Document:The Markov and Maxwell Murders - Wikispooks
9 December 2000. Thanks to G.
These are a series of postings by Gordon Logan to the Web site of former MI5 officer David Shayler ("Shaylergate") which is no longer active. David Shayler said at a public meeting on 10 November 2000 that he closed the site after it came under sustained attack.
See Mr. Logan's most recent presentation: http://cryptome.org/markov-file.htm
The Burden of the Past (supercedes previous three versions)
From: Gordon Logan
Date: 03 Nov 1999
Time: 07:29:01
Comments
The Burden of the Past (supercedes previous three versions)
The murder of Robert Maxwell was MI6's most costly blunder (to Cap'n Bob's pensioners at least). A video of the real autopsy (for his life assurance) was made in Israel and was the subject of extensive coverage in Paris Match in January 1992. Maxwell had been beaten up in his state room so as to get him to divulge the numbers of the combination lock of his safe. He was finally stabbed in the abdomen and thrown overboard. Of course, all this was ignored by the British media, and certainly by Tom Bower. Why was it considered necessary to murder Maxwell?
Well, about six weeks prior to his murder he had received a visit from Andrei Loukanov, the former communist Prime Minister of Bulgaria, who was probably Maxwell's closest associate in the Eastern Bloc. Loukanov gave Maxwell a selection of documents, including no doubt tapes, from the Markov file. They related to the famous Bulgarian Umbrella case - the murder of Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov in London in September 1978. MI6 had paid the son of General Nanka Serkedzhieva, the Keeper of the Bulgarian State Security archive, the sum of fifty thousand dollars in Singapore to have the file destroyed.
The trial of Gen. Vlado Todorov for the file's destruction was a charade merely for the form. (A copy of the Markov file existed in Moscow, and was hastily removed from public access at MI6's request after the Moscow coup of August 1991.)
The murder of Markov and the attempt to kill another defector, Vladimir Kostov, in Paris a few weeks earlier both involved the use of iridium pellets laced with rycin. Two defectors, two pellets - therefore made in KGB, obviously. However, the whole truth is not so simple.
The organiser of the killings was none other than a remarkable double agent, Mrs Mercia MacDermott, who must certainly have been betrayed by Aldrich Ames in 1985, when her star in Bulgaria visibly began to decline. After her unmasking she remained in Bulgaria for a few more years as part of the cover-up. Her detection provided the Bulgarian State Security with a trump card that stood it in very good steed in the years after the end of the Cold War.
Mrs MacDermott had distinguished herself by surpassing the efforts of the communist authors in writing readable biographies of the country's national heroes. She was (and is) a household name in Bulgaria and was greatly respected by Politburo Secretary for Ideology Alexander Lilov, who was at that time seeking (with KGB approval) to become Zhivkov's heir apparent.
It was decided to have Markov murdered on Zhivkov's birthday. Markov had been staked out in London prior to his murder by another old English lady, a Mrs Bartlett, who of course had no idea she was really working for MI6. Immediately before the killing, Mrs Bartlett was conveniently flown to Sofia, where she still lives.
Baroness Park (now retired) referred to the murder of Markov in a Panoramainterview a few years ago, when she explained how MI6 liked to get their enemies to do their dirty work for them. That Markov should be got rid of was suggested by one short sentence in Alexander Lilov's ear: "He's not very discrete, is he?" Mrs MacDermott went on to steer matters to their final conclusion on Waterloo Bridge.
How do I know these things? Well firstly, because in April 1991, I paid a visit to British Vice Consul Graham Wicks in his office, and put it to him that Mrs MacDermott was behind the Markov murder. Graham did not react. I then told him that I had been told that Mrs. MacDermott had been a British agent. Graham immediately turned grey, and seemed to age twenty years.
The attacks on Markov and Kostov were a brilliant propaganda coup for MI6, and were intended be the final masterpiece of Sir Maurice Oldfield, prior to his retirement. The problem of course was that the homosexual Oldfield discounted Markov's wife, who had loved her husband very much, and has spent twenty years (and a large amount of money) trying to bring his murderers to book.
We shall pass over the appalling taste underlying the exploitation of Markov's widow for over twenty years for propaganda purposes.
In Bulgaria itself, the Markov skeleton has meant that the Bulgarian State Security has never been properly cleaned up, with devastating consequences for the country throughout the nineties (although things have improved somewhat in the last year or so). Loukanov had been sent to Maxwell by Vladimir Kryuchkov, who was languishing with his associates in prison after the failure of the Moscow Coup of August 1991. Kryuchkov had been hoping to use Maxwell to pressure the British so that they in turn would pressure Yeltsin for leniency for the plotters. As it turns out, the plotters got leniency anyway.
Had Maxwell lived, he would probably have got himself out of debt. At the time, both Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch were investing heavily in satellite TV, which of course has proved to be a gold mine for Murdoch, and no doubt would have been one for Maxwell. Maxwell's family know that he was murdered and no doubt know who was responsible. Hence the remarkable charade of the Maxwell brothers' court case.
Dozens of MI6 officers and diplomats have been faced with the unpleasant task of lying to, and bamboozling Markov's widow, Annabella, and this has caused considerable resentment in the Foreign Office. It is no accident that Sir Richard Stagg, who is now our Ambassador to Sofia, was Cultural Attache there in the late seventies and early eighties and was involved in liaising with Mrs MacDermott, through an intermediary of course. An old hand like Richard was most suitable for what remains a very sticky posting.
Why am I divulging all this? Well, mainly because keeping it to myself has done me no good at all - quite the reverse. This is because MI6 is a lot less focussed than it used to be. To put it bluntly, bitter experience has proved the Service to be too stupid to deal with. Their monstrosity on the Thames will do them no good at all, as they well know. Anyway, it seems to me that the Markov and Maxwell murders need to be finally brought out into the open, before MI6 can have any hope of passing into new and cleaner hands. In intelligence work, vanity, arrogance and hatred are the prerequisites of failure.
Last changed: November 02, 1999
Last changed: February 14, 2000
Last changed: February 14, 2000
Message to David Shayler
From: Gordon Logan
Date: 05 Nov 1999
Time: 09:51:14
Comments
There is a communication dated 24 October entitled "Rumours and Lies" from "The Ear on the Glass on the Wall". Unlike many of your Forum's contributors, the 'Ear' seems to be an insider, since he knows of my conflict with MI6. The author of the piece, which I don't understand very well, suggests that you are "ideally suited" to ferreting out the facts.
As a former insider, it seems to me that the facts that would be most useful to you right now concern the murders of Markov and Maxwell. I know a lot of what there is to know about the British involvement in the Markov murder, which I began investigating when I was in Bulgaria in the 80s. The main missing item in the Maxwell investigation is the motive, which I supply. An investigation of the cover-up would be useful. That also applies to the Markov case. You will be in a better position than I was to investigate the anomalies at the British end.
The beginning of the tragedy lies in the fact that Markov was on bad terms with Peter Uvaliev, a colleague in the Bulgarian Service of the BBC. Uvaliev was a Bulgarian diplomat who defected in the 1947, and was a respected screen writer amongst other things. They both believed that the other was a Bulgarian agent! Unfortunately for Markov, Uvaliev worked for MI6, and his hostility to Markov meant that Maurice Oldfield regarded Markov (and Kostov) as 'expendible' defectors.
The 'Ear' refers to the 'bar tender' and his sojourn in the city. I don't know who the 'bar tender' is, but maybe you do, or can find out. To the shocked bystanders in the Forum, I can only suggest that they bide their time, and watch this page. Yes, MI6 did get up to some strange things during the Cold War. To those who came to this Forum expecting (or hoping) to find nothing, I apologize.
David, you can expect no forgiveness from Lander and Spedding. The only way forward is to beat them. I.e. to drive them into a conflict with the politicians in which the latter are forced to take your side. It can be done.
You can e-mail me at georgimarkov@hotmail.com
More on the Shadow (The murders of Markov and Maxwell)
From: Gordon Logan
Date: 07 Nov 1999
Time: 12:12:30
Comments
Firstly, I would recommend that visitors to David's site should read my piece entitled 'The Shadow of the Past' - it's essential background reading. I might add that I've had quite a lot experience of the 'Great Game' - a life that few outsiders can imagine, or would even want. However, I take my hat off to Mrs MacDermott - a truly astonishing agent. But alas, what a mess she left for others to clear up.
I spent 12 years in Bulgaria, and in 1984 I almost suffered the same fate as Markov at the hands of Mrs. MacDermott, who appears to have tried to persuade the Bulgarians to liquidate me in circumstances that would have resulted in my wife appearing on TV bewailing my murder at the hands of the Bulgarians - just like Mrs Markov. But that is another story. What I state about the British involvement in the Markov case is fact, and most Sofia journalists have been briefed that there is a British involvement though they don't know quite what it is.
Back in 1991, Vladimir Bereanu, a well-known TV journalist, who wrote an important book about the Markov case, tried to get me to tell him the truth, but I'd got involved in the cover-up, so I didn't tell him. His book was to have been published in Britain, but not surprisingly the deal was cancelled. To this day nothing of any substance whatsoever has appeared in Britain about the Markov case. However in Bulgaria, a lot of interesting bits and pieces have appeared over the years.
On 21st April 1991 on Bulgarian Television, the communists leaked the code names of two foreign nationals who had received medals for the Markov assassination. The leak was in fact aimed at embarrassing the Foreign Office, but was used to justify an official secrets clampdown in Bulgaria, whuich suited the communists fine, and continues to this day - because of the MacDermott case. The code names of the two foreigners were 'Hector' and 'Atanas'. It was disclosed that 'Hector' had received the Order of Cyril and Methodius (Second Class) and 'Atanas' had received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. Now I know that Mrs MacDermott, alias 'Hector', did indeed receive the medal. In fact I know, as do all the other teachers who worked with her at the elite English Language School in Sofia, that the Headmistress of the school, a curmudgeon, refused to give Mrs MacDermott the day off to go to the award ceremony in the Bulgarian parliament! Mrs Bartlett was of course 'Atanas'.
Has there been any official admission of the involvement of British subjects in the Markov case? Indeed there has, and it's on record. In 1985, the Observer (I believe) discovered that there was an army officer working at the BBC for MI5, and that his job was to vet job applicants. This caused a bit of a stir at the time, and the officer concerned was forced to justify his presence at the BBC. He did so by announcing that one of his functions was to protect Eastern bloc defectors working at the BBC from hostile infiltrators - foreign OR British. To justify the vetting of Brits, he let slip that British citizens were known to have been involved in the Markov killing. Now this admission, although providing the officer with an excellent justification for his function, was a blunder. Were the British collaborators named? No. Were they questioned or arrested? Certainly not. I do not have a copy of the Observer article - but I remember that it was a long one. You might try to get a hold of it and read it. Why did MI5 not follow up on their lead? The reason is that those involved had to be protected.
It might interest readers to know that that there was no air gun mounted in the umbrella. The famous umbrella is just a part of the mythology. You may remember that Markov said that he had turned round to see the assailant picking up an umbrella. Of course the assassin hadn't dropped his weapon. In fact, the umbrella was merely a prop that the killer was to drop with his left hand so that he could bend down and pull out an air pistol with his right hand and shoot Markov at point blank range in the thigh. This artifice was made necessary because of the survival of Vladimir Kostov, who had been shot in the back from about twenty yards in a Paris metro station a few weeks before. The State Security chiefs in Sofia decided that the pellet can't have penetrated Kostov's clothes. In fact, it had entered Kostov's back but by a miracle he survived. The failure of the attack on Kostov caused them to order the killer to shoot Markov at point blank range in the thigh, i.e. through only one layer of clothing. Kostov may well have been told about the British connection, but if he has, he's keeping quiet. Of course, the totally fictitious air gun mounted in the umbrella has become a part of Cold War spy mythology. They've even gone so far as to publish diagrams of a specially adapted umbrella that never existed!
In fact, the term 'Bulgarian Umbrella' was used by the Bulgarian State Security mafia to refer to the immunity conferred on them by the Markov case. I remember that a former Bulgarian agent, who had defected and decided to write his memoirs in 1991, thinking it was safe to do so, died in strange circumstances (threats from unknown Bulgarian visitors in white coats as he lay dying) of a strange infection in an Augsburg hospital. His family received threats in the name of the 'Bulgarian Umbrella', although it's quite possible that it was another agency that killed him. The MacDermott case created a security minefield in Bulgaria too - but this is not the place to discuss that... Suffice it to say that all her activities resulted in blanket cover-up that include physical liquidations up to the rank of Army general and State Security general - one of each that I know of.
As the regards the Maxwell case, back in 1991 I had long conversations about Cold War secrets with retired (pro-monarchist) Bulgarian intelligence officers. We knew that Lukanov had copied the Markov file because it was reported in the Bulgarian newspapers not long before Lukanov left Sofia to visit Maxwell. I and my friends assumed that Lukanov gave Maxwell the file, simply because it was the natural thing to do. Who else could he give it to? Maxwell was ideally suited to putting the file to use on behalf of the hardliners.
Another important aspect of the Markov case is that, according to General Kalugin (who incidentally is on record as referring to the fact that there is something about the Markov case that the British want covered up) it was Vladimir Kryuchkov himself, who as Head of the First Directorate, 'sold' (Mrs MacDermott's) idea of the poison pellets to Yuri Andropov. Kryuchkov was furious when he later discovered how the British had tricked him.
When I discovered (from a KGB agent) about Kryuchkov's fury, I got to work on it. The result was that I exposed Lilov's role in the Markov killing (amongst other things) in the Bulgarian press in August 1991. There was a TV debate between CP boss Lilov and opposition leader Philip Dimitrov, who became Prime Minister a few months later and is now Ambassador to Washington. On the Tuesday before the Moscow Coup I visited Dimitrov in his office and told him to get in touch with the President to tell him that behind Lilov was a British agent provocateur, Mrs MacDermott. The same day, President Zhelev fired the two chiefs of the Intelligence Service.
That night in Moscow, Vladimir Kryuchkov decided to launch his coup - instead of the State of Emergency which had been agreed on with Gorbachov and was to have been voted by the Supreme Soviet at the end of August. Thus there was a fundamental psychological split between Kryuchkov and the other plotters, whom he unexpectedly summoned to the KGB at the weekend. None of them would have known about the Bulgarian connection - except probably KGB General Boris Pugo - and we all know what happened to him. In this connection, you may remember that Gen. Varennikov has repeatedly referred to the coup as being a 'Western provocation' and the 'provocation of the century'. Whether it was or not I don't know. I kept in touch with our Head of Chancery, Les Buchanan, and sounded him out over the phone before taking steps, but he certainly didn't give me any orders. Incidentally, a letter that I wrote to Les has disappeared from concealment in my home in Scotland. It was the only thing that I ever committed to writing on Mrs. MacDermott.
By the way, I was also married to Zhivkov's ex-mistress. I ws the subject of a front page article in a Bulgarian newspaper on 9th February 1996. In fact the journalists were pro-Zyuganov communists who were trying to get me to go public on Mrs. MacDermott. The headline in Bulgarian says: 'British agent divorces Tato's (i.e. Zhivkov's) mistress. Of course, I was never a British agent, I just made them an offer they couldn't refuse.
THE MARKOV AND MAXWELL MURDERS COME HOME TO ROOST IN WESTMISTER.
From: Gordon Logan
Date: 14 Feb 2000
Time: 14:27:04
Comments
The publication on the internet of report CX95/53452 on the Ghadafi assassination plot indicates another crack in the secret state. In Westminster, the Markov and Maxwell murders have also broken surface. Two weeks ago, I sent a rather detailed briefing to 39 Members of Parliament on the role of MI6 in instigating the 'Bulgarian' umbrella murder in 1978, and in the murder of Robert Maxwell, which cost the taxpayer 650 million quid (or three times the annual budget of MI6). The replies received so far are mainly from MPs or ministers that have already had run ins with the security services.
The MPs that have been co-opted into the Markov/Maxwell Murders Contact Group are:
Gerry Adams, Martin Bell, Stuart Bell, Tony Benn, Lord Bethell, Tony Blair, Paul Boateng, Gordon Brown, Ann Campbell, Dale Campbell-Savours, Charles Clarke, Iain Coleman, Robin Cook, Jeremy Corbyn, Frank Dobson, Jim Fitzpatrick, George Foulkes, Ian Gibson, William Haig, Peter Hain, Harriet Harman, Edward Heath, Patricia Hewitt, Margaret Hodge, Simon Hughes, Glenda Jackson, Tessa Jowell, Oona King, Gerald Kaufman, Martin Linton, Ken Livingstone, John Prescott, Marjorie Mowlam, Jeff Rooker, Brian Sedgemore, Clare Short, Jack Straw, Dennis Skinner, Teddy Taylor.
The text of the covering letter was:
Dear _____,
The Markov and Maxwell murders, which are in fact directly related, are the crown jewels of MI6 murders, and require revisiting. David Connett of theExpress and two other journalists came to see me to examine the material and have said that they would like to do a story on it. Whether they will be able to get it published is another matter.
The murder of Markov, whom the Bulgarians were tricked into killing by a double agent, aimed at the cynical exploitation of his widow, and displays the sustained evil and vanity of the secret state at its worst. Stalin himself would have been impressed. The obvious murder of Maxwell revealed the British media to be docile and invertebrate. Maxwell had selected a crew of ex-servicemen and ex-policemen thinking that MI6 would not dare to compromise them and itself. He was wrong. An obvious murder that would have been deemed clumsy and botched in most other countries of the world, sailed past the nose of the British public as an accident. No country deserves such sleepy politicians and newspapers - or such bloated and contemptuous security services.
Before he was murdered Markov wrote to a friend expressing doubts about our 'tattered democracy'. If he was wrong, you may like to table the following question to the Prime Minister:
'Baroness Park of MI6 clearly stated a few years ago on Panorama that an MI6 agent had brought about the murder of an un-named individual with the following sentence: "He's not very discreet, is he?" Would MI6 like to state the name of the individual whose murder was brought about in this fashion? If not, would MI6 care to deny that the victim was Georgi Markov, the anti-communist broadcaster who was murdered in London in 1978?'
I would be most grateful if you could ensure a brief acknowledgment of the receipt of this letter.
Yours sincerely,
Gordon Logan
Lastly, visitors to Shaylergate might like to know that Jane Tienne, the Cambridge lady who was, in her won words 'ruined' after trying to publish a book that merely suggested MI6 involvement in the Markov murder, is now incommunicado. I spoke to her twice. The first time she was animated and spoke freely. The second time, she was frightened. I passed her phone number to a few interested parties, so that they could hear the state that the security services had reduced her to. She was telephoned by some journalists wishing to get hold of a copy of the suppressed book, she refused, and her phone is now dead.
I posted an article entitle MI6 and the Markov and Maxwell Murders on 7th Jan. It's under six yards of spam (produced at taxpayers expense, I suspect), if you have the patience to scroll down that far.
Last changed: February 14, 2000
The Markov/Maxwell stain is spreading.
From: Gordon Logan
Date: 25 Feb 2000
Time: 00:16:35
Comments
I flew into Sofia, Bulgaria last Friday, planted a few mines, and left on Saturday night for the Emirates en route for Tashkent, where I am enjoying myself. On the night of my arrival, Russian TV News did a story on the Markov murder, and Robin Cook turned up a few days later in Moscow, to see Vladimir Putin about Chechnya, and also no doubt to see whether Putin would help to get MI6 out of the disastrous mess it has got itself into over the Markov and Maxwell murders.
The previous Thursday, a file of 120 pages arrived in the House of Commons. It has already been described by one MP as 'fascinating and frightening'. The following day, ex-President Bush telephoned ex-President Yeltsin, no doubt to tell him that the clowns of MI6 had fucked up totally and allowed the Moscow coup story to leak all over the place.
The question now is: When will Tony Blair (and the political class in general) decide to tackle the two security services, now that David Shayler and myself have proved that they are run by idiots and scoundrels?
For visitors who haven't read the article on the Markov and Maxwell murders, it was posted on Jan 7th on this Forum, and can be found under the spam.
Last changed: February 25, 2000
JOURNALISTS AND MPs, CLICK HERE!
From: Gordon Logan
Date: 15 Mar 2000
Time: 02:54:44
Comments
You have reached the right place. Some journalists have expressed interest in my articles on the Markov murder and the Moscow Coup. This is a twelve page article that recapitulates everything in the other articles I wrote. There is also additional material on the Moscow Coup. I will be visiting Bulgaria and Britain during the next three weeks. Anybody who wants to get in touch with me can find me at georgimarkov@hotmail.com.
I hear that MI6 Chief David Spedding is in the doghouse. I look forward to getting the rat out and into a less demanding job during the New Year. It seems that MI6 is spamming the site. Well, I've got news for you, guys and gals. You're too late, by a long chalk. What's more, if the spamming doesn't stop, this stuff will go up once a week. So bugger off and have a nice Christmas!
MI6 AND THE MURDERS OF GEORGI MARKOV AND ROBERT MAXWELL
1. The link between the murders of Georgi Markov and Robert Maxwell
The murder of Robert Maxwell was MI6's most costly blunder (for Cap'n Bob's pensioners at least). A video of the second autopsy (the real one, for his life assurance) was made in Israel and was the subject of extensive coverage in Paris Match in January 1992. Maxwell had been beaten up in his state room so as to get him to divulge the numbers of the combination lock of his safe. He was finally stabbed in the abdomen and thrown overboard. Of course, all this was ignored by the British media, and certainly by Tom Bower.
Why was it considered necessary to murder Maxwell? Well, some weeks prior to his murder he had received a visit from Andrei Lukanov, the former communist Prime Minister of Bulgaria, who was probably Maxwell's closest associate in the Eastern Bloc. Lukanov gave Maxwell a selection of documents, including no doubt audio cassettes, from the Markov file. They documents related to the famous Bulgarian umbrella case - the murder of Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov in London in September 1978.
MI6 had paid the son of General Nanka Serkedzhieva, the keeper of the Bulgarian State Security archives, the sum of fifty thousand dollars in Singapore to have the file destroyed. (Thus, the trial of Gen. Vlado Todorov for the file's destruction was a charade. A copy of the Markov file existed in Moscow, and was hastily removed from public access at MI6's request after the Moscow coup of August 1991.) The murder of Markov on September 7th 1978 and the attempt to kill another defector, Vladimir Kostov, in Paris a few weeks earlier both involved the use of platinum pellets containing the very potent toxin, ricin.
Two Bulgarian defectors, two pellets - the culprits were obvious. The truth however is not so simple. The organiser of the killings was none other than a remarkable double agent, Mrs. Mercia Macdermott, who must certainly have been betrayed by Aldrich Ames in 1985, when her star in Bulgaria visibly began to decline. After her unmasking she remained in Bulgaria for a few more years as part of the cover-up.
Her detection provided the Bulgarian State Security with a trump card that stood it in very good steed in the years after the end of the Cold War. Mrs. Macdermott was (and is) a household name in Bulgaria. During the seventies she had distinguished herself by surpassing the efforts of the communist authors in writing readable biographies of the country's national heroes. She was greatly respected by Politburo Secretary for Ideology Alexander Lilov, who was at that time seeking (with KGB approval) to become the heir of the long-standing Bulgarian dictator, Todor Zhivkov.
It was decided to have Markov murdered on Zhivkov's birthday. Markov had been staked out in London prior to his murder by another elderly English lady, a Mrs. Bartlett, who of course had no idea she was really working for MI6. Immediately before the killing, Mrs. Bartlett was conveniently flown to Sofia, where she still lives.
The MI6 veteran, Baroness Park (now retired), in a remarkably indiscrete tribute to female secret agents, referred to the murder of Markov in a Panoramainterview a few years ago, when she explained how MI6 liked to get their enemies to do their dirty work for them. That Markov should be got rid of was suggested by one short sentence in Alexander Lilov's ear: "He's not very discrete, is he?" Mrs. Macdermott went on to steer matters to their final conclusion on Waterloo Bridge.
How did I come to learn these things? Well firstly, because in April 1991, I paid a visit to British Vice Consul Graham Wicks in his office, and put it to him that Mrs. Macdermott was behind the Markov murder. Graham did not react. I then told him that I had been told that Mrs. Macdermott had been a British agent. His reaction was dramatic. Graham's face literally turned grey, and seemed to age twenty years.
The attacks on Markov and Kostov were a brilliant propaganda coup for MI6, and were intended be the final masterpiece of Sir Maurice Oldfield, prior to his retirement. The problem of course was that the bachelor Oldfield had discounted Markov's wife, who had loved her husband very much, and has spent twenty years (and a large amount of money) trying to bring his murderers to book.
We shall pass over the appalling taste underlying the exploitation of Markov's widow for over twenty years for propaganda purposes.
In Bulgaria itself, the Markov skeleton has meant that the Bulgarian State Security has never been properly cleaned up, with devastating consequences for the country throughout the nineties (although things have improved somewhat in the last year or so).
Andrei Lukanov had been sent to Maxwell by Vladimir Kryuchkov, who was languishing with his associates in prison after the failure of the Moscow Coup of August 1991. Kryuchkov had been hoping to use Maxwell to pressure the British so that they in turn would pressure Yeltsin for leniency for the plotters. As it turns out, the plotters got leniency anyway. Had Maxwell lived, he would probably have got himself out of debt.
At the time, both Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch were investing heavily in satellite TV, which of course has proved to be a gold mine for Murdoch, and no doubt would have been one for Maxwell. Maxwell's family know that he was murdered and no doubt know who was responsible. Hence the remarkable charade of the Maxwell brothers' court case.
Over the last twenty years, dozens of MI6 officers and diplomats have been faced with the unpleasant task of lying to, and bamboozling Markov's widow, Annabel, and this has caused considerable resentment in the Foreign Office. It is no accident that Sir Richard Stagg, who is now our Ambassador to Sofia, was Cultural Attache there in the late seventies and early eighties and was involved in liaising with Mrs. Macdermott, through an intermediary of course. An old hand like Richard was most suitable for what remains a sticky posting.
(2) The murder of Georgi Markov
I spent 12 years in Bulgaria, and, in the summer of 1984, almost suffered the same fate as Markov at the hands of Mrs. Macdermott, who appears to have tried to persuade the Bulgarians to liquidate me in circumstances that would have resulted in my ex-wife (with whom I had remained on good terms) appearing on the Six O'clock News bewailing my murder at the hands of the Bulgarians - just like Mrs. Markov. But that is another story.
What I state about the British involvement in the Markov case is fact, and most Sofia journalists have been briefed that there is a British involvement though they don't know quite what it is. Back in 1991, Vladimir Bereanu, a well-known TV journalist, who wrote an important book about the Markov case, tried to get me to tell him the truth, but I'd got involved in the cover-up, so I didn't tell him. His book was to have been published in Britain, but not surprisingly the deal was cancelled. To this day nothing of much substance has appeared in Britain about the Markov case. In Bulgaria, however, a lot of interesting bits and pieces have appeared over the years.
On 21st April 1991 on Bulgarian Television, the communists leaked the code names of two foreign nationals who had received medals for the Markov assassination. The leak was in fact aimed at embarrassing the Foreign Office, but was used to justify an official secrets clampdown in Bulgaria, which suited the communists fine, and continues to this day - because of the Macdermott case. The code names of the two foreigners were 'Hector' and 'Atanas'. It was disclosed that 'Hector' had received the Order of Cyril and Methodius (Second Class) and 'Atanas' had received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. Now I know that Mrs. Macdermott, alias 'Hector', did indeed receive the medal.
In fact I know, as do all the other teachers who worked with her at the elite English Language School in Sofia, that the Headmistress of the school, a curmudgeon, refused to give Mrs. Macdermott the day off to go to the award ceremony in the Bulgarian parliament! Mrs. Bartlett was of course 'Atanas'. Has there been any official admission of the involvement of British subjects in the Markov case? Indeed there has, and it's on record. In 1985, the Observerdiscovered that there was an army officer working at the BBC for MI5, and that his job was to vet job applicants. This caused a bit of a stir at the time, and the officer concerned was forced to justify his presence at the BBC. He did so by announcing that one of his functions was to protect Eastern bloc defectors working at the BBC from hostile infiltrators - foreign OR British. To justify the vetting of Brits, he let slip that British citizens were known to have been involved in the Markov killing. Now this admission, although providing the officer with an excellent justification for his function, was a blunder. Were the British collaborators named? No. Were they questioned or arrested? Certainly not.
Why did MI5 not follow up on their lead? The reason is that those involved had to be protected. It might interest readers to know that that there was no air gun mounted in the umbrella. The famous umbrella is merely a part of the mythology. Before he died in hospital, Markov said that he had turned round to see the assailant picking up an umbrella. Of course the assassin hadn't dropped his weapon. In fact, the umbrella was merely a prop that the killer was to drop with his left hand so that he could bend down and pull out an air pistol with his right hand and shoot Markov at point blank range in the thigh. This artifice had been made necessary because of the survival of Vladimir Kostov, who had been shot in the back from about twenty yards in a Paris metro station a few weeks before. The Bulgarian intelligence chiefs in Sofia decided that the pellet can't have penetrated Kostov's clothes. In fact, it had entered Kostov's back but by a miracle he survived.
The failure of the attack on Kostov caused them to order the killer to shoot Markov at point blank range in the thigh, i.e. through only one layer of clothing. Kostov may well have been told about the British connection, but if he has, he's keeping quiet. Of course, the totally fictitious air gun mounted in the umbrella has become a part of Cold War spy mythology. They've even gone so far as to publish diagrams of a specially adapted umbrella that never existed! In fact, the term 'Bulgarian Umbrella' was used by the Bulgarian State Security mafia to refer to the immunity conferred on them by the Markov case.
I remember that in 1991, a former Bulgarian agent, who had defected and unwisely begun to write his memoirs, died in strange circumstances of an unusual viral infection in an Augsburg hospital. An anonymous Bulgarian visitor in a white coat threatened him as he lay dying, and later his family received threats in the name of the 'Bulgarian Umbrella'. Of course this unusual death received no publicity in the West. The Macdermott case had created a minefield.
As regards the Maxwell case, back in 1991 I had long conversations about Cold War secrets with retired (pro-monarchist) Bulgarian intelligence officers. We knew that Lukanov had copied the Markov file because it was reported in the Bulgarian newspapers not long before Lukanov left Sofia to visit Maxwell. I and my friends assumed that Lukanov gave Maxwell the file, simply because it was the natural thing to do. Maxwell was ideally suited to putting the file to use on behalf of the hardliners. The KGB involvement in the Markov murder was supervised by General Oleg Kalugin. Kalugin is an active reformer and has obligingly helped MI6 in the cover-up, in particular perpetuating the story about the non-existent 'poison' umbrella. (Although, incidentally, even he is on record as referring to the fact that there is something about the Markov case that the British want covered up.) According to Kalugin, it was Vladimir Kryuchkov himself, who as Head of the First Directorate, 'sold' Mrs. Macdermott's idea of the poison pellets to KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov. Kryuchkov was furious when he later discovered how the British had tricked him.
When I discovered (from a KGB agent) about Kryuchkov's fury, I got to work on it. The result was that I exposed Lilov's role in the Markov killing (amongst other things) in the Bulgarian press in early August 1991. There was a TV debate between CP boss Lilov and opposition leader Philip Dimitrov, who became Prime Minister a few months later and is now Ambassador to Washington. On the Tuesday before the Moscow Coup I visited Dimitrov in his office and told him to get in touch with the President to tell him that behind Lilov was a British agent provocateur, Mrs. Macdermott. The same day, President Zhelev fired the two chiefs of the Intelligence Service.
That night in Moscow, Vladimir Kryuchkov decided to launch his coup - instead of the State of Emergency which had been agreed on with Gorbachev and was to have been voted by the Supreme Soviet at the end of August. Thus there was a fundamental psychological split between Kryuchkov and the other plotters. None of them would have known about the Bulgarian connection - except probably KGB General Boris Pugo - and we all know what happened to him.
In this connection, one of the plotters, Gen. Varennikov has repeatedly referred to the coup as being a 'Western provocation' and the 'provocation of the century'. Whether it was or not I don't know. I kept in touch with our Head of Chancery, Les Buchanan, and sounded him out over the phone before taking steps, but he certainly didn't give me any orders.
(3) Peter Uvaliev and the murder of Georgi Markov
What was the reason for the deterioration in the attitude of MI6 chief Maurice Oldfield to Georgi Markov? Few people in Britain know about this, virtually all of them being MI5 or MI6 officers. Mrs. Markov probably knows that her husband was on poor terms with a man called Peter Uvaliev. Uvaliev, who died recently, was a man of many talents. Amongst other things he distinguished himself as a screenwriter. He had been a diplomat at the Bulgarian embassy in London after the war, and defected in 1947, and became well-connected with the British security services. Being well aware of the Great Wall that existed between the rather well-policed British media, and the leaky post-Zhivkov media, and feeling confident that nothing of what he said would be allowed to leak back into the British media, Uvaliev permitted himself some remarkable indiscretions in the Bulgarian newspapers.
As a superior of Markov at the BBC, he describes their poor relationship. He tells, amongst other things, how Markov had difficulty finding inspiration to write in London, and that Markov had not been very happy at the BBC, (not surprisingly with his superior Uvaliev as an enemy) and had been considering moving to Germany permanently, to work for Deutsche Welle and/or Radio Free Europe. Relations between Uvaliev and Markov were indeed so bad that at one point both believed the other to be a Bulgarian agent. (Perhaps Mrs. Markov remembers her husband talking about this).
In the confined hothouse of MI6, Uvaliev's hostility inevitably became Oldfield's hostility, all the more so since the murder of Markov would achieve enormous dividends for what is known in the trade as 'agent enhancement', and of course for the propaganda war, especially after the Bulgarians had failed to kill Markov twice, and Mrs. Macdermott intervened with the brilliant idea of the poison pellets, one for Kostov and one for Markov - obviously Lubyanka technology. The murder of Markov, initiated by Mrs. Macdermott through her puppet, Politburo Secretary for Ideology, (and KGB/MI6 supported candidate for Zhivkov's job) Alexander Lilov, would make them partners for life, as it were.
So true is this, even after her exposure 14 years ago, that Mrs. Macdermott, who to my knowledge has never returned to her beloved Bulgaria since 1989, continues to write Mr Lilov comradely letters of communist solidarity from time to time. These are of course for public show, and get printed in the communist press. Through Mrs. Macdermott, Oldfield was able to establish that Markov was indeed alone, and that he did not have any clandestine contact with the Bulgarian Intelligence. However, the hostility remained, and above all, a sacrifice was needed. As Baroness Park proudly told Panorama viewers, the crucial suggestion was conveyed by the sentence to Lilov, "He's not very discrete, is he?" The infernal machine was put into operation with the results that we all know.
Most people forget that there was a second sudden death in the BBC Bulgarian service in September 1978 that went virtually unnoticed. Vladimir Simeonov, a colleague of Markov's, was found dead in his home soon after the Markov murder. He had been questioned by Scotland Yard in connection with Markov's death for all of two days. Simeonov didn't drink, but there were two washed glasses in the sink with no fingerprints. The mark of a bottle was on the tablecloth, but the bottle was missing. That was how Scotland Yard protected its witnesses in those days. To this day, Scotland Yard has said nothing about those two days of interrogation, and there seems to have been no attempt to identify Simeonov's last visitor. If, as is likely, Simeonov was working for the Bulgarians, wouldn't he have been more useful to Scotland Yard alive?
Before we finish with the salient points of the Markov case, it might be worthwhile quoting the seemingly enigmatic words of communist Interior Minister Semerdzhiev in 1991, who admitted that some of his Ministry's officers 'may have been involved in the Markov case", but categorically denied that they had organized it. Quite right, the murder of Georgi Markov was a straightforward case of sub-contracting. Having paid in 1991 for the destruction of the Markov File, and murdered Robert Maxwell in order to get hold of the copy of the file given to him by former communist Prime Minister Andrei Lukanov, the Security Services have managed to sell the idea that an investigation cannot proceed without the requisite KGB file. This fudge has been raised again in the recent case of Melitta Norwood, the atom spy, and seems to have become a permanent addition to the 'armory'of the security services. No file, no case. In effect, the only acceptable form of evidence has become documents provided the guilty party. The reader can imagine the judicial paralysis that would arise if that absurd principle was applied across the board.
The truth is that the Security Services have too often been mired by court cases, and would much rather use more effective and discrete instruments for dealing with people they don't like, such as troublesome MPs. Targets can be damaged or destroyed by their many friends in the media, for example. Few MPs would relish the enmity of the Security Service, and blackmail is not merely the prerogative of party whips. The age of digitalization and 'techint' provides a remarkable range of new and easy opportunities for discrete and deniable personal surveillance and intervention. Targets simply start being unlucky! Unfortunately these methods proved unsuccessful in dealing with real enemies, such as terrorists, as the repeated bombing of London by the IRA has proved.
(4) The murder of Lyudmila Zhivkova
The prerequisite for the British involvement in the Markov murder was of course the remarkable influence of Mrs. Macdermott over Alexander Lilov, Politburo Secretary for Ideology. Lilov's responsibility for ideology meant that that in the highly centralized system he was directly responsible for control over dissident elements (like Markov), with access to the enormous files of the Sixth Directorate on millions of Bulgarians.
Lilov was also responsible for orthodoxy in the media and the arts, including writers, artists and film-makers. He was above all backed by both the KGB and the British Intelligence Service for the top job - that of General Secretary of the Politburo - Zhivkov's job. Clearly it would have been of considerable benefit to the West, if Mrs. Macdermott's 'puppet' could be both protected and, at a suitable time, promoted.
Unfortunately, at the beginning of the Eighties, a crisis in Lilov's career began to develop. Lilov was very close to Zhivkov's daughter, Lyudmila. In fact, he had been her lover, and had used her to climb the party hierarchy by leaps and bounds. Lyudmila was also a member of the Politburo, and held the position of Minister of Culture.
Now Lyudmila, although very close indeed to Lilov, was in fact his rival in every respect, though she was too naïve to realize it. She regularly used to extricate writers and artists from the clutches of the much feared Sixth Directorate. She promoted oriental philosophy and 'decadent' art forms, travelling around the world and organizing outlandish exhibitions in Sofia on her return. None of these enterprises required direct support from Lilov, in particular since Lyudmila used General Tincho Vodenicharov, who worked in the State Council with Zhivkov, to get support directly from her father if needed. Thus she, as Minister of Culture, and Lilov, as Politburo ideology secretary did not come into direct conflict. Indeed, she regarded Lilov as her closest ally in the Politburo.
In 1981, however, matters reached a crisis. Lyudmila, who was perceived by both the KGB and the Intelligence Service as a serious threat to Lilov's ambitions, asked him to call a meeting of the Politburo at short notice, in her father's absence, and move that the members of the Politburo vote to have Lyudmila replace her father as General Secretary. Of course it was a crackpot scheme, and Lilov betrayed Ludmila, and leaked her naïve proposal to the Russians certainly, though probably not to Zhivkov, for fear of alienating Lyudmila.
However, one way or another, Zhivkov got to know, and had a dreadful row with his daughter. She realized that only Lilov could have betrayed her, and overnight Lyudmila, on whom Lilov had depended so much in the past, became his mortal enemy. The KGB realized that the conflict between father and daughter would soon be healed, but that Lilov's career, dependent on the caprices of the Zhivkovs, was finished.
As a result, the decision was taken to poison Lyudmila. She went into a rapid decline, which is described by her father, and died on 21st July 1991. One source in Sofia claimed that she had been poisoned by means of a French perfume spray, given as a present to her by Lilov personally.
The above story was probably the most terrible secret of Zhivkov's Bulgaria, and Bulgarians now believe that many people were eliminated in order to guard the secret. They include both the above-mentioned General Vodenicharov, and State Security General Kashev. I learnt the story from a retired military counter-intelligence officer, who had been a close personal friend of General Vodenicharov. I didn't publish it until December 1991. After receiving some copies of the newspaper direct from the printers, I walked round to the Parliament and gave them to a Communist MP whom I knew, Elena Poptodorova.
I then went home and turned on the TV. The parliament proceedings were being shown live. Interestingly enough, Alexander Lilov wasn't sitting in his leader's seat on the front bench. He was sitting, visibly slumped, on a back bench. I mentioned above that the Intelligence Service had no interest in seeing Lyudmila supplant Zhivkov, since Lilov was 'their man', owing to his confidence in Mrs. Macdermott, which had been greatly enhanced by the Markov murder - a very effective warning to Bulgarian defectors throughout the world not to step out of line.
The question then arises: did Mrs. Macdermott have anything to do with Lyudmila's murder? Clearly Lyudmila's ambitions had been an accident waiting to happen for Lilov, and therefore for the British Intelligence Service. Did Mrs. Macdermott seek to challenge Lyudmila's cultural policy in any way? Indeed she did, in fact I was told that she used her influence behind the scenes to destroy the career of Bulgaria's most talented film director, Georgi Dyulgherov, who was banished to a provincial theatre, and has remained a nonentity to this day.
But did she play a role in bringing about the murder of Lyudmila? It is possible. I remember a conversation that I had in 1981 with the well-known journalist (and MI6 agent) Nora Beloff, who had visited me at home at the time of Lyudmila's funeral. Nora simply said, "Oh, the Russians murdered her of course!" The confidence with which this was said surprised me, and I challenged her, but she was adamant.
In 1991, as things began to leak out, I remembered the conversation with Nora, and wondered how it was that MI6 had received accurate news so quickly of the Soviet involvement in Lyudmila's murder - this was not the sort of information that Moscow Centre would have passed on even to Oleg Gordievsky, and Nora had got it within a day or two of the death of Lyudmila. How had that been possible?
I also remembered Mrs. Macdermott at parties with Bulgarians. She was a devoted defender of a nationalist communist orthodoxy that she made all her own. Alternately praising the Bulgaria's national heroes (whom she had become the top authority on) and carping on about how they were insufficiently respected by the up and coming cultural whippersnappers (whom Lyudmila was defending). Indeed, the only sort of culture Mercia had any time for was old Bulgarian folk songs about national heroes - the sort of stuff that Lilov had pouring out of every radio in every shop and restaurant.
There were many opportunities for compromising Lyudmila. The fact that she had studied history at Oxford, then the home town of Mrs. Macdermott (and of course other MI6 people) suggested a long-standing MI6 interest in Zhivkov's daughter. Perhaps her decadent cultural interests had been encouraged. It would have been easy for MI6 to facilitate some of the many international invitations she received. Lyudmila was indeed invited everywhere - like no other Eastern bloc politician.
When I began my investigation of Lilov in April 1991, I had no suspicions regarding Intelligence Service involvement in the murder of Lyudmila. Those suspicions were aroused in June 1991 quite by accident, when I telephoned our Head of Chancery, Les Buchanan, and after exchanging a few greetings, I told him, "By the way, it seems that Alexander Lilov is behind the murder of Lyudmila Zhivkova."
Les let out a gasp of shock over the phone - as if it was a British secret, as well as Lilov's. I was very surprised by his reaction. Nora Belov had been so casual and matter of fact when she had told me in July 1981 that the KGB had killed Lyudmila, and now ten years on our Head of Chancery was reacting with shock. Why should a British diplomat give a toss in 1991 about who killed Lyudmila Zhivkova ten years earlier?
Last changed: March 15, 2000
MI6 and the Markov and Maxwell Murders
From: Gordon Logan
Date: 14 Mar 2000
Time: 07:13:19
Comments
This article is a part of a 120-page file which was placed in the documents section of the House of Commons Library a month ago. The first postings on the subject appeared on the Forum in November and were the reason for the avalanche of spam that has hit the Forum since. Vladimir 'Kompromat' Putin made sure that a story on the Markov case appeared on Moscow TV News a few days before the arrival of Robin Cook in Moscow last month, thus ensuring the docility of Cook and Blair on the Chechnya war crimes. Putin holds both copies of the Markov file, the Sofia copy having been taken to Moscow in May 1990, after MI6 paid $50,000 to the the Bulgarians for its concealment.
HOW MI6 TRICKED THE BULGARIANS INTO MURDERING GEORGI MARKOV
Summary: This story is at present being investigated by a national newspaper. The author spent twelve years in Bulgaria from 1980 to 1992. He investigated the ‘Bulgarian umbrella’ murder (of defector Georgi Markov in 1978). An MI6 double agent was responsible for tricking the Bulgarian communists into killing Georgi Markov in London in 1978, in circumstances that would clearly identify the culprits, thus creating a unique propaganda opportunity.
In 1985, MI5 announced that British subjects were involved in the Markov murder. In 1991, the Bulgarian Television announced the code names of two non-Bulgarians that received medals in 1979 for their involvement in the Markov murder. The author identifies the two agents, one of whom was a British double agent who now lives in Britain. Baroness Park referred to the agent, a woman, on Panorama in 1994, when praising the work of female agents in the Cold War, and also described her role in causing a murder, which was in fact the Markov murder. The agent was betrayed by CIA officer Aldrich Ames to the KGB in 1985.
Robert Maxwell was murdered by MI6 in 1991 because, eight weeks prior to his death, he had received transcripts and audio cassettes of the agent’s interrogation that would have incriminated MI6. The widow of Georgi Markov has been manipulated by the British security services for over twenty years, spending a large amount of her own money in futile attempts to bring her husband’s murderers to justice.
1. The link between the murders of Georgi Markov and Robert Maxwell
The murder of Robert Maxwell was MI6's most costly blunder (for Cap'n Bob's pensioners at least). A video of the second autopsy (the real one, for his life assurance) was made in Israel and was the subject of extensive coverage in the French magazine Paris Match in January 1992. Maxwell had been beaten up in his state room so as to get him to divulge the numbers of the combination lock of his safe. He was finally stabbed in the abdomen and thrown overboard. Of course, all this was ignored by the British media, and certainly by Maxwell’s MI6 approved biographer Tom Bower.
Why was it considered necessary to murder Maxwell? Well, eight weeks prior to his murder he had received a visit from Andrei Lukanov, the former communist Prime Minister of Bulgaria, who was probably Maxwell's closest associate in the Eastern Bloc. Lukanov gave Maxwell a selection of documents, including no doubt audio cassettes, from the Markov file.
The documents related to the famous Bulgarian umbrella case - the murder of Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov in London in September 1978. In 1991, MI6 had paid a Bulgarian state security officer the sum of fifty thousand dollars in Singapore to have the file concealed. A copy of the Markov file existed in the central KGB files in Moscow, and was hastily removed from public access at MI6's request after the Moscow coup of August 1991.
In fact, two defectors were attacked in 1978: Markov on September 7th and another defector, Vladimir Kostov, in Paris a few weeks earlier. Both attacks involved the use of platinum pellets containing the very potent toxin, ricin. Two Bulgarian defectors, two pellets - the culprits were obvious. The truth however is not so simple. The organiser of the killings was none other than a remarkable British double agent, Mrs. Mercia Macdermott, who must certainly have been betrayed by Aldrich Ames in 1985, when her star in Bulgaria visibly began to decline. After her unmasking she remained in Bulgaria for a few more years as part of the cover-up. Her detection provided the Bulgarian State Security with a trump card that permitted it to take outrageous liberties with the Markov investigation after the end of the Cold War.
Mrs. Macdermott was and is a well-known name in Bulgaria. During the seventies Mrs. Macdermott distinguished herself by surpassing the efforts of communist hacks in writing readable biographies of the country's national heroes, and became known in the Bulgarian press as ‘Bulgaria’s great friend’. She was greatly respected by Alexander Lilov, Politburo member responsible for ideology (and dissidents), who in 1978 was seeking (with KGB approval) to become the heir of the long-standing Bulgarian dictator, Todor Zhivkov. It was decided to have Markov murdered on Zhivkov's birthday. Markov had been staked out in London prior to his murder by another elderly English lady, a Mrs Bartlett, who of course had no idea she was really working for MI6. Immediately before the killing, Mrs. Bartlett was conveniently flown to Sofia, where she still lives.
The MI6 veteran, Baroness Park (now retired), in a remarkably indiscrete tribute to female secret agents, referred to the murder of Markov in a Panorama interview a few years ago, when she explained how MI6 liked to get their enemies to do their dirty work for them. That Markov should be got rid of was suggested by one short sentence in Alexander Lilov’s ear: "He's not very discrete, is he?" Once the communists had failed twice to kill Markov, Mrs. Macdermott intervened a second time with the cunning suggestion of the tell-tale poison pellets, which resulted in the attacks of Kostov and Markov.
In April 1991, in order to get conclusive confirmation that Mrs. Macdermott was indeed involved in the Markov murder, and was really an MI6 agent, I paid a visit to British Vice Consul Graham Wicks at the British embassy in Sofia. I put it to him that Mrs. Macdermott was behind the Markov murder. Graham reacted very calmly, as if this was old news, and expressed no surprise at all. I then told him that I had heard that Mrs. Macdermott had been a British agent. The change was, to say the least, dramatic. Graham was very shocked, his face literally turning grey. He did not even venture a denial.
The attacks on Markov and Kostov were a brilliant propaganda coup for MI6, and were intended be the final masterpiece of Director-General Sir Maurice Oldfield, prior to his retirement. The problem of course was that the bachelor Oldfield had discounted Markov's wife, who had loved her husband very much, and has spent twenty years (and a large amount of money) trying to bring his murderers to book. We shall pass over the appalling taste underlying the exploitation of Markov's widow for over twenty years for propaganda purposes. In Bulgaria itself, the Markov skeleton has meant that the Bulgarian State Security has never been properly cleaned up, with devastating consequences for the country throughout the nineties (although things have improved somewhat in the last year or so).
Andrei Lukanov had been sent to Maxwell by Vladimir Kryuchkov, who was languishing with his associates in prison after the failure of the Moscow Coup of August 1991. Kryuchkov had been hoping to use Maxwell’s influence as the owner of some of Britains’s leading newspapers to force the Foreign Office to pressure Yeltsin for leniency for the plotters. In fact, Kryuchkov himself risked being murdered like his KGB colleague General Pugo, and was hoping to use Maxwell for ‘life assurance’. As it turns out, the plotters got leniency anyway. Had Maxwell lived, he would probably have got himself out of debt. At the time, both Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch were investing heavily in satellite TV, which of course has proved to be a gold mine for Murdoch, and no doubt would have been one for Maxwell. Maxwell's family know that he was murdered and no doubt know who was responsible. Hence the remarkable charade of the Maxwell brothers' court case, and the panache with which they have trounced the DTI.
Over the last twenty years, dozens of MI6 officers and diplomats have been faced with the unpleasant task of lying to, and bamboozling Markov's widow, Annabel, and this has caused considerable resentment in the Foreign Office.
2. The murder of Georgi Markov
Since the fall of communism, most Bulgarian political journalists have been briefed that there is a British involvement in the Markov murder, though they don't know quite what it is. To this day, nothing of substance has appeared in Britain about the Markov case. In Bulgaria, however, a lot of contradictory and sometimes interesting bits and pieces have appeared over the years.
On 24th April 1991 on Bulgarian Television, the communists leaked the code names of two foreign nationals who had received medals for the Markov assassination. The leak was in fact aimed at embarrassing the Foreign Office, but was used to justify an official secrets clampdown in Bulgaria, which suited the communists fine, and continues to this day - because of the Macdermott case. The code names of the two foreigners were 'Hector' and 'Atanas'. It was disclosed that 'Hector' had received the Order of Cyril and Methodius (Second Class) and 'Atanas' had received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. Now I know that Mrs. Macdermott, alias 'Hector', did indeed receive the medal. In fact I know, as do all the other teachers who worked with her at the elite English Language School in Sofia, that the Headmistress of the school, a curmudgeon, refused to give Mrs. Macdermott the day off to go to the award ceremony in the Bulgarian parliament! Mrs. Bartlett was of course 'Atanas'.
Has there been any official admission of the involvement of British subjects in the Markov case? Indeed there has, and it's on record. In 1985, the Observerdiscovered that there was an army officer working at the BBC for MI5, and that his job was to vet job applicants. This caused a bit of a stir at the time, and the officer concerned was forced to justify his presence at the BBC. He did so by announcing that one of his functions was to protect Eastern bloc defectors working at the BBC from hostile infiltrators - foreign OR British. To justify the vetting of Brits, he let slip that British citizens were known to have been involved in the Markov killing. Now this admission, although providing the officer with an excellent justification for his function, was a blunder. Were the British collaborators named? No. Were they questioned or arrested? Certainly not. Why did MI5 not follow up on their lead? The reason is that those involved had to be protected.
It might interest readers to know that that there was no air gun mounted in the umbrella. The famous umbrella is merely a part of the mythology. Before he died in hospital, Markov said that he had turned round to see the assailant picking up an umbrella. Of course the assassin hadn't dropped his weapon. In fact, the umbrella was merely a prop that the killer was to drop with his left hand so that he could bend down and pull out an air pistol with his right hand and shoot Markov at point blank range in the thigh.
This artifice had been made necessary because of the survival of Vladimir Kostov, who had been shot in the back from about twenty yards in a Paris metro station a few weeks before. The Bulgarian intelligence chiefs in Sofia decided that the pellet can't have penetrated Kostov's clothes. In fact, it had entered Kostov's back but by a miracle he survived. The failure of the attack on Kostov caused them to order the killer to shoot Markov at point blank range in the thigh, i.e. through only one layer of clothing. Kostov may well have been told about the British connection, but if he has, he's keeping quiet. Of course, the totally fictitious air gun mounted in the umbrella has become a part of Cold War spy mythology. They've even gone so far as to publish diagrams of a specially adapted umbrella that never existed!
In fact, the term 'Bulgarian Umbrella' was used by the Bulgarian State Security mafia to refer to the immunity conferred on them by the Markov case. In early 1992, a former Bulgarian agent, Pencho Spassov, who had defected and unwisely begun to write on the Markov case, died only four weeks later of an incurable and undiagnosed fever in an Augsburg hospital. An anonymous visitor in a white coat approached Spassov as he lay dying and told him he would not survive more that five days. Later his family received threats in the name of the 'Bulgarian Umbrella'. Of course this unusual death received no publicity in the West. Mrs. Macdermott had created a minefield in which anyone who strayed was liable to be murdered.
3. Peter Uvaliev and the murder of Georgi Markov
What was the reason for the deterioration in the attitude of MI6 chief Maurice Oldfield to Georgi Markov? Mrs. Markov knows that her husband was on poor terms with a man called Peter Uvaliev. Uvaliev, who died recently, was a scholar, essayist, scriptwriter, who also broadcast, like Markov, on the Bulgarian Service of the BBC. He had been a diplomat at the Bulgarian embassy in London after the war, and defected in 1947, and became well-connected with the British security services.
In 1969, Uvaliev lured Markov out of Bulgaria with promises that he would help him to become a screen writer for the Italian cinema. After the fall of communism, being well aware of the wall that existed between the rather well-policed British media, and the leaky post-Zhivkov media, and feeling confident that nothing of what he said would be allowed to leak back into the British media, Uvaliev permitted himself some remarkable indiscretions in the Bulgarian newspapers, in a series of interviews in which he did nothing the conceal his hatred of Markov.
Five years after the fall of communism, referring to Markov’s broadcasts, he said, "I am against anybody that writes against Bulgaria. Such authors have to know that they are spitting in the wind, and that they will get it back in the face". At one point, he even suggests to his audience of unreconstructed communists that Markov might not have been murdered at all, and goes to far as to suggest that "Markov’s heirs" were out to make "easy money".
Uvaliev also tells, amongst other things, how Markov had difficulty finding inspiration to write in London, and that he had been unhappy at the BBC, (not surprisingly with the influential Uvaliev as an enemy). Relations between Uvaliev and Markov were indeed so bad that at one point both believed the other to be a Bulgarian agent
In the confined hothouse of MI6, Uvaliev's hostility inevitably became Oldfield's hostility, all the more so since the murder of Markov would improve Mrs. Macdermott’s standing with the communist State Security, and of course provide excellent material for the propaganda war, especially after the communists had failed to kill Markov twice, and Mrs. Macdermott intervened with the cunning idea of the poison pellets, one for Kostov and one for Markov - obviously KGB technology.
The murder of Markov, initiated by Mrs. Macdermott through her puppet, Alexander Lilov, a leading Politburo member, (and KGB/MI6 supported candidate for Dictator Zhivkov's job), would make them partners for life, as it were. So true is this, even after her exposure 15 years ago, that Mrs. Macdermott, who to my knowledge has never returned to her beloved Bulgaria since 1989, has written Lilov several comradely letters of communist solidarity. These are of course for public show, and get printed in the communist press.
Through Mrs. Macdermott, Oldfield was able to establish that Markov was indeed alone, and was not passing information to Bulgarian Intelligence. Not only that, he discovered that the Bulgarian defector, well known for his broadcasts criticizing the communist satraps, had been homesick, and in a fit of depression had sent a secret letter to Sofia, asking how many years he would have to serve in prison if he went back home. Markov was not the sort of defector they like in MI6.
Markov had nothing going for him amongst MI6’s cold warriors, after hundreds of anti-communist broadcasts he was a squeezed lemon that could be thrown away. Morover, a sacrifice was needed - good for Fleet Street, good for the Free World. As Baroness Park proudly told Panorama viewers, the crucial suggestion was conveyed by the sentence to Lilov, "He's not very discrete, is he?" She was dead right, Georgi Markov hadn’t been at all discrete. Tricking the communists into killing him can’t have been very difficult..
Most people forget that there was a second sudden death in the BBC Bulgarian service in September 1978 that went virtually unnoticed. Vladimir Simeonov, a young colleague of Markov’s, was found dead in his home soon after the Markov murder. He had been questioned by Scotland Yard in connection with Markov’s death for all of two days. Simeonov didn’t drink, but there were two washed glasses in the sink with no fingerprints. The mark of a bottle was on the tablecloth, but the bottle was missing. Somebody (from the BBC?) had paid Simeonov a visit, no doubt to get him to drink ‘to the memory of poor Georgi’.
That was how Scotland Yard protected its witnesses in those days. To this day, Scotland Yard has said nothing about those two days of interrogation, and there seems to have been no attempt to identify Simeonov’s last visitor. If, as is likely, Simeonov was working for the Bulgarians, wouldn’t he have been more useful to Scotland Yard alive?
Before we finish with the salient points of the Markov case, it might be worthwhile quoting the seemingly enigmatic words of communist Interior Minister Semerdzhiev in 1991, who admitted that some of his Ministry’s officers ‘may have been involved in the Markov case", but categorically denied that they had organized it. Quite right, the murder of Georgi Markov was a straightforward case of sub-contracting.
4. Conclusion
Having paid in 1991 for the disappearance of the Markov File, and murdered Robert Maxwell in order to get hold of the material from the file given to him by former communist Prime Minister Andrei Lukanov, the Security Services have managed to sell the idea that an investigation cannot proceed without the requisite KGB file. This fudge has been raised again in the recent case of Melitta Norwood, the atom spy, and seems to have become a permanent addition to the ‘armory’ of the security services. No file, no case. In effect, the only acceptable form of evidence has become documents provided by the guilty party. The reader can imagine the judicial paralysis that would arise if that absurd principle was applied across the board.
The truth is that the Security Services have too often been mired by court cases, and would much rather use more effective and discrete instruments for dealing with people they don’t like, such as troublesome MPs. Targets can be damaged or destroyed by their many friends in the media, for example. Few MPs would relish the enmity of the Security Services, and blackmail is not merely the prerogative of party whips. The age of digitalization and ‘techint’ provides a remarkable range of new and easy opportunities for discrete and deniable personal surveillance and intervention. Unfortunately these methods have proved unsuccessful in dealing with real enemies, such as terrorists, as the repeated bombing of London by the IRA has proved. The total inability of the massive secret state to deal with the epidemic of illegal drug importation and manufacture is common knowledge. Its control of the mass media is however impeccable.
Markov’s murder was not only a monstrous crime, but a blunder on the part of MI6, because Maurice Oldfield hadn’t asked himself what the consequences would be if Mrs. Macdermott were to be discovered. The identification of Mrs. Macdermott as a British agent gave the KGB a very strong card, entirely because of her involvement in the murder of Georgi Markov. Her other operations were not ones that the KGB had any desire to disclose. The Markov murder was very different however. A leak there would partially exonerate the KGB and the Bulgarian communists, while at the same time exposing MI6 to a tide of public criticism in Britain, with Markov’s aggrieved widow playing the key role. This is the sort of thing that tabloids would still find irresistable - if we in fact have a free press…
Gordon Logan - January 2000
e-mail: gordonehil@hotmail.com
Postscript MI6, through their agent Mrs. Macdermott, tried to trick the Bulgarians into murdering the author in similar circumstances to Markov’s in the summer of 1984. Television viewers would have seen the author’s wife on the Six O’Clock News bewailing his death at the hands of the ‘Bulgarians’. The Markov case is directly involved with the conspiracy that led to the foiling of the August 1991 coup in Moscow.
Last changed: March 14, 2000
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From: Gordon Logan
Date: 15 Mar 2000
Time: 03:02:42
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5. The campaign to forcibly change the names of Bulgarian Turks.
After examining the possible role of MI6 in the murders of Robert Maxwell, Georgi Markov and Lyudmila Zhivkova, I would like to look at another likely MI6 operation, made possible by the influence of British agent, Mercia Macdermott over Bulgarian Politburo Secretary for Ideology, Alexander Lilov.
This operation, although not directly involving murders, did have very serious consequences for the Bulgarian Turkish population, and was a tragedy for several dozen families who lost loved ones during the disorders. In terms of the trouble it caused, it surpassed by far the murders of Georgi Markov and Lyudmila Zhivkova.
After the murder of Lyudmila Zhivkova, which MI6 knew all about as soon as it happened, although Moscow Centre would not have briefed KGB officers like Oleg Gordievsky, Alexander Lilov survived in the Politburo until 1983, when he was put into cold storage by the KGB, which was going to need a "Mr Clean" in preparation for the change of guard after Zhivkov's removal. When he was dropped by Zhivkov in 1983, Lilov retained all his privileges and was put in charge of a specially created Central Committee social policy think tank. To call it a think tank is to exaggerate - the lack of new ideas on anything social (or economic) was obvious throughout the the Eastern bloc.
It was in this environment of total intellectual stagnation that, strangely enough, a new 'social' idea actually did manage to surface about 1983. The idea was, with hindsight, idiotic and outrageous, but the Bulgarian Communist Party and the Ministry of the Interior went for it with a will. The idea related to a very sensitive area of language policy, and involved requiring the Muslim Turkish population to change their names to Bulgarian ones - an absurd idea since the Bulgarian Turks had constituted a docile, hardworking and relatively prosperous part of the provincial population of Bulgaria since the communist takeover in 1944. In short, the changing of names campaign addressed a problem that didn't exist, and created a very serious problem for the hundreds of thousand of Turkish Bulgarians required to change their Muslim names, as well as for the Ministry of the Interior and the country's economy.
Such a ludicrous policy had never been applied in the Eastern Bloc before. Even Lenin and Stalin had been very careful not to encroach on the religious sensibilities of Muslims, while cheerfully blowing up churches and shooting priests. The significance of the changing of names campaign has been overlooked, which is surprising, since in fact it marked the return of ethnic cleansing to the Balkans after an absence of several generations.
In the nineties Slobodan Milosovic took a road that had been already signposted by the Bulgarian communists. The process proper began in 1984 and as a result there were many demonstrations, a few shootings and finally a mass exodus of offended Muslims to Turkey that continued in sporadic waves up until a final large wave in 1989.
According to Bulgarians I spoke to, who had been in the Turkish-speaking areas, there were in fact two forces at play - that of the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior, and also that of the Turkish Intelligence Service, which had contacted the elders of the Turkish villages and persuaded many of them to order their populations to sell everything and move to a supposedly better life in Turkey.
The Muslims were thus being subjected to a push-pull process. This seeming cooperation between Communist Bulgaria and Nato Turkey was curious, as was the whole name changing process. Consequently, during 1991 in Sofia, the question was often asked: "But whose idea was this changing of names?" Nobody had an answer, even though amongst the communists and even the general population, many people approved of it.
In fact, there was a small radical movement (OKZNI) rooted in the old State Security mafia, the main platform of which was support for the name-changing. There was a persistent rumour that the idea had not been a Bulgarian one, and some even suggested that it might be Russian. However, as I mentioned above, the Russians had never tried to do anything so stupid.
There was also a rumour that Alexander Lilov was responsible. Now that made sense, simply because Lilov had been the top man in charge of ideological (and social) issues in the early Eighties, and had continued to play a leading role behind the scenes at the head of his social policy think tank. In fact, Lilov's was the only name that cropped up as a possible instigator of the name-changing policy.
As I gathered information about him in 1991, it became clear that, as in the case of the murders of Georgi Markov and Lyudmila Zhivkova, he was a real Teflon don. He was obviously the first person who should have been asked about his role in the changing of names, but he never was. Indeed my conversations with newspaper editors and the intelligence community revealed that behind the scenes he was by far the most feared politician in Bulgaria, even in 1991. The most fearless of editors, former spy Alexander Alexandrov, said to me, "I don't dare touch him."
Back in early 1985, I had been thrown out of Bulgaria, in spite of my (second) marriage to a Bulgarian. Without going into all the details, I had noticed a curious synergy between the Bulgarian authorities and the British embassy in belabouring me with difficulties. When I returned to Britain, I wrote to the British Council on the matter, since they had sent me to Bulgaria in the first place. Surprisingly, I received no answer from them.
At the end of 1985, in November, I managed to return to Bulgaria, thanks to intercession of Zhivkov himself, who had turned out to be my wife's former lover! It had become clear to me, that I could only address my problems with the British diplomats in Sofia by dealing with them face to face. I went up to London, and before leaving for Sofia, I dropped in at the British Council in Tottenham Court Road and asked to see whoever was in charge of Bulgaria. I was shown into the office of the man 'in charge of Bulgaria'. His name was Anthony Lewis.
We got talking and I mentioned some of my problems without really pushing things very hard, because Lewis was proving to be very talkative. I gave him his head, and found that, for a specialist in English teaching, Anthony was very political indeed, and passionate with it. He asked me whether I had heard that the Bulgarians were 'exterminating' the Turks. I said I had heard something about name changing, but nothing about extermination. Anthony went on at length about shootings and extermination.
However, what was surprising in the way he spoke was that he did not express any distress at all. On the contrary, his eyes not only had a definite mischievous look, I had the clear impression that he was gloating! Anyway, after half an hour, I bade him farewell and left for Sofia, and forgot all about it.
(Strangely enough, Anthony was to reappear in Saudi Arabia as British Council Director in 1995, some time after my arrival there and was to stay there until recently, leaving just a month or two before I was thrown out of my job as Supervisor of the Royal Saudi Navy's English Language Training Program in Dammam at the personal order of the Chief of Saudi Intelligence, who had been maliciously (and incorrectly) told by our Embassy that I was a Russian spy. But that is another story.)
So the question remains. Whose idea was the changing of names? Nobody has taken 'credit' for it, although Zhivkov accepted 'responsibility' before he died. He was quite unrepentant, since his platform is that of a sort of 'national communism', a fairly common right wing tendency in the former Eastern bloc. My own conviction , as the reader will have guessed, is that Mrs. Macdermott fed the name-changing idea to Alexander Lilov in 1983.
The idea is totally in line with her professed Bulgarian nationalism - she was a foe of anything to do with the Ottoman Empire, and had spent much of her life writing against all things Turkish. Then of course, there was the persistent rumour throughout Sofia to the effect that the idea had never been a Bulgarian one - perhaps Russian but not Bulgarian. And lastly there was the mischievous, gloating Anthony Lewis, in charge of Bulgaria two thousand miles away in London at the British Council - a specialist body providing governments of developing countries with help, amongst other things, on language policy.
6. The links between events in Sofia and the Moscow Coup of August 1991
(1) The fact that Mrs. Macdermott's main function for MI6 was as an agent provocateur suggests that the value of the information that she was able to obtain was relatively limited. Agents in place that obtain high grade information are not usually used as agent provocateurs. Mrs. Macdermott's limitations were very much a result of the limitations of Alexander Lilov's responsibilities.
Lilov was not involved in the military decision-making of the Warsaw Pact, and had no access to secrets of military technology. The identification of Mrs. Macdermott as a British agent gave the KGB a very strong card, entirely because of her involvement in the murder of Georgi Markov. Her other operations were not ones that the KGB had any desire to disclose. The Markov murder was very different however. A leak there would partially exonerate the KGB and the Bulgarian communists, while at the same time exposing MI6 to a tide of public criticism in Britain, with Markov's aggrieved widow playing the key role.
This is the sort of thing that tabloids would still find irresistable. Markov's murder was a blunder on the part of MI6, because Maurice Oldfield hadn't asked himself what the consequences would be if Mrs. Macdermott were to be discovered. The consequences were in fact totally negative until I intervened in the summer of 1991, and made our Head of Chancery, Les Buchanan, an offer he couldn't refuse: that of exposing Lilov and covering up Mrs. Macdermott, which I did in a series of newspaper articles.
At the summit meeting in Malta in December 1989 between President Bush and General Secretary Gorbachev, it was secretly agreed that Bulgaria would remain in the Soviet field of influence. All of the rest of the Eastern bloc was up for grabs. Bulgaria was in effect to become a sixteenth state of the Soviet Union, with a 'reform' programme made in hell by Bulgarian Prime Minister Andrei Lukanov, and approved by the KGB.
The centre-piece of the reform programme was Decree 56, a cunning document designed to help the officers of the Bulgarian Intelligence Service (The First Directorate) to become rich overnight. The selling out of Bulgaria to the Soviets at Malta was a direct consequence of the Macdermott case.
How could the West allow the opposition to take full control in Bulgaria, when one of the first imperatives of any new government would be to investigate the murder of Georgi Markov?
The Markov case remains an awkward one for the Bulgarian President (and the Foreign Office) to this day. On 10th November 1989, prior to the Malta agreement, the KGB tricked Zhivkov into resigning, by offering him an acceptable candidate for the General Secretary's job, Foreign Minister Peter Mladenov. A few months later, Alexander Lilov, the murderer of Zhivkov's daughter, replaced Mladenov as General Secretary. Who would be better than Lilov himself to ensure that nothing leaked out?
However, the KGB had made one mistake. After consultation with Andrei Lukanov, they had agreed to the idea that, if the largely puppet opposition were to be given the Presidency, then the new President should be Zhelyu Zhelev, a former communist professor of politics, who had been repressed under Zhivkov. Lukanov assured Gorbachev personally that Zhelev would be a docile president. However, there are puppets and puppets, and Zhelev was not to prove as docile as they had thought.
The other mistake that the communists made was that they gave the President the power of hiring and firing the Chiefs of the Security Services. This power in fact meant nothing, since Zhelev was systematically kept out of the loop. When he asked the Bulgarian Intelligence Service chiefs about the Markov case, they simply told him that 'the West' didn't want them to disclose any information to him, which was in fact true.
On Tuesday, August 14th 1991, after publicly exposing the role of Alexander Lilov in the murders of Georgi Markov and Lyudmilla Zhivkova, I paid a visit to Philip Dimitrov in the opposition headquarters at 134 Rakovski Street and told him that although I had been conducting a public campaign to expose Lilov (which had reached the national press and TV), in fact there was another person behind Lilov, the well known 'great friend' of Bulgaria', and MI6 agent provocateur Mercia Macdermott.
Dimitrov, who went on to become Prime Minister and is now Ambassador to Washington, got in touch with Zhelev, who confronted the two chiefs of his intelligence service and fired them. That evening in Moscow, a KGB source told a French journalist that KGB Chief Kryuchkov had decided to launch a coup, with no preparation as it turned out, instead of waiting until the end of August to have a state of emergency voted by the Supreme Soviet, as agreed to with Mikhail Gorbachev.
That is why Gorbachev turned away the plotters that arrived in Foros. It is also why Kryuchkov had difficulty persuading the other plotters to sign up. His real motivation was not a secret one, and he couldn't tell them where he was 'coming from' although KGB General Pugo must certainly have known, which is why he and his wife were murdered. Incidentally, nobody in Moscow believes that Pugo and his wife committed suicide.
That events in Sofia triggered the events in Moscow on 18th August 1991 has not been challenged by the British or Russian diplomats that I've spoken to. Various aspects of the underlying facts can be corroborated by documents and by at least dozens, and probably hundreds, of concordant references in the Bulgarian press, the Russian press, and by quotations from Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and the coup leaders themselves, including the arrested plotter, General Varennikov who, after his acquittal in early August 1994, accused the West of having engineered the 'provocation of the century'.
7. The links between events in Sofia and the Moscow Coup of August 1991
(2) In April 1991, a KGB agent in Sofia tried to set me up. I had been investigating the Markov murder and had identified Mrs. Macdermott as one of the culprits. Although I wasn't sure she was a British agent, that danger had always been in the back of my mind. Anyway, I'd been a bit of a troublemaker in Bulgaria, and I had enemies, so the KGB ordered their agent to reveal to me that Mrs. Macdermott was in fact a British agent. Simultaneously, there were a series of leaks in the media.
The Russians were using the Markov case to mark out their territory. As a part of the operation, the KGB were planning to kill me using lyophilized snake poison. I got the agent drunk and actually got a verbal confession out of her. I was tricked into receiving a medical certificate stating that I was suffering from terminal cardio-vascular disease (snake poison mimics terminal cardio-vascular disease.) I telephoned a retired diplomat friend in England and he offered to pay for a flight back to Britain, but I did not take up his offer till the following year, by which time I (and Yeltsin) had blown the Soviet Union apart.
What the KGB didn't know at the time, was that I was also on the track of Mrs. Macdermott's puppet, Alexander Lilov. After the failed attempt to kill me, I had a unique window of opportunity that gave me the freedom that I needed. A second attempt, would have been too high profile, although I was told that they would have dearly loved to try it.
In June, I wrote a long letter, ostensibly to our Head of Chancery, accusing Lilov of being behind the murders of Markov and Lyudmila Zhivkova. I faxed a copy of the letter to my cousin in Scotland. The following day, I noticed that some of my 'friends' were in a state of shock. They must have been called in for questioning in order to establish who had leaked Lilov's involvement to me. Of course, nobody had. The fax had the desired effect of making the KGB think that our Embassy, who knew that the Russians had leaked Mrs. Macdermott's real allegiance to me, had told me about Lilov as a tit for tat measure.
That fax is the reason why Vladimir Kryuchkov hit the roof in his speech to the Supreme Soviet around 21st June, when Pavlov tried to get additional powers, in the so-called constitutional coup. That was also when the Americans warned Gavril Popov and Alexander Bessmertnykh of the danger of a coup. The result was that an alliance was forged between the arch-enemies Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who was able to touch base with the military in July, and ensure the loyalty of key figures like Shaposhnikov, in the event of the KGB undertaking anything.
In early August 1991, I went public on Lilov, with several front page stories appearing and a confrontation between Lilov and opposition leader Dimitrov on Bulgarian Television. Then, on Tuesday 13th August, I visited Dimitrov in his office, and told him that Mrs. Macdermott had been behind Lilov, and that this information could be used to nail the State Security bosses.
The final decision to launch a coup in Gorbachev's absence, (as opposed to a state of emergency voted by the Supreme Soviet, which is the variant that Gorbachev would have been prepared to accept, according to his and other people's memoirs) was taken by Kryuchkov that night, according to a French journalist.
Note the typically Gorbachevian fudge - a union treaty (Yanayev called it a cloud in trousers) giving substantial republican autonomy, together with a Centre that could declare a state of emergency anywhere it liked - in accordance with legal procedure. It was the former possibility and the latter requirement that held back the hardliners, Lukyanov in particular, and made it necessary to give Kryuchkov an extra push. In selling the idea of launching a state of emergency in Gorbachev's absence, he made the point that Gorbachev himself would not be compromised, as Yanayev surely would sooner or later.
After the coup, rumours were circulating in Sofia that there had been a connection between events in Sofia and events in Moscow, and newspapers were full of speculation about what it was. The President's party newspaper hinted at the link between the removal of the Intelligence chiefs and the Moscow coup, but never followed it up. Yeltsin sent a delegation to deny that there was any connection, and there was a public argument between Dimitrov and General Oleg Kalugin, who was one of the KGB officers involved in the Markov murder.
It is remarkable that only one book, by Martin Sixmith, has been 'permitted' on the coup. Sixsmith's main contribution was to cover up the responsibility of Kryuchkov, since the British wanted to get the KGB role hushed up. Sixsmith wastes a lot of time on Anatoly Lukyanov (not to be confused with the Bulgarian Prime Minister, Andrei Lukanov), claiming that he was the 'mastermind' responsible for summoning the plotters to the Kremlin. Initially Lukyanov was to carry the can because he had written a few notes objecting to the draft Union Treaty, which was one reason why the non-KGB plotters got involved.
The treaty itself was a scarecrow, constructed by the only two republican signatories, Yeltsin and Nazarbayev, and only got published on the Thursday or Friday, no doubt to push the non-KGB plotters into the trap. Yeltsin and Nazarbayev were in fact the two republican leaders who foiled the plotters. Nazarbayev played an important role in harassing his old hunting buddy, Yazov, over the phone, persuading him not to allow the soldiers to shoot.
At the beginning of 1991, MI6 were in bad shape. The Cold War gains that had been made possible paradoxically by none other than Aldrich Ames, whose recruitment lulled Vladimir Kryuchkov into a false sense of security, were counterbalanced by the fact that the KGB had become impenetrable overnight. In 1985, both MI6 and the CIA had ceased to have agents in place in the Soviet Union. Moreover, for MI6 the legacy of the Markov/Macdermott case was entirely negative - a liability that placed them in a uniquely vulnerable position in Britain itself vis-à-vis the KGB.
Paradoxically, it was that liability that became the trump card that brought down the Soviet Union. The secret British involvement in foiling the long-awaited hardliners' coup gave MI6 an international reputation second to none. So much so that in Eastern Europe, at least three countries have chosen MI6, rather than the CIA, to advise them on the reforming of their intelligence services.
As the recent object of a botched, and above all unbelievably foolish, MI6 operation, I doubt whether that reputation is deserved. I know James Bond, and in spite of all the 'techint', in the field of human intelligence he's a bungling rat, dependent on the mistakes and the help of others.
Gordon Logan - November 1999
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