Forbidden History - Cold War Crimes: Service 7

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we investigate a shadowy, secret department within the Bulgarian government suspected of carrying out assassinations in nine other countries during the Cold War. Cast List: Jamie Theakston: Investigative Reporter Richard Felix: A historian and lecturer specialising in local and paranormal history Dr. Linda Papadopoulos: Author & Psychologist Andrew Gough: Writer, presenter and editor of The Heretic Magazine Lynn Picknett: Historian and researcher specialising in exposing historical conspiracies. She is also the co-author of several notable works Guy Walters: A British author, historian, and journalist who has written several books on WWII. As a journalist for The Times, he writes on historical topics for the national press.  Alexenia Dimitrova: Journalist  Natalia Mihneva: Daughter of Service 7 Target Boris Volodarski: Former Russian Intelligence Officer  Konstadin Grozav: Professor at University of Sofia Todor Boyadzhiev: Former Deputy Director, Bulgarian Intelligence  Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. The Murder Bureau was a secretive assassination squad, behind some of the most deadly hits of the 1960s and 70s. It was a highly trained unit responsible for targeting enemy agents around the world, who had codenames like The Black, Trader, Hammondy,

Betrayer and the Widower. Some of their hits made the headlines, like the attack on Georgie Markov on Waterloo Bridge in London, and their influence was felt around the globe. We go inside their former headquarters, where torture of foreign agents is alleged to have occurred, and we take a look at the weapons and spy gadgets that they used to kill their targets.

The Murder Bureau was Bulgarian, but run by the infamous Russian KGB and was part of the greatest covert intelligence conflict in history. The Cold War. You had to have spies and double spies to had skills in espionage, tracking, monitoring, kidnap, and of course killing and wiping your traces clean. Its targets are dissidents, but also former intelligence agents

who've defected. Those are the ones who really hated. those are the ones who are regarded as traitors. This was all really James Bond. All of the gadgets are reminiscent of a cube, whether it's the umbrellas or the pellets, and all of the covert ways that this was done. The public has no idea that there is everything to play for.

Russia, Britain, the United States, world domination is at stake. During the Cold War, the communist Bulgaria, Secret Service had a top secret and highly trained kill squad who were tasked with eliminating people on foreign soil. It was called the Murder Bureau and was designated simply as Service 7. Details of who was assassinated and why have only come to light in the last 10 years or so. And even today this whole subject is considered classified, and very few people in Bulgaria want to talk about it.

In many ways, the Murder Bureau was straight out of the novels of Ian Fleming and the films of Jason Bourne. Anonymous men slipping unnoticed in and out of major cities, carrying out stealthy assassinations using all manner of bizarre James Bond-like gadgets. The Murder Bureau was a covert, counter-espionage unit created by the Bulgarian Communist Party to carry out the most sensitive and deadly of operations against enemies of the state. You've got to imagine this at the time of the Cold War, anyone that's seen as a political dissident. And this doesn't have to be someone that's actually protesting. It can be a journalist.

It can be a writer. It can be a lecture. They're seen as a threat. Then this murder squad, which is actually made up a handful of people, something in the region of a dozen people, goes out and gets the job done. Service 7 was very, very secretive. To be quite honest with you, even to this day, if you interviewed, say, the head of the Secret Service, he probably wouldn't know the names of most of his operatives.

They had code names, all manner of ways of keeping it very, very secret. British investigative reporter Jamie Thiexton has travelled to the Bulgarian capital Sophia to meet Alexenia Dimitrova. a Bulgarian journalist who has spent over 20 years looking into the files and history of the Murder Bureau. Over the last 10 years, she has been able to compile a detailed and extensive list of the operations, agents and methods since its creation in 1964. It was very secretive. There's only rumors in the beginning of 90s. I was not able to find any documents until 2006. And before that, I sued the Bulgarian intelligence service

because I wanted these documents and they said, no, we don't have any documents. But later on, I was able to obtain these documents and to find some interesting stuff there. I found documents that they targeted. They pursue Bulgarian defectors abroad. And I found out documents that they pursued more than about 10 people, 10 people, 10 Bolgian.

to nine countries around the world, to try to poison them, to kill them, to kidnap them. In a way, it was hit squad. Within the Bulgarian intelligence service, Service 7 was very much need to know. It was secret within secret. And it was dedicated to tracking, monitoring, and then eradicating dissidents.

But not dissidents within Bulgaria. within Bulgaria, dissidents who had gone abroad. So if they were going to kill them, it involved something very subtle and out of the ordinary. They couldn't use guns in the street of, say, London. I mean, it's a major point that they were actually operating on somebody else's sovereign territory.

Service event was not so big in the beginning. When I established it in 64, I read in the documents that they were only seven people, and I even have the list of the people. of the people, but in late 60s, they become probably 20, even more, because they need more personal to carry on these tasks. The Murder Bureau was clearly very secret. Like, unless you were at the very top echelons of Bulgarian intelligence, you didn't know,

and in effect it, it had to be this secret. You know, these people were there to assassin. They were there to decide who was doing something wrong and to execute. execute them almost immediately. So the fewer people that knew, the safer it was to carry out what was sort of the ultimate penalty. The most famous assassination by the Murder Bureau took place on Waterloo Bridge in London on September 11, 1978. The victim was Georgie Markov. Georgie Markov remains one of the most intriguing hits of the Murder Bureau. He leaves Bulgaria when it's still a communist country.

And he's absolutely disgusted with the politics there. So for the next nine years, he's on the BBC's on Radio Free Europe, just giving it as all about how corrupt his country is. Now, this guy had defected from Bulgaria about 10 years previously, and he was, you know, very vocal in the UK about what had gone on in Bulgaria. He was on the BBC talking about it. he was writing about it. So he was a thorn in their side.

He's a very, very powerful voice against the Bulgarian regime, and the regime wants him silenced. And of course, this is the job for all service seven. One evening, early evening, Markov is crossing Waterloo Bridge, and he waits by the bus stop just at the top of the bridge to get his bus to the BBC, where he's working. And suddenly he feels this prick in the back of his thigh.

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. The reason that this worked so well is because, you know, Markov didn't even notice. I mean, he kind of felt something hit his leg, it was a bit uncomfortable, but he goes off to work. He, you know, he speaks to his colleagues about being bitten

by being stung by something that's kind of getting really uncomfortable and itchy. Over the next few hours, he begins to feel more and more sick, more and more unwell. And he goes to hospital, but of course no one knows exactly what is happening to him until a very sharp-eyed medic suddenly spots this small capsule embedded in his leg. And it soon emerges that this is actually this very, very dangerous compound called ricin. That was it then.

The balloon went up. The press got hold of it. And he died within four days. And then things really got serious. And of course, the story went worldwide. And of course, that's really what Service 7 wanted. Very few today will admit being part of the Murder Bureau or discuss their operations. But British investigative reporter Jamie Thexton has tracked down a small number of people in Sofia

who have agreed to meet him to discuss their activities, including the daughter of one of its targets. Natalia Michneva's father was a Bulgarian agent who fell out of favor with his bosses in Sophia. The result was an attempted poisoning. So, Natalia, why was your father targeted by Service 7? They probably wanted to punish him because he wanted freedom. I don't think he was dangerous to the system. He just wanted out to be free. He was working for the Bulgarian state security.

This is very official in the documents. They sent him abroad in Oxford as a student undercover. And after that, because he defected, they wanted probably to punish him and he got that sentence. So for a while, for a short time, he was kind of part of the Bulgarian intelligence. Did they ever try and kill your father? When I read the details in my father's court case, I found out that my grandfather was sent to London to bring him back to Bulgaria.

The secret service gave some salami to my grandfather as a gift to give to my father. My father was suspicious and threw the salami to a street dog who ate it and died suddenly. There are so many people in Bulgaria who have lost their fathers. They disappeared probably in the night. No one knew where they'd gone, no one knew what happened to them. And sometimes 40, 50 years later, Later, the researchers are now being able to go to these documents and actually tell these orphans, for want to a better word, what happened to Dad and at least lay the ghosts

to rest. There is very little evidence left of communist Bulgaria and the Cold War in Sophia today. But Bulgarian journalist Alexania Dimitrova has managed to get Jamie access to the former headquarters of Bulgarian intelligence. It was in this building, in the 60s and 70s, that hundreds of political prisoners were kept, questioned and tortured. Okay, this building is now National Archives, but it used to be until 1972 the headquarters of the Bulgarian State Security.

In the basement, there were cells of the Bulgarian State Security where they probably torture people or whatever things they can do to political and political and So prisoners were kept in here. Yeah, it should be cell probably, and they kept the prisoners here, and they tortured them and they beaten them severely just to extract some evidences from them. So tell me what might have gone on in this room. I heard about witnesses who they hear screaming outside of the building here, because obviously the tortures of people were just severe.

So you've spoken to people who might have been held in this cell. Yeah. And what did they tell you? That it was just cruel, severe beatings. Not much remains of communist Bulgaria, but in Sophia, there is a building that is the, probably the last testament to the Murder Bureau, where it has cells, little rooms that were probably used as torture chambers, where members of the Bureau would interrogate and try to persuade in every, every manner possible, the enemy of the state, to reveal their secrets.

In that basement, obviously a chair would 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 apparently 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. This was a dirty war. Boris Volardsky was a spy who worked for the powerful military intelligence unit of the mighty KGB

during the latter days of the Cold War. He agreed to meet with Jamie and shed what light he could on the murder bureau and its operations. I used to be an officer of the Russian military intelligence and particularly of the special forces of the Russian military intelligence, which is called the Spitznas, which is a rough equivalent of the British SAS. These are the group of officers that are involved or planned to be involved in special operations in case of a necessity or in case of a war behind the lines, deeply behind the lines. So what kind of activities were you expected to do?

That depending upon the situation, of course, could be blowing up bridges, could be be poisoning waters in a certain location. Could under certain circumstances be assassinations of the targets pointed by the commanding officers. How active were these agents in Soviet satellite states like Bulgaria? Every secret service of every Soviet satellite country, or was a packed country. They were under complete control of the Russian KGB. 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. So there were reports on a daily basis reporting of what's going on, and all operations were coordinated by Moscow. So the KGB were fully operating in Bulgaria? They were fully controlling operations in Bulgaria.

Not operating, because didn't need to operate. It was all clandestine. It was all behind the scenes. There were spies, super spies, and the whole damn thing, really, could have blown up big time into World War III. The Murder Bureau's key objective was stealthy assassinations. They wanted to slip in and out of the world's capital cities,

carry out their hit without anyone noticing, and then returned to Bulgaria. This ruled out the use of simple weapons like guns. So the Bulgarians developed a range of everyday items like umbrellas and pens that could be adapted for deadly use. The Soviet bloc and the Bulgarian Secret Service developed the most kind of mind-boggling array of secret weapons that are like something at a Q branch in the James Bond films.

You have, of course, the famous poison umbrella, but also then you have what something looks like a knife, but actually inside the handle. It's four bullets. You've got a whole dazzling array of weapons. And also what you've also got the use of are very, very nasty poisons like ricin. So the weapons they develop are inventive and incredibly unpleasant.

When you're in Service 7, you're assassins on foreign soil. You had to have something quite subtle. A lot of the weapons used by Service 7 seem to be straight out of James Bond. You know, fountain pens that actually fire pellets of poison, this kind of thing. I mean, it was a natural progression

from what various intelligence agencies had used during the Second World War, which were astonishing, including things like exploding camel dung. Bulgarian historian Konstantin Grotchev has spent many years investigating the history of Bulgarian intelligence and the work of the Murder Bureau.

He's looked into their clandestine operations around the world during the Cold War and how their assassinations were planned and targeted to influence global politics. This service seven was a section at the first department, at the foreign intelligence, which was dealing with the so-called sharp or acute measures. They had two divisions of labor. One was the so-called active measures, propaganda mainly. Those were like making films, making fake articles.

While the acute measures, this was a very secret department dealing with, in fact, without the euphemism killing of people. Let's be clear here. You're talking about state-sponsored assassinations. More or less, yes. Service 7 did have a license to kill from the very top echelons of the Bulgarian government. Of course, it's probably breaking technically Bulgaria's own laws and a lot of the war. of course, you know, every law going everywhere else in the world. So it was kept incredibly kept a secret. It had very few people working for it.

And of course, you know, all its documentation is written in this highly-deniable style. So instead of having go and kill someone, it was going to carry out what was called a sharp measure, which is this fantastically dark euphemism for literally ordering someone's death. What happened to all the documents, all the evidence that the department never existed?

You can find many traces of this and mentioning of that. So probably we are not able to have the whole documentation of what that Section 7 was doing, but plenty of it is still available. The aptly named Secret Archives Building houses millions of files from the Cold War. Although most, if not all, classified or revealing papers about the operations of the Murder Bureau have long been hidden away, or most probably destroyed, there are some trace left.

Local journalist Alexenia Dimitrova's father was arrested and tortured by Bulgarian intelligence, and she has spent many years trying to uncover and reveal their clandestine activities. About 10 years ago, nobody knew that this service seven existed. Nobody knew that they have been targeted. But when I discovered these documents, I was absolutely sure. I was absolutely shock and surprise that these documents have been preserved.

I found that they created this super secret unit in 1963, in 1964, and they have plans for what they have doing. And in this particular document, for instance, you can see the nicknames of eight Bulgarians who defected out of Bulgaria, and this super secret unit pursue targeted outside of Bulgaria in nine countries. It's astonishing that now, as a researcher, if you ask the authorities for documentation regarding Service 7, you will get it and it will not be redacted and it will be thousands upon thousands of pages with nothing censored.

Basically, code names of people, addresses, details, it's all there. One document that Dimitrova found in the archives clearly states that Bulgarian intelligence wanted to silence a defector who was working against them in a foreign country. They referred to this operation as a dirty job. In the world of espionage, this means only one thing. Assassination. Many of these archives were in fact held by the United States for many years, before being returned to Bulgaria once it left the Soviet bloc.

There are thousands of documents relating to the activities of the infamous murder bureau, including the reports of a Soviet spy ring in Vienna, in Austria, whose identities were then blown by American spies working undercover. One of the great ironies about the Murder Bureau and the Bulgarian Intelligence Service is that today its files are remarkably open compared to the files that we have our own intelligence services in the West. So, you know, as a historian, if I'm to look at a former MI5 file or something to CIA files, you just find, you know, black redactions all over it

with just a couple of words, the and but left open. But the irony is if you then go to Bulgaria and you look at their files from even, you know, Service 7, the Murder Bureau, you'll find it's remarkably open. You'll find that they've hardly redacted any of it. So of course you can look at the files and you can see the code names of some of those who were there were trying to kill. And you've got this incredible wealth of information that makes it possible for us to really understand what took place. It's been almost impossible to get anyone from the communist Bulgarian intelligence to talk about their work in the Cold War, let alone actual operations.

But one man, General Todor Boriechev, agreed to be interested. Although his exact role in the spy world has never been defined, he rose to become the deputy head of Bulgarian intelligence. Interestingly, he denies any knowledge of a top-secret hit squad working for them. But as the old saying goes, he would say that, wouldn't he? In each intelligence service, not only in Bulgarian intelligence service, in the structure of intelligence, there is a single service, there is counter-intelligence unit.

Usually there are very, very, very secret small structures which deal with soul named dirty tricks. Sometimes that means assassination. If there was such a structure, it was so secret, that even me, deputy head of the Bulgarian intelligence in charge of information and analysis of political information, I never know about such a structure. Service 7 had to be secret, very secret, because obviously we're talking now of the Cold War,

we're talking of spies everywhere, people being caught, captured, tortured. And if the guys at the top knew the names of everyone and they were tortured, then there's every possibility that they would give the whole game away. So nobody knew who each other was. We reveal how the infamous murder bureau spiraled out of control and was eventually shut down. Coming up, when forbidden history returns. I knew that there was a very, very, very secret unit in the Bulgarian intelligence. That was a unit in which served top top secret Bulgarian intelligence officer.

In most of the cases they were known only to the very top of the leadership of intelligence and their identity was a top, top secret. This guy is the quintessential spy chief, and he has been for decades. He's been working with the top four or five other spy chiefs from other allies and adversaries for decades. He's probably working hand and glove with Russia most of his life. So it's become ingrained in him that he can't reveal anything. This is his training. This is a half century of training that says,

I'm just going to block it. I'm going to tell you I know nothing, and whatever secrets I have, I'm going to take him to my grave. In the end, Service 7, the Murder Bureau, was wound down in 1974 as the KGB centralized all-Soviet bloc spy and espionage activities out of Russia.

It remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War. You have this great disconnect in the 60s between what we think of being the popular the culture of the 60s, which is clearly the summers of love and colorful clothing and flares and rock music and people smoking weed and so on and so forth and that whole counterculture. But of course, underneath it all is this very, very secret cold war that in the secret world is actually not cold at all.

It's incredibly hot because there are spies running around the world bumping each other off. many years ago there's a kind of super secrecy crossing around Europe here and there. We didn't know about that years ago, but now when the documents are open, we can easily find out that they kidnap people or poison them or humiliate them or whatever. Because when I published my book about Murder Bureau, I suddenly discovered there's such a similar unit existed in Germany eventually and also similar service existed in Soviet. The public has no idea that there is everything to play for.

Russia, Britain, the United States, world domination is at stake. So there's honey traps, there's spies, double spies, there's all kinds of espionage and weird devices that are being used to poison people, to blackmail people, to get information that you couldn't otherwise get. There was no internet, there were no chat rooms. You had to have spies and double spies. double spies, trust no one was the mantra of the day. It's not called the Cold War for nothing. You know, it really was a secret war.

You've got, you know, the Eastern Bloc who is fighting against the West. So whether it's America or England, you know, the rest of Europe, there's constantly something going on, and it's just under the radar. The Murder Bureau remains an enigma of Cold War history. There are no official figures to do that. official figures to refer to. But it's believed that Service 7 killed around a dozen people in highly planned covert operations from 1963 to 1974. Some were shot, some were poisoned, all were considered enemies of the communist state. This clandestine Cold War assassination program

operated in the shadows for over two decades, and even today, most of its operations, targets and results remain cloaked in secrecy.