.
The famous umbrella modified to fire a poison pellet. Service 7 crudely attempted to trick Trecho into eating poison meat. And due to the requirement that Markov's death appear to be a natural one, he was killed with the far more sophisticated poison, ricin.
And this begs the question: did Service 7 have the means and technical knowledge to carry out Markov's far more elaborate assassination alone? Boris Volodarsky reveals to us that the Soviet Union's control over Bulgaria went beyond policy. The secret services of the Eastern Bloc had a very powerful master.
Every Secret Service of every Soviet satellite country was a packed country. They were under complete control of the Russian KGB. They had a representative in the appropriate ministry. They had a liaison officer with the Secret Service and they were completely controlling all Secret Services of all former socialist countries.
It's difficult today to comprehend the sheer scale of Russia's KGB. With their 480,000 personnel, the KGB infiltrated every major Western intelligence operation. They placed an agent of influence in almost every major capital city in the world. And they became, quite simply, the world's largest foreign intelligence service.
The KGB also instructed Bulgaria in how to build their own Soviet-style security service, the KDS. And once it was up and running, Bulgaria's President Zhivkov took things further. To ensure that he and his regime had the backing of the Kremlin, he personally assured Moscow that his intelligence service was a mere branch of the KGB.
Most of Bulgaria's foreign intelligence operatives were trained at the KGB academy in Moscow, and the KDS became utterly subservient to their Russian counterpart.
But the loyalty that Zhivkov had bought them from Russia not only helped prop up his regime, it also gave it access to the operational and technical expertise of the KGB. More specifically, the products of two laboratories in Moscow. Boris Volodarsky. There were two laboratories. One laboratory was working on poisons, on specific poisons that cannot be traced.
And this is the laboratory which was set up by Lenin in 1917. This laboratory is given a very specific task: to come up with a poison that when given to Markov would not only kill him, but kill him in such a way that it looked as if he died of natural causes. This would ensure that Markov would not be seen as a martyr by those sympathetic to his cause.
The poison they choose is ricin. Found in castor seeds, it's been calculated that just 10 grams would be enough to kill 30,000 people. And after its use, not only do the symptoms take time to develop, but when they do, they're easily dismissed as natural for those not in the know.
With the decision made to use ricin, the job of the second KGB laboratory is to come up with a method of delivering the poison without arousing suspicion.
Another laboratory was working on special guns, that is working on the objects that could be used as a weapon to kill somebody. Any object might do. This weapons laboratory was like Q Branch in James Bond. The KGB engineers develop weapons disguised in all manner of everyday objects, from pens that literally drip poison, to knives and even newspapers modified to shoot bullets.
For the assassination of Georgi Markov, the laboratory chooses to modify an umbrella. The KGB convert the tip into a gun that would silently shoot the ricin pellet into its victim. Testimony from a former member of the KGB reveals that the development of the poison and the delivery method took over a year and a half of traumatic trial and error.
The ricin and the umbrella are made in two KGB laboratories before being flown to Bulgaria for the KDS to test. A Bulgarian operative fires the first ricin pellet into a horse, which soon dies. The second pellet is tested on a Bulgarian prisoner, but the ricin fails to release, and he survives. Further experiments back in Moscow then refine the technique.
But when the weapon is first used on the streets, the target is not Markov. Ten days before Markov's assassination, Bulgarian defector Vladimir Kostov is ascending an escalator from the Paris metro at the Arc de Triomphe. He suddenly feels a sharp sting and turns to notice a man with an umbrella running away. He carries on with his day until he starts to become ill. He suffers in agony for 48 hours.
but survives. It's determined that the assassination attempt fails because he was wearing such a heavy sweater that the pellet did not penetrate deep enough into his body to reach his bloodstream. Service 7 will not make the same mistake with Georgy Markov, and a date is set for his death. As a cruel joke, he will be assassinated on President Zhivkov's birthday, September 7th, 1978.
And they now select the agent to be given the deadly task. The Bulgarians employed one of their agents, which is today said to be Agent Piccadilly, who lived in Denmark. Agent Piccadilly is most likely the codename of Francesco Gelino.
an Italian by birth, after his recruitment in Bulgaria, he had been set up in Copenhagen, undercover as an antique stealer. It's alleged that it was Jolino who was sent to Britain to eliminate Markov. And so, Agent Piccadilly, with his orders from Bulgaria and Umbrella Gun and ricin from Russia, is the man who carries out the hit. This is how it happened.
Agent Piccadilly makes his way to Waterloo Bridge and spots Georgie Markov standing at a bus stop a few hundred meters away. Exactly as anticipated, he makes his way towards Markov, careful to appear normal and unrushed. Markov is 200 meters away, then 100. Piccadilly gets jostled by morning commuters, then 50, then 25. He swears he can hear his own heartbeat.
Then ten, then five. He tightens his grip on his umbrella. Now is the moment. His target is right in front of him, facing away. With a swift movement, he swings the KGB's umbrella out in front of him. Its pointed tip makes contact with the back of Markov's leg. And then he pulls the trigger. The ricin pellet is fired into Markov's leg. Piccadilly clumsily drops the umbrella.
He quickly grabs it off the pavement and dashes across the road and jumps into a waiting black cab and disappears. Markov suspects nothing at this point, but would later recall Piccadilly dropping the umbrella. Piccadilly's part of the operation has been successful. Now it's time for the ricin to do its work.
Markov continues on his way to work, but at the BBC, he notices a red spot on his leg and becomes feverish. His symptoms worsen at home that evening, and he takes himself to Balham Hospital.
He mentions to the doctors that he believes himself to have been poisoned. But this knowledge won't save him. As the KGB had planned, the ricin confounds the British doctors. Four days after the attack on Waterloo Bridge, Markov is dead. The man who most likely pulled the trigger, Francesco Gelino, would be investigated multiple times in the coming years
But with the relevant records missing from the Bulgarian archives, he would never be brought to trial. The case officially remains open. President Todor Zhivkov's popularity would later decline. And in November 1989, his 35-year rule of Bulgaria came to an end, when he was ousted by his own party.
The revolutions in the Eastern Bloc in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union marked the end of the Cold War, and the opening of previously classified archives is beginning to shed light on the activities of the Eastern Bloc's most secret operatives. But Boris Volodarsky argues that while the Cold War is over, that covert spy war hasn't gone away. It's merely evolved.
Today, spying is about recruiting people who can influence public opinion to get decisions in favor of what the politicians want them to do, or want the countries to do, the European Union to do, this sort of thing. And in our modern globalized world, it is in fact much easier.
In the times of the Cold War, it was very difficult to travel abroad. While today, almost anybody can travel abroad. Spying became very easy. Anybody can settle in a country, in this country or in any Western country. There are much more spies working today in the West. It's ten times more than during the Cold War, the whole Cold War. Today, Georgi Markov is buried in Dorset in southern England.
On his gravestone is the inscription "Died in the cause of freedom." And while Service 7 may have been consigned to history, continued unexplained deaths on the world's streets remind us that their so-called "sharp measures" are still very much in use today.
Next time on Forbidden History. I don't think Ludwig was mad. I think that Ludwig was eccentric. After being declared insane and taken into custody, the so-called Mad King of Bavaria was found floating in two feet of water. Timing is everything. He was forced to be removed from Neuschwanstein. Within 24 hours, he was in the castle of Burg and he was dead. But was his death the tragic result of suicide?
or the murder of a crown monarch. The death of King Ludwig, to my mind, certainly looks like it could have been a murder. And I find it very strange that we still can't see the bones of King Ludwig. Because I think they'll probably show that Ludwig was shot. In The Madness of King Ludwig II.
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