The Rest Is Classified - 21. Death on the Thames: The Poisoned Umbrella (Ep 2)

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

Was an umbrella too obvious a murder weapon for an assassination in the heart of London? Why were the KGB hesitant to do the Bulgarian government's dirty work? And how do scientists work with spy agencies to identify lethal poisons? Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident writer, is dead. But, who murdered him? Was it the Bulgarians or the KGB? What about the British? In the aftermath of Markov's poisoning, the Metropolitan Police are struggling to discover the perpetrator behind the umbrella. Listen as David and Gordon continue the story of the mysterious murder of a Bulgarian BBC broadcaster on Waterloo Bridge, and ask: will the assassin ever be caught? ------------------- Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, via this link. ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

He told me the most extraordinary story that he had been jabbed with an umbrella tip. It was almost as if he didn't want to believe it himself. And I don't think he wanted to frighten me with it. But he showed me the mark the umbrella had made. It was like the point of a hypodermic needle. Well welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera.

And that was the testimony of Annabel Markov, wife of the murdered Bulgarian dissident and writer, Georgi Markov. And we have been looking at the amazing story surrounding the death of Georgie Markov in London, in central London in 1978. So last time, in the last episode, we talked about how Markov, Gordon had been feeling ill

after he felt something jab him on Waterloo Bridge September of 1978. Within days, Markov is dead and a post-mortem is gonna find a tiny pellet inside his leg. Tests are going to later reveal that the deadly toxin ricin is the most likely culprit in this murder, but we still have no idea of exactly how it was delivered. And I think as we're going to see here that Markov gives sort of the critical clue to his wife, Annabelle, in the hours after he's poked on Waterloo Bridge.

That's right. He clearly remembers that moment of being on the bridge of feeling something he associates that with then feeling unwell. And with this person who had the umbrella and who picks up the umbrella. So he clearly gives this clue that the umbrella was perhaps the delivery mechanism for the pellet that they find within him. It's still a bit mysterious as to how this actually happened. Was it a poisoned umbrella? How does a pellet get into you? Who would be able to wield such a weapon? But that's the suggestion, at least, at this time, is that the umbrella was associated with it. And, of course, you can imagine at the time when this gets out that this is what he thought, it's a media sensation. Because, I mean, you couldn't get anything more British than the murder of a man with an umbrella in rainy Britain on a bridge in the shadow of Big Ben.

And so, both in British terms, but also worldwide, this becomes a huge kind of subject of interest and a kind of a murder mystery. But it's a murder mystery where people think they know what the weapon was, but they don't actually have any suspects or any proof. Markov is convinced that the umbrella plays some role But he didn't see the umbrella poke him all he did was see the guy pick it up the national symbol of Britain And so we don't have any Really concrete evidence. We have no idea who this mysterious man with the umbrella was who he was working for and

I think it is worth saying we talked about this a little bit last time Gordon that the pellet that was dug out of out of Markov's skin was very unusual, right? It was it was very tiny. I mean, we're talking about one point something millimeters in length. It was made from platinum and iridium. And it had very, very small holes that might have been drilled or engineered in some way to secrete a poison. So it looks like something that's quite advanced, but again, no idea who was actually behind this thing. That's right. And the Bulgarians are the obvious suspects because they've got the motive.

They've got the axe to grind with Markov, the kind of thorn in their side as this dissident writer. But could they really have fashioned this kind of remarkable pellet and come up with a means of delivery as advanced as seems to have been required? That does seem unlikely. So you have got this mystery. The problem for the police, led by Jim Neville, this investigation is that it basically hits a dead end right after the poisoning. I mean, they can't find any suspects. They can't find the mystery man who carried the umbrella with a foreign accent who disappeared in a taxi.

They've got no hard evidence to link it either to Bulgaria or to the KGB, the Soviet secret services who Markov had suggested on his deathbed might have been involved. And so, it's a problem. It's a problem for the British state because they can't really complain about it or make a fuss or do anything because they haven't got the proof to say, you know, you were behind this, give us the evidence, because everyone could deny it. They haven't got the proof to be able to show or to put on display. And this is 30 some odd years before the British state got comfortable with Russian dissidents being murdered willy-nilly on British soil. I think it's a different era where it's harder to prove these things and therefore it's harder

to make an accusation or to get any proof or to put any pressure on a country. Effectively, the trail goes quiet for a decade or so and then something surprising happens. That's quite the jump, Gordon. A whole decade passes. That's it from about 1980 or so. I mean, it doesn't look like this is still an open case, but there's really nothing more they can do. The police are investigating, we should say. The investigation is ongoing, but there's effectively 15 years after his murder before there's the next kind of big moment. But the crucial thing that happens, of course, the end of the 80s, start of the 90s, is at the Cold War ends. And the Bulgarian communist regime, which had been thought to have been,

perhaps, behind this, has fallen. And so the question is, is the answer in the files? Can investigators go there and get the answers as to what happened with Markov? And they clearly hope they might be able to. I will say that one of the things that struck me just in preparing for this episode was the contrast between the absolute dead end that the British investigation ran into in the Markov case and the relatively quick capture of the sort of suspect here in the states of killing that healthcare executive, our friend Luigi, who got paraded around right afterward is it has become, I think, a lot harder to kill people and get away with it. killing that healthcare executive, our friend Luigi, who got paraded around right afterward, it has become, I think, a lot harder to kill people and get away with it. Wouldn't you

say? I mean, in London in 1978, there are no cameras anywhere, I would imagine. There's nobody's got a phone. And in this case, interestingly enough, I guess the difference between using a gun or knife or something like that and a poison is that there's a tremendous amount of time that's going to elapse that would have allowed a killer to get away. Because for most of that day in September, the next day, up until his death, there's a lot of confusion about what's actually happened. And so, you know, you just kind of contrast London 78 with today. I mean, anybody who's thinking about killing someone has a little bit of a harder road to hoe these days

than they did back in the Cold War. And that's one of the things that makes it so difficult for the police. We shouldn't underestimate the challenges for the men. And so they're hoping once you get to 1990, that they might finally get the answers. They've literally got to wait for the archives to open to get the answer.

So you get to 1990 and the police, and actually I think Markov's widow go to Bulgaria, but here they hit a problem because the crucial files, surprise surprise, have been destroyed. As the communist regime fell, the files directly relating to Markov have been destroyed and anything which might suggest responsibility on the part of the Bulgarian state. This appears to have been done by the head of the Foreign Intelligence Department of the Committee of State Security, a general who actually had been serving back in 1978, and he's actually prosecuted for destroying these files.

The second person suspected of destroying the documents commit suicide. So what you get is a sense of people who are keen to cover up any evidence there might have been. And you know this does become a very very controversial episode in Bulgaria then and still to now and it goes back to what we've talked about previously that Georgi Markov was quite a famous figure who's a big novelist who'd been killed so people wanted to know the answers. He was the Bulgarian Ian McEwen. He was. And I think one of the interesting things is it does get to a bit of, you know,

I visited Bulgaria once or twice and it is a country which even now, long after the fall of communism, but still is slightly caught between a kind of European future and its old ally Russia. And there are certainly people in Bulgaria who feel closer and a closer affinity to Russia. And there would have been people at the time who would have worked closely with the Russians or the Soviets then,

and who would have wanted to maintain that. And so you get this sense that the Markov case then in 1990, but right up to now is part of a tussle over Bulgaria, its political alignment, its future, and how open to be about the past. This becomes a crucial problem. Again, we've got a kind of dead end, it appears, but then around 1993, the mystery starts to open up again in a really interesting and surprising way. That comes when a former KGB general called Oleg Kalugin flies to London for an interview

with the BBC. Now, Kalugin is a very interesting character. He had, as I said, been in the KGB. He'd actually been a real high flyer in the KGB who had, at one point, been one of the youngest generals ever to rise up into the KGB. He'd spent time in the US as a young officer, but in the 80s, he falls out with the hard lines of the KGB quite badly and then moves to becoming effectively an opposition politician. When there's a coup in the Soviet Union in 1991, he's on the side, not of the KGB, but

of the opposition trying to bring democracy to Russia and Boris Yeltsin and people like that. He would eventually leave Russia and goes to live in the US. I've actually met him. He's still alive in the US. I've been to his house and spoken to him. He's a very interesting cultured guy. I was actually talking to him because he'd known Kim Philby many years ago, and I was talking to him about that. Really interesting, but he wasn't a defector or a classic kind of, you know, spy who'd been spying for the West, but he's someone who became disaffected with the KGB and then leaves. And what that means is at this period in the early nineties, he knows the KGB secrets and

it turns out he crucially knows one of the secrets about Markov and actually he's briefly detained when he comes to London because the British police think that he might have been involved or at least knows about the Markov case. And I guess the case is still open at this point, 15 years later. Yeah. He's not arrested in the sense that he's not, you know, charged because he hadn't been directly involved in Markov's killing. But he does know about it. And this is the crucial fact is that he brings a crucial piece of the puzzle, because we've been looking at that

question of, you know, was it the Bulgarians? Was it the KGB? Well, it turns out that Kulugin knows about the exact sequence of events, and particularly the relationship between the kind of KGB, and the Bulgarians, he's got this kind of crucial insight into what happened. Well, I think it's probably before I read here a little bit of exactly how this went down, it is probably worth just a little bit of a setup of the Bulgarian Committee for State Security, their security service, the Jersnava Sigurnost, the DS, was, and for those of you keeping track

on your Restless Classified bingo cards for mentions of obscure security services, you'll be pleased to be able to check off the DS as one of them on this episode. We kind of think about the Eastern Bloc, I guess the Soviet Bloc is kind of monolithic in this period, I guess. But you know, it's the case that like the Stasi, the East German service is kind of a partner with the KGB. There's a bit of a give and take. The Bulgarian DS in this period is basically the KGB's outpost in Bulgaria.

They're very close. It is a very close service. It is so close, in fact, that in this period, they are sharing agents with one another. The Bulgarians are basically sending all of their people to Moscow for training. They are extremely, extremely close. I mean, the KGB is actually helping the Bulgarians spy on foreign embassies in Sofia. I mean, in one case, the Bulgarians actually have handed over an asset they recruited to be run instead by the KGB. All of this, you know, from the standpoint of sort of sovereign nations or separate security services is kind

of pretty wild. So it's a kind of Soviet block special relationship, I guess you could say, Gordon, in which the Bulgarians have gone kind of full open kimono in exchange for support from Moscow. And I think, interestingly, and I think this might've been from reading, I don't know if they're portrayed this way in Clancy novels, or if it's because they were

suspected of having some role that Bulgarians were in an attempt on Pope John Paul II's life. But there was this like tendency to see the Bulgarians as the KGB's wetwork guys. Like you know, the KGB needed something nasty done. They went to the Bulgarians to get it done. Wetwork we should say is the euphemism for killing people. Or, you know, I've actually also seen in some of these Bulgarian files, I'm deep in the Bulgarian files now, Gordon, they called it sharp measures was sharp measures. Sounds like what you tell your children, you'll be subject to sharp measures should you not do what you're told.

There were many times, many times over holiday breaks where I would like to subject them to sharp measures. But not the Bulgaria type, thank you. But the Bulgarians are actually entirely dependent on the Soviet KGB to conduct these sharp measures. It's kind of the other way around. It's not the KGB outsourcing its dirty work to the Bulgarians. It's really the Bulgarians coming to the KGB and proposing something that the KGB is not maybe super keen on supporting. Yeah, that's exactly right. And that seems exactly what happens here with the Markov case. And it's interesting, Kalugin says that this was the only time in his words he was

involved in what he called a wet job, meaning an assassination. Kalugin in his memoir says that the KGB chief, Khrushchev, had been contacted by the Bulgarians to ask for help in carrying out a specific request from the Bulgarian leader, Tordozhivkov, because they needed help to do it. And they wanted help to get rid of Markov effectively. And we've got from Kalugin's memoir an account of the meeting in the KGB where they're discussing this. This is Kalugin recalling the incoming Bulgarian request and how it was dealt with at the KGB. We sat in silence for a few seconds.

I will never forget the tidy euphemism Kruchkov used for Markov's assassination. Quote, physical removal. Vishchis kuevst menye in Russian. I felt a chill go down my spine and thought to myself, to hell with these Bulgarians. Let them do whatever they want to their political opponents. Why are they dragging us into this mess? Andropov was taken aback. He got up from his desk and started nervously pacing back and forth. The chairman seemed lost for a few seconds, then said, I'm against political assassinations. I don't think it's the right way to deal with these problems. The time when this sort of thing could be done with impunity has passed. We cannot return to the old ways. I'm really against it. Again, there was silence save for the faint hum of traffic in Jirzinski Square. Finally Kruchkov spoke again.

It's comrade Zhivkov's personal request. They have to deal with this problem somehow. Andropov continued pacing around the room. All right, all right, he said, stopping suddenly. But there has to be no direct participation or not. But give the Bulgarians whatever they need, show them how to use it and send someone to Sofia to train their people. But that's all no direct involvement. Beautifully read as ever, David. I think you've got the KGB voice down, Pat.

It's a great, I think, quote, because what you get a sense of from there, which is, I think, quite surprising, is a few crucial details about Markov's assassination. One is it's the Bulgarians' request to the KGB that it's come from Zhivkov. The Bulgarian leader personally has asked the Soviets, please help me with this problem. So clearly, it's him who wants it done, but he can't do it himself. And so it's come to the KGB. Also fascinating, isn't it? That the KGB is quite reluctant. They don't want to do it.

They were like, don't go here. Why are we going to do this dirty job? It's fascinating, isn't it? It's totally fascinating. On that point, also in my Bulgarian files, Gordon, in 1972, and this is all the stuff that's come out since the collapse of communism in Bulgaria, what was called Department Four of the DS in Bulgarian intelligence, which kind of had this part of its portfolio, the planning of sharp measures against dissidents, what they called

the hostile emigre community, they actually had a memo that they were going to send to the East German security service, the Stasi, in which they were going to send to the East German security service, the Stasi, in which they were going to ask the Stasi for a whole bunch of different items like miniature pistols with silencers, quick working poisons was in there, some gadgets for the sudden injection of poison into the body. All of this stuff was being sent in a memo to the East Germans, but the KGB had to clear it first. That's how close the Bulgarians were with the KGB.

The KGB, in editing the memo, literally in red ink, wrote, niet, with two exclamation points. No, do not send this to the East German. You kind of see that I think this is also something that the KGB had probably been dealing with with Zhivkov and these guys and the DS for a lot of the 1970s was these guys wanted to kill Bulgarians living outside of Bulgaria who were bothering them and creating problems. And the KGB had probably said no a whole bunch of times and felt by the time they got to 1978, like they had to say yes. Yeah. And what's interesting is we think of the KGB being the kind of trained killers and being the ones who've done this. And there is definitely a history of that. If you go back to the kind of Czechist days from the 20s onwards, you know, there's a

period in the 50s where they're kind of really busy with this, you know, they've already killed Trotsky. So there is a history of assassinations which are linked to the Soviet Union and the KGB. But actually, once you get into the 60s and 70s... Mellowed. Yeah, they've, they've, they've mellowed. I mean, they're actually not so into it. And they kind of want to see themselves a bit more

as a professional intelligence service, less willing to use those kind of slightly darker Stalinist methods. And so in their self-image, as we can hear in that kind of quote, they're reluctant. They don't want to do it. But it's so interesting. The leadership of the KGB is like, oh, it's

a personal request from Zhivkov. He's really pestered. We don't want to do it. But you know, it's so interesting. The leadership of the KGB is like, oh, you know, it's a personal request from Jivkoff. You know, he's really pestered. We don't want to do this. So okay, if we have to, we're gonna do it. We'll give them some technical support. But I don't want anyone to get their hands dirty directly and doing it from the KGB. We give them the stuff, we tell them how to do it, they do it. So that is the kind of key detail that really comes from Kalugin's account. What we then know from what he says is the KGB go to their operational technical directorate.

It is noticeable that even though KGB people say, oh, we didn't really do that many assassinations in this time, they still have a technical directorate and a secret poisons laboratory which knows how to do it. They've not got rid of that. You know, they still got this laboratory 12, which develops poison. So it's clear they've kept the capability even if they're a bit more reluctant to use it. And we should say that I guess the 50s and the 60s and kind of the 70s, this was sort

of the any security service worth its salt had a secret poisons lab, right? I mean, the CIA had one. This was an era, in particular in the 60s, where the CIA had one of the largest caches of shellfish toxin. It's actually a distilled toxin from butter clams in its laboratory. The CIA had Cobra venom. The CIA had a gun famously held up by Senator Frank Church at sort of the church pike hearings in the mid 70s.

There's a great picture of him holding this thing up and you know, it's a gun that's designed to shoot a pellet with kind of that distilled shellfish toxin in it to induce a heart attack, right? And so you do have this period where you would sort of be embarrassed if you were a security service that didn't have Cobra venom in the basement, you know, but the difference I think between the Central Intelligence Agency and here the KGB was that by the time you got to the mid 1970s, the CIA had basically been dragged through the mud for not having destroyed all of its Cobra venom and its shellfish toxins. It had kind of more or less dismantled those programs.

And the KGB obviously, you know, in this case, is fielding an active operational request from the Bulgarians to poison somebody or to help poison somebody in London. And it's fascinating because they look at the different ways they could do this. And I think it's particularly interesting now in hindsight to look at the account of this,

particularly after what's happened recently, because one option they look at to get rid of Markov is poison in his food or drink. Now, of course, poison in your tea or in case of radioactive poison, that's how it's done with Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. Another option they look at is a gel, a poisonous gel, which you could apply to the handle of Markov's car. Now, of course, this is similar to how it's done with Sergey Skripal in that Novichok, a poison nerve agent, is put on the door handle of his house. We should say both Linfenenko and Skripal, both Russian defectors, right, who were in London. And then a third option, which they talk about at the time, is a pellet.

And you know, Kalugin talks about in his memoir, it being like a comedy of errors as they try and work out how to use this, or what the best way might be, they look at, you know, trying to poison Markov while he's on holiday in Sardinia, it turns out, you know, they wanted to smear gel onto his bare skin on the beach. The Cabana boy approach to assassinations. You know, you kind of go, I mean, that's even weirder than an umbrella is the idea that someone's going to kind of walk past you while you're kind of semi naked on a beach and just smear something on you.

It does sound so bad, but the weather was so bad, supposedly, that he wasn't on the beach the time they were looking at it. And he was at a private villa, so they couldn't get anything into his drinks or his hotel. The assassin just sat there with a bucket of toxic gel in the rain. I guess so. I mean, bizarre. Another one was to poison him in his drink while he's recording for Radio Free Europe in Munich.

The problem is he's actually pretty careful because he's had these warnings, of course, and doesn't eat out at restaurants or bars. He brings his own food even if he's going to someone's house. So in the end, they settle on this idea of the rice and pellet. The KGB bring it to Bulgaria. The Bulgarians test it on a horse and it dies. According to Kalugin, they even test it on a prisoner who feels his skin pricked. You're a prisoner and you feel something prick your skin. He knows this is looking bad and he cries out. But in that case, the poison isn't released and so he he's fine. And so the KGP go back to lab and say, hang on a sec, you know, you need to make this work. We have to develop a better pellet. Yeah, on the pellet point, I guess the idea

they're testing here technically is that pellet has a couple small holes that actually release the ricin, right? But there's something that coats the pellet. Once it's injected into the skin, sort of the body temperature, I guess, is going to melt that coating and then release the ricet. Once it's injected into the skin, the body temperature, I guess, is going to melt that coating and then release the ricin. So you've got to get it into someone, but also make sure it releases the poison. Now, in the end, it looks like they settle on the umbrella as the delivery mechanism. Now, it's interesting because there's still some people who are not totally sure about this. There's some people who've thought that the umbrella was a kind of distraction and that actually there was a kind of special pistol that would be used. But almost all the evidence

points to it being a specially designed umbrella, which the KGB make, which uses compressed gas to fire the pellet. And it has to be hard enough to kind of break through clothes and get into someone, as you said, but not a kind of bullet or something which is going to go through the person or, you know, which is going to be really obvious, you know, in terms of pain. And there's a few more clues as to how it's done, which come out from the files that Vasily Matrokin, the KGB archivist, smuggles out. And we should say, Gordon, before we get to Matrokin, that in the interest of kind of also mentioning the fact that we have the same sort of technical advances going on,

on both sides of the Iron Curtain in this era. The Office of Strategic Services, the sort of predecessor to CIA, had developed an umbrella gun in the Second World War. And they also had an electric dart gun capable of silently firing poison pellets that would dissolve in a victim before an autopsy could be performed. Now that's really interesting. So it's very similar. Very similar. Yeah. So I think you had essentially kind of, I guess, the same tech being created to solve

this problem of how do I kill somebody and leave no trace such that an autopsy might inconclusively certainly to the point where you couldn't point a finger at a particular assassin or at a particular security service, right? Because I'm utterly fascinated by this Russian Soviet block obsession with poison. point a finger at a particular assassin or a particular security service, right? Because I'm utterly fascinated by this Russian Soviet block obsession with poison. And I'm sure it's something we'll talk about when we discuss some of the other notable poisonings in London, you know, by the Russian security services. But it is this question of like, they're going through all of these technical, really, this kind of R&D work to build this thing you know it does kind of raises question of

why not just find a criminal willing to take some money and have him shoot mark off you know it's kind of an interesting point i think around the tension of i guess they're trying to build something that will allow this person to get away i think there's also something to be said for the theatrics of it it It's a demonstration maybe of the state's power to kill you in a particularly kind of brutal and unique way. Yeah, but it is interesting because I think in these cases, the idea was that it would look, it would be mysterious. Shooting someone in the head, it's clear it's murder, and you've got an assassin who needs to get away and could easily get caught, and then they get traced, and then it's a mess. The advantage of these techniques are firstly that they suggest that someone might have been killed, but they're not definitive.

There's an element of mystery because you don't know what poison is being used. It may take some time for that to work out. The delivery mechanism is covert, so the person who uses it, in this case an umbrella, can get away. The Soviets had used other things. They'd used cyanide sprays in the 50s, which they'd used against Ukrainian nationalists. They'd sent out KGB assassins who would effectively spray with a specially made spray gun, cyanide into people's faces. But again, that gave someone time to get away and it would often not be clear what had killed them for a

while. So I think this fits into that category. In terms of the umbrella being the cause, I mean, the Matrokin archives, these are files brought out by the former KGB archivist, which got published in 1999, has some further clues because they say that the murder weapon in the Markov case was concealed in an American umbrella and that These were purchased by the KGB's residency, its office in Washington. Again, this was partly to disguise the KGB connection. The idea is, if anyone found that umbrella or if the person was captured, then it would look like an American umbrella and not going to use a Russian or even a British umbrella. This had then been converted by these KGB technicians to be able to fire that tiny pellet from the tip of the umbrella into someone.

Even through his jeans, I guess, without him even being able to see. Maybe there, Gordon, we've now got the weapon and we know it was the KGB supporting the Bulgarians, but we still don't know who actually did it. So when we come back, we'll get into who was actually using that umbrella gun on the streets of London. Are you crushing your bills? Defeating your monthly payments? Sounds like you're at the top of your financial game.

Rise to it with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card, the credit card that rewards your good financial habits. Unpoints for paying your credit card bill in full and on time every month. Level up from bill payer to reward slayer. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back. We are now unraveling the last thread in the murder mystery of who killed Georgie Markov on Waterloo Bridge in 1978. And it's going to come out here, Gordon, that the British police thought they knew who the murderer was all the way back in 1993 and had actually spoken to him. That's right. This will only come out many, many years later, and the name of the person will only emerge really in the 2000s and beyond. We talked a bit about how the files had been destroyed and

lots of the files which dealt directly with the murder. But a Bulgarian journalist, Hristo Hristov, starts working through these files in Bulgaria in the mid-2000s. He particularly focuses on a Bulgarian operative, an agent working for the DS, who is codenamed Piccadilly. Now, I mean, it's a slightly weird, you know, Piccadilly Circus is in London. It's a slightly weird codename. But his research suggests that this might be the prime suspect in Markov's murder. And what he does is he looks at some of the related files about Agent Piccadilly and identifies it as someone of Italian origin, but who's living in Denmark called Francesco Galino.

Now the key files on the murder itself might have been destroyed, but Galino's files are fascinating because they point to him traveling to the UK around the time of the murder. He received special training signed off by the head of Bulgarian intelligence. I think most tellingly, he's recorded as giving an acknowledgement signal to a Bulgarian spy the day after Markov's killing in Rome. He's also paid off for many years afterwards, despite actually not looking like he's doing that much spying. There's even a special dinner in his honor.

There's nothing else which suggests he would be deserving of that kind of treatment. So it's not definitive proof, but it's very, very suggestive circumstantial evidence about it. Well, and this is one of the fascinating things I think about our maybe mental model for some of these more piratical security services, let's say these kind of communist services in the Cold War is that even though they did things that we would consider to be remarkably immoral or amoral and illegal, they kept massive amounts of paper. They kept the files. They kept the files. And so there's this very bizarre paradox in that they are pursuing extra legal action, but

keeping mountains of paperwork to document it. There's not really a wink and a nod thing here and then none of it's captured. They're capturing the sort of case files in the same way that the British SIS would or the CIA would in terms of monitoring and tracking their interactions with an asset. The thing is, even though they thought they destroyed the files on the murder, because they're so bureaucratic, they've got so many files, you can find kind of circumstantial evidence from the other files. Let's look a little bit at Galeno.

Now, he's a really interesting character. He is like the kind of character out of one of those spy novels of the past, a kind of Eric Ambler spy novel of the 30s or something like that. He's a shady chancellor. He's an oddball. He's a drifter. He's orphaned young.

He ends up in petty crime. By his 20s, he's driving trucks from Turkey around Europe and doing low-level smuggling. This crucial moment comes where he's arrested as a 24-year-old traveling into Bulgaria from Greece with a small amount of drugs and undeclared foreign currency. At this moment, he's told he could face 10 years in jail. Then, in the classic spy move, he's there having been detained and he's introduced to a charming man who says he could make the charges go away for him.

Of course, that man works for the first main director of Bulgarian intelligence. He's basically spotted that Galino has some potential. He's a guy who's got languages. He's an opportunist. He knows how to move across borders. He's involved in smuggling. Effectively, he says, come and work for us. He signs a loyalty oath.

He becomes Agent Piccadilly. He's trained then in espionage and how to spy on foreigners and ends up in Denmark. Now, this is also where the story gets fascinating because the book to read on this is a book called The Umbrella Murder by a Danish journalist called Ulrik Skottar, which came out just a few years ago and who really drills down on the trail of Galeno. The reason why Ulrich Scotter focuses on so much is that Ulrich Scotter is approached in the 90s by a friend of Galeno who says, I think I know who Markov's murderer is. This person has apparently been sharing a place with Galeno and he comes across from

Audrey Scott's investigations this really odd character Galino who's got copies of Mein Kampf, he's got photos of women dressed up as Nazis. It's a weird oddball, but he's also questioned by British police in 1993 in Denmark. They actually go over and interview him about the case at that point. So clearly, British police have also got onto him as early as 1993, because it's at that point that Scott kind of first becomes aware of his name. Do we know why the British police were interested specifically in Galeno in 93?

Was it looking at the archives and kind of piecing it together or? Yeah, I guess that must be the case that they'd somehow got some kind of tip off or some lead or they'd got something when they did visit the archives. Because Galeno's name isn't public until the 2000s. But they do have enough where they feel they can question him. But the real problem seems to be that they fly over to interview him. What it looks like is that they're trying to get a confession and they need the confession because it doesn't look like they've got hard evidence.

If they had the hard evidence, you'd suspect they would have extradited him or found a way to charge him, but they don't. They haven't got that, so they manage to interview him, but no more. Then the saga continues and they're still trying to get more from the files. And this is really interesting that in 1997, you've got two foreign secretaries from Britain bringing up the issue of files, you know, before and after an election and access to the agent Piccadilly files and the Bulgarians say, oh, we can't really help you. You know, there's a limit to what we've got.

Again, the kind of difficulties in getting answers. Because I guess by this point, Galino has wisely decided to pack up from Denmark and go back to Bulgaria. No, no, he's still in Denmark. He's still there. I mean, this is what's remarkable. He moves around Europe. But he's he's effectively a free man. And you get the Metropolitan Police Detectives, they visit Bulgaria, and they still pursuing this case. So in 2007 and 2008,

and I checked this with a Met Police detective I know from that era and he said, yeah, we were still pursuing this. Three decades after Markov's murder, they've got detectives flying out to Bulgaria, trying to interview people and get access to the files. Journalists are now onto this as well. Ulrich Schkott on the case. So he, he actually tries to speak to Zhivkov who's still alive in Bulgaria. And he goes to see, you know, the Bulgarian leader who is suspected of ordering this assassination and Zhivkov of course denies it, you know, says, no, I didn't do it, which isn't very believable and Ulrich Skotar also confronts Galino himself in 2021 and Galino course, denies it all, and then

dies shortly after natural death. But what that means is, you know, he was the prime suspect, all the circumstantial evidence is there. But he's never charged, no confession. And technically, still an open case for the Metropolitan Police. Is the thinking that he was responsible, and we also we talked in the last episode about the fact that there was another sort of Bulgarian journalist in Paris

who'd been hit with a similar pellet and who did not die. There was a Bulgarian dissident, another one in London, who was pushed down the stairs and did die. I mean, is the thinking that Galina was responsible for those as well like he was moving kind of around Europe knocking off problematic Bulgarians. Less clear, less clear whether he was involved in Paris, someone else was briefly in the frame for Paris, but you know, again, not charged.

And also there'd been been questions over the years about whether really Galina would have acted alone or whether there would have been other people in London, perhaps from the Bulgarian Secret Service who were supporting, for instance, doing reconnaissance on Markov. Working out his route, where he'd be, because they had to know he'd be at that passing that bus stop on Waterloo Bridge on that day, on September 1978. Whether there was a bigger team as well, that is unclear. And that may be in those files that was destroyed. So Galino is the only person in the frame, but the proof is never is never quite there to get him. Well, and I think it does. I mean, you know, as we end this

story up with the case still being open, although the answer on the question of you know, who done it probably answered. I mean, I think there is a big question around if you are Todor Zhivkov, the former dictator of Bulgaria, and you ordered this killing, I mean, was it successful? Do you think? I mean, I wonder how you think about that one, Gordon. I mean, obviously he died. So in some respects it was, but Markov was killed on September or attacked rather on September the seventh, which is

Zhivkov's birthday, which I think is a pretty damning bit of circumstantial evidence as well. This was kind of a birthday gift for Zhivkov to have this frustrating dissident knocked off. But yeah, I mean, you know, if you're Zhivkov, you know, you wanted him gone and he's gone. This person who'd kind of slightly humiliated you this dissident writer you thought was your friend, but equally, you've drawn a hell of a lot of attention onto yourself in Bulgaria and into what you're capable of.

The Secret Service operatives involved in it have been trying to cover it up for decades. I guess what it tells you is that if you're Zhivkov, you've become so obsessed with getting rid of one person that you're willing to take those risks. I think there's a parallel there with some of the other assassinations that we've briefly touched on. If you look at Alexander Litvinenko, he is killed in London with radioactive polonium, another kind of remarkable thing to do in 2006. Again, there, there was something personal between him and Putin, actually.

The two of them had met when both had been at the FSB, the Russian security service in the 90s. Again, there's a slightly personal desire of a leader to do whatever it takes to get rid of someone they really hate and they really want to kill. I think there are parallels there about why certain leaders are willing to take quite big risks to go after someone. I guess one of the other differences is that with Litvinenko, it was much easier and quicker to identify the suspects who were involved there. But again, they got away. That's the advantage of using these kinds of poisons is those suspects were able to get away, get back to Russia. and even though they've been identified, they've not been brought to justice, they've not been put

on trial. Well, it's also, I think, an interesting case study in how common it is for these types of authoritarian regimes to use their spy services, not to kill foreigners, although that can certainly happen, but to kill members of their sort of political elite who have a left and who are creating problems for them, right? If I think about a lot of these Russian killings are of Russian defectors or oppositionists or journalists who are making problems for Putin, it's they're killing Russians. The Iranian services for a long time focused on Iranian dissidents overseas, right? The Bulgarians here, I mean, they're not killing members of the British

Secret Services in London or British citizens. I mean, they're going after Bulgarian exiles and even China, you know, with some of these kind of kidnappings and renditions they've done of political opposition businessmen. They're going after, you know, with some of these kind of kidnappings and renditions they've done of political opposition businessmen, they're going after, you know, Chinese citizens or exiles who live overseas. So I mean, this is one example of that kind of evergreen tendency on the part of dictators to go after people who are causing them problems at home. Yeah. And I think one of the points to make as well is that, you know, we talked a bit about how there was some reluctance in the 70s from the KGB to get involved in this assassination.

But I think you can see if you look at the long arc of history, the ebbs and flows of Russia and Moscow's willingness to use poisons as a tool of assassination. And you can see it, you know, the 30s, 40s, 50s, they're using it. There is this slight period where the 60s and 70s and 80s where maybe they're less likely to use it. But certainly, once you get to recent years, it's back. You can see their use of toxins in Ukraine against Yushchenko, a Ukrainian leader. You can see it in the use of radioactive material against Lipunenko. You can see nerve agents against Sergey Skripal in Salisbury, and against Alexei Navalny in Russia itself.

I think the idea that there's a reluctance to use poisons or toxins like in the Markov case, that might have been the case for a brief period, but these days it certainly seems to be back as a tool in Moscow's arsenal. Well, and I think it's certainly, you know, and maybe this is a good point to kind of close out or sort of drop the curtain on this murder mystery because this is the theater of it. And this is why we're talking about this case 50 years later is the poison and the umbrella gun. If the Bulgarians, if the KGB decide to do this with just pushing someone down the stairs or shooting them, we're not cutting an episode on it, right? I mean, there is a theatrical nature to these crimes that I think really seems to appeal to, you know, these kind

of security services, builds this kind of notoriety and it creates, I think, this kind of reverberation over time. They're powerful stories because of the choice of the poison and the umbrella gun. And so maybe that's a good spot to wrap up the story of Georgi Markov wrap up the story of Georgi Markov and the assassin with the umbrella gun. We'll see you next time on The Rest Is Classified. Thanks for listening.