Bulgarian secret police files to be opened

BULGARIA:A month before joining the European Union, Bulgaria's plan to open the files of its communist-era security services has been denounced by the country's spy chief and rocked by the mysterious death of the man in charge of the secret archives.

Exactly who did what for the communist secret police has been a hot political topic throughout eastern Europe since the collapse of the Soviet empire, but Bulgaria has lagged behind its neighbours in opening its security service files to the public.

Under pressure from Brussels, parliament in Sofia passed a law this week to create a commission to investigate whether current leading public figures were agents or informers for a hard-line communist regime that crumbled in 1989. But Bulgaria's spy chief, Kircho Kirov, said it would be a "lethal step" to reveal the secrets of a security service that worked very closely with the Soviet KGB, and was accused by the West of involvement in the shooting of Pope John Paul II and the "poison umbrella" murder of dissident Georgi Markov in London.

"The National Intelligence Service would have to withdraw a large number of employees and officers from abroad," said Gen Kirov, referring to the spy agency that he leads.

"I cannot imagine that a self-respecting country could take such a lethal step against its intelligence services," he said, adding that the archives held "sensitive material concerning foreign nationals, as well as Bulgaria's bilateral and multilateral relations." Many Bulgarians believe top politicians, businessmen and security officials will go to great lengths to protect privileges that they could lose if their communist-era pasts are revealed.

That suspicion grew this month, when the man in charge of the secret police files was found dead at his desk with a bullet in his head.

Security officials made no mention of Bozhidar Doychev's death until it was announced two days later by a London-based Bulgarian news service; then they insisted that he had killed himself with his own gun, to the disbelief of friends and colleagues.

Politician Vesselin Metodiev spoke for many Bulgarians when he noted "a very unpleasant coincidence between this incident and a new law on the files". Successive Bulgarian governments have failed to open the security service archives, and critics accuse the ruling Socialist Party of having no desire to reveal the secrets of the Communist Party from which it sprang.

Furthermore, several top intelligence officers have been jailed since 1989 for destroying thousands of secret files.

Some of those dossiers related to the 1978 murder of exiled writer Georgi Markov, a critic of the Bulgarian regime, who died after being struck on London's Waterloo Bridge by a pellet containing the poison ricin, believed to have been shot from a special umbrella by one of Sofia's agents.

Bulgaria's spy agency was also accused by some western governments of being behind the 1981 gun attack on Pope John Paul, who was an inspiration to the anti-communist Solidarity movement.