Bulgarian cold war spy files to remain secret

Bulgaria:The murkiest secrets of one of the cold war's most notorious spy services may never be revealed, rights groups warn, after Bulgarian politicians bowed to pressure from intelligence agencies by agreeing not to open part of their communist-era archives.

Bulgaria's secret service was implicated in the 1978 "poison umbrella" murder of dissident Georgi Markov in London and the 1981 shooting of Pope John Paul. Repeated attempts to declassify its records have foundered on opposition from security officials and a lack of will from political leaders, many of them former communists.

Under pressure from Brussels less than a month before joining the EU, parliament finally passed a law this week to open the archives and allow Bulgarians to see their own secret police files and find out whether leading public figures were agents or collaborators under the communist regime that ended in 1989.

A last-minute change to the law however means that some files will remain secret, a move that intelligence officials insist is essential to protect national security and agents still operating in the field.

Parliamentarian Nikolai Svinarov defended the change but admitted that it was made under "serious pressure . . . from the intelligence services".

However Georgi Lozanov of the Clean Voices group that wanted full declassification of the files, said the amendment would allow the communist-era spy agency to "maintain its secret power over our political and social life".

"This looks like a step back in Bulgaria's ability to free itself from its repressive past," he said. "This leaves a closed enclave within the archives, which contains the information about the real background of our present- day political establishment."

Bulgarians were shocked last month by the death of the man in charge of the security service archive. Police say he shot himself, but rumours of foul play are rife.