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 Thirty-one years ago this week, on 7 September 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian émigré, who lived and worked in London, was assaulted in broad daylight on London’s Waterloo Bridge.
Georgi Markov had been a prolific and successful literary figure in Bulgaria before defecting to the West in 1969. He settled in England and became a broadcast journalist for Radio Free Europe, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), and the German international broadcast service Deutsche Welle.
Markov had a large listening audience in Bulgaria, who listened to his prime-time Sunday-night broadcasts over Radio Free Europe. He dared to tell his audience that Bulgarian President and Communist Party chief Todor Zhivkov wore no clothes.
In June 1977, Communist Party Chairman Zhivkov chaired a Politburo meeting, and stated he wanted the activities of Markov stopped. The Interior Minister reacted and requested KGB assistance in the killing of Markov. Though he wanted Markov killed, he wanted no trace to Bulgaria. The Chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, agreed to the assassination, as long as there would be no trace back to the Soviets. Thus, the Bulgarians and Soviets were operating under a double case of “plausible denial. “
A former KGB general has publicly admitted his role and the role of the KGB in supplying the Bulgarian intelligence service with both the weapon and the poison. Purportedly, the highly secret KGB laboratory known as the "Chamber" developed both the weapon, concealed in a US-manufactured umbrella, and biotoxin ricin impregnated in a wax-coated pellet the size of a pinhead.
Markov received various warnings and anonymous threats to stop broadcasting his inside knowledge of Zhivkov and the obsequious circles of Bulgarian intellectuals and government officials. Until his death, Markov persisted and peeled away the artichoke leaves of lies and corruption in Bulgaria.
A grotesque black comedy followed with three attempts to kill Markov in 1978. The first attempt was in Munich in the spring, when Markov visited friends and colleagues at Radio Free Europe. An agent failed in an attempt to put a toxin in Markov's drink at a dinner party held in his honor. The second failed attempt was on the Italian island Sardinia while Markov enjoyed a summer vacation with his wife Annabel and daughter Sasha. The final and successful attempt was in London on President Zhivkov‘s birthday 7 September 1978.
On that day, Markov worked a double shift at the BBC. After finishing the early morning shift, he went home for rest and lunch. Returning to work by car, he drove to a parking lot on the south side of Waterloo Bridge to take a bus to his office at the BBC. As he neared the waiting queue, he experienced a sudden stinging pain in the back of his right thigh. He turned and saw a man bending to pick up a dropped umbrella. The man, facing away from Markov, apologized in a foreign accent, hailed a taxi, and departed. He has never been identified.
Though in pain, Markov boarded the bus to work and noticed a small blood spot on his pants. He told colleagues at the BBC what happened and showed one friend a pimple-like red swelling on his thigh. Later that evening, Markov developed a high fever. His wife called a colleague at the BBC, who took Markov to St. James hospital, where he was treated for an undetermined form of blood poisoning. He did not respond to doctors’ efforts, went into shock, and after days of delirium, pain, and suffering, Georgi Markov died in London on 11 September 1978 at the age of 49.
British authorities later ruled that Markov had been “unlawfully killed” and died of "septicemia, a form of blood poisoning caused by bacterial toxins, possibly a result of kidney failure."
Investigative reporter in Bulgaria Hristo Hristov has published two books in English, based on his years of research into Bulgarian intelligence files, which include a copy of the passport and photographs of an Italian art dealer and small time-criminal, code name “Piccadilly”, used by Bulgarian intelligence service in the murder.
A copy of an umbrella that was adapted into a “gun”, believed by many to have been used to deliver a biotoxin that killed Markov, is on display at the International Spy museum in Washington; the minute pellet that contained the poison, believed to be ricin, is on display today in the Crime Museum at New Scotland Yard in London. It has been estimated that one ounce of ricin could kill as many as 90,000 persons. British scientists later estimated that only about 450 micrograms were used to kill Markov
One Bulgarian general committed suicide rather than face trial for destroying thousands of pages of information about Georgi Markov. Another general was found guilty, spent a few months in jail, and reportedly now lives quietly in a villa in Bulgaria.
The case has been investigated by generations of Scotland Yard policemen and remains open in England. In Bulgaria, the case should have been closed in 2008, due to thirty-year statute of limitations, but authorities decided to keep it open another five years.
Georgi Markov was buried in the Saint Candida and Holy Cross Churchyard cemetery in Whitchurch Canonicorum, Dorset, England. The epitaph on his gravestone is written in Bulgarian on one side and English on the other:
And yet, with all the public information and years of official investigation, no one has been charged with the crime. The dots have not been completely connected. The final piece of the puzzle to complete the picture remains to be found.
Georgi Markov’s death proved how far a totalitarian regime would go to protect itself from the truth. The murder of Georgi Markov seems destined to be another footnote in the history of the Cold War. Georgi Markov deserves a better fate.
Further Reading
See Chapter 3 of the author’s book Cold War Radio: the Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950 – 1989 (McFarland & Co, 2009).
Markov’s Radio Free Europe programs posthumously were collected and translated into English as The Truth That Killed (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, 1983).
For full details of “Piccadilly”, including photographs, see Hristo Hristov’s book, The Double Life of Agent Piccadilly and Kill the Wanderer at http://hristo-hristov.com/
 Author of Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950-1989 and the soon-to-be published Radio Free Europe's 'Crusade for Freedom': Rallying Americans Behind Cold War Broadcasting, 1950-1960, Richard H Cummings has, to say the least an interesting background - for example he served as West European Director of Security and gives presentations at numerous international academic conferences such as the 2009 Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: Successful CIA Covert Operations in the Cold War CIA & US Foreign Policy Conference, UCD Clinton Institute for American Studies in Dublin, Ireland.
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