According to the documents, the operation failed but the officers discussed it in the reports as the first and very useful experience. They continued working on it in the next years. Among the ideas was for a woman-collaborator to attract Slavenov to travel to Vienna. According to the reports this attempt failed too.
I tried to find Slavenov in Italy. Unfortunately it turned out that he died in 1996. But I found his daughter Elza. I understood from her that her father somehow knew about the actions prepared against him and he was very cautious. He applied different techniques to escape from the people who followed him. One day he has left his home at 6:30 pm, on the next day at 9 pm, one day he returned at 6 pm, on the other after 11 pm. He also changed several times the home latch-lock and he shifted his daily routes.
The daughter also told me in detail how her father had escaped from the plan to kidnap him on the ship. An Italian friend of his called him to ask to be a translator helping Bulgarian ship crew accosted to Trieste to resolve a mechanical problem with the vessel. Slavenov doubted this story and refused to get on the ship. He was sure that it was a well prepared trap.
Slavenov returned to Bulgaria only after the fall of Berlin fall in 1989. Despite all the actions against him and all his fears throughout the years, he very much loved his country. He wanted to die here. In 1996 he was buried in his native village not far from Plovdiv, South Bulgaria.
FP: How about another case?
Dimitrova: Another target of the Murder Bureau was Traycho Belopopski, an ex-officer from the First Directorate of the Bulgarian Intelligence who escaped to the UK in the early 60’s and was sentenced to death in 1964.
I found him alive in New York in 2006. The documents stated that he was also a target of the secret Service 7. My interest was provoked by his court cases, which I read in the archives.
In 2006 Belopopsky was afraid to talk. However, in a private correspondence he mentioned that years ago his father had visited him in London and brought him a piece of salami. Knowing the methods of his former colleagues he was suspicious of the food and tossed it to a street dog. It immediately died in agony.
Asked about the case, one of the high ranking ex officers of the Bulgarian Intelligence Col. Dimo Stankov denied that the institution has planed any operation against Belopopsky. He also denied knowing that the emigrant got a death sentence.
“We tried having him come back by sending his father and his brother on law to persuade him to return, but when he failed, we gave up,” claimed Stankov.
The recently discovered reports of the secret Department refuted these claims. Just the opposite – they confirmed that Belopopsky was one of the planed victims of Service 7 under 2 code names “The Black” and “Mavrov”. Obviously he was able to survive, escaping from UK to the USA where he married for 3rd time. Belopopsky’s first wife and daughter, who left in Bulgaria after his emigration, never saw him again.
There are 8 more cases of émigrés-targets of the Bulgarian SMERSH between 1963 and 1974 described in Murder Bureau. The book contains nearly 100 document facsimiles, which reveal all the details about the secret operations and its targets.
FP: What is the significance of these findings?
Dimitrova: For first time I found documentary evidences of the existence of special unit responsible for so-called sharp measures. Untill now we all knew the notorious case of the so-called Bulgarian Umbrella – the killing of the Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov in London in September 1978. Obviously long before this assassination, strategies and people were prepared to perpetrate such assignments.
FP: Alexenia Dimitrova, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
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These guys were the Murder Incorporated of Spies.
I just finished re-reading "Thirteen Days that Shook the Kremlin", an inside account of Hungary's 1956 uprising. One of the most insidious aspects of Soviet totalitarianism was the falsification of history and the effective use of the "big lie." This vile tactic is alive and well today in the world of the liberal/left.
"The Big Lie"? And would "The Big Lie" include such as: "Yes, absolutely, in this day and age, our nation absolutely can spend its way to a tremendous prosperity—those who decry our totally new innovations are simply wrong, like a stick-in-the-mud; the reason why the fruits of the stimulus package are so weak is because it was about 1/5 the size it should have been. And if people wanna work, if someone really wants to work, there's always something somewhere they can do. But the point is, they don't really absolutely HAVE TO work. Think about it: people need money to spend—because, after all is said and done, spending money is what an ECONOMY is all about—how can any one in their right mind deny that?".
I've got a question. Did this agency,this Service 7 have any operations in the United States? Were there any deaths of Bulgarian defectors in this country like there were in Europe?
During the war in Iraq, allied forces came across a note from Russia to Saddam, offering the services of their assassins in the West. That didn't happen with the old Soviet Union, that happened with new Russia.
Here is another scary item – this one from the time of the USSR:
"Colonel Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov (aka Ken Alibek), was deputy director of Biopreparat, a large Soviet biological warfare development program prior to his defection in 1992 to the United States. He published his memoirs, Biohazard, in 1998. In his book, he describes a top secret covert KGB development program, codenamed Fleta (Flute). He learned about the project but could not penetrate it because of its extreme secrecy. Nevertheless, he was able to learn enough to establish its mission: the development of psycho-active drugs and neuro-toxins to "alter personalities and modify human behavior".
The Bulgarian program was just a continuation of the first Soviet intelligence wet operations after the Revolution, which were in turn a continuation of the Czarist efforts to eliminate emigre anti-Czarist opposition in France and other European countries. The assassination of Trotsky in Mexico was a more recent case. 9Nothing new and still continuing, but not PC.