CIA Infiltration Agents into Bulgaria in the early Cold War ©

Bulgaria

CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) Operational Project QKSTAIR was approved on April 18, 1950, with final authorization on April 24, 1950. The original objectives of QKSTAIR included

 

• Develop underground networks within Bulgaria.
• Provide financial support to George M. Dimitrov to enable him to develop an underground along the lines outlined in his paper “Organization of the Anti-Communist Resistance Movement in Bulgaria,” and 
• Develop additional networks entirely separate from Dimitrov`s organization.

Georgi M. Dimitrov was Chairman of the Bulgarian National Committee (Bulgarski Nacionalen Komitet, BNC)

Below are excerpts from a review of early CIA training in West Germany of the Bulgarian infiltration agents:

The German training installation has its headquarters in Frankfurt, which is under the cover of the Documents Disposal Division. This office administers and controls the training areas, such as supply, finance, personnel, documentation, and transportation. There is a training plans staff located in Frankfurt that prepares the training schedules and lesson plans for the various training areas. This staff is now re-writing and standardizing all lesson plans to include all subjects used in training. The training areas will request these lesson plans as needed. Commo training is handled by a separate communications staff. 

The main training areas are Gernsheim, Murnau, and the U.S. Army Grafenwohr military sub-post. Since Grafenwohr is the largest and most active of the sites visited, this report will primarily concern the training of Bulgarians now undergoing training at this area. 

The Grafenwohr training site is located on the base of the Grafenwohr military sub-post. The trainees, consisting of Bulgarians, Poles, and Czechs, are quartered in three barrack-type houses. The houses are located approximately one city block apart. 

All members of the training staff are under military cover. The instructors who are not actually military personnel are documented at Frankfurt previous to entering the Grafenwohr sub-post. Personnel assigned to Germany for training, particularly those going to Grafenwohr, should acquire Army uniforms prior to their departure. However, articles of uniform can be purchased in Germany at certain Army Quartermaster stores. It is particularly desirable for alien contract agents and persons who are not familiar with the army uniform and army procedure to obtain their uniforms before going overseas.

Army rank is designated by the Frankfurt office to those persons who are to be directly connected with the training program or to anyone who may at various times be required to enter a military installation under military cover. Military rank is assigned to the individual on the basis of his pay grade. Therefore, a contract agent drawing the equivalent of a Major's pay will be assigned the rank of Major. This practice has a tendency to give too high a rank to some individuals. As an example, one of our alien contract agents, under the cover of an Army Major, will work under army personnel of lesser rank. 

Bulgarians.

The Bulgarians are being trained in a variety of subjects, primarily weapons, demolitions, parachutes, map reading, base selection, guerrilla warfare, survival, and some agent training. 

Recreation and entertainment for the Bulgarians have consisted primarily of American movies. There has been no recreational activity as far as outdoor sports are concerned, however, the training staff had arranged to use the facilities of the post-gymnasium two nights a week. The Bulgarians are occasionally allowed liberty outside of their quarters. They are never allowed liberty on the military post and are escorted wherever they go on the post. Liberty was granted to the Bulgarians once in December and once in January, in the cities of Nurnberg and Beyreuth. The Bulgarians were required to check in every two hours with two staff instructors who accompanied them on liberty. 

Between May 16, 1951, and May 28, 1951, 17 agents were infiltrated into Bulgaria. This number included the 15 agents trained in Germany during March and April, plus two others recruited in Greece for specific one-shot missions. The total number was broken down into six teams. According to reports received by the end of June 1951, the status of the 17 agents infiltrated during May was:

• Three agents remained in Bulgaria,
• Eleven returned to Greece and were being prepared for re-infiltration
• One of the eleven had been captured by the Bulgarians and forced to establish Motorola contact with the OPC covert aircraft but was permitted to escape for reasons now being investigated.
• One of the 17 agents was killed in an ambush by Bulgarian soldiers while returning to Greece with one of his teammates and four recruits, two of whom were also killed.
• Two agents defected to the Communists.
• Another two are being treated as rejects because of a demonstrated lack of operational ability.  

In September 1951, six CIA infiltration agents were tried in Sofia. Three were sentenced to death and three to long-term imprisonment. Apparently, the men were caught as a result of: 

•  information furnished to the militia by a defector,
•  faulty operational judgment on the part of some of the agents, 
•  militia ambushes. 

CIA believed that the trial did not cause severe damage to future operations because “The information available to the Bulgarian authorities from the defendants must have been known to them already through agents who had defected or been captured.

2023 issue of Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies (JIPSS) : "In Focus: Radio Propaganda in the Cold War"

 

The 2023 issue of JIPSS has just been published: "In Focus: Radio Propaganda in the Cold War" contains my article "CIA Early Cold War Clandestine Radio Broadcasts to Ukraine from Greece and Spain." Below are some editorial comments:

You will find numerous insights thoroughly relevant to the present: Numerous basic propaganda techniques have changed little or nothing since the early Cold War and are still used effectively today. And they are not limited to the medium of radio. Original Cold War radio propaganda, such as disinformation in the form of gray propaganda, can be found in online videos and social media campaigns. The use of dissidents and the politically persecuted can also be observed to this day. Moving images and dissemination through the Internet may have been added to pure sound – but one discovers many parallels in the techniques and principles used.

Moser, Mehring, Summers, Bardet, and Jäggi provide new insights into the weighty cultural and diplomatic role of radio within the Western bloc. Michael Kuhlmann, Richard Cummings, and Adrian Hänni examine hitherto unnoticed aspects of radio use in the ideological conflict between East and West.

Kuhlmann makes clear the incredible political impact radio coverage could have. For example, radio in the American Sector of Berlin (RIAS) played a significant role in the people's uprising in the GDR on June 17, 1953. Editors openly showed sympathy for the opposition movement, but their coverage swung to de-escalation when East Berlin imposed a state of emergency.

CIA Early Cold War Clandestine Radio Broadcasts to Ukraine from Greece and Spain

Cummingsʼ article on CIA clandestine radio propaganda explains how Spanish and Greek stations were used to offer anti-Soviet radio broadcasts to a Ukrainian target audience. Cummingsʼ approach focuses less on the content and impact of the broadcasts than on the operational and technical levels of the operation. In the former, preparation on the part of Western intelligence and information services, especially the CIA, plays an important role. Cummings shows how such an operation was planned, prepared, and executed, and thus how the basis for such a propaganda project could be created.

Hänniʼs contribution shows that not only state actors such as the CIA used clandestine radio stations as a weapon in the Cold War. Using Radio Omega, the Roman Catholic Church also tried to support the ideological struggle against “atheistic communism” clandestinely. Hänniʼs case study of Radio Omega, which broadcast Russian-language programs to the USSR in the 1960s, offers insights into aspects of radio propaganda that have received little attention in research to date, such as the importance of religion or the collaborations between propaganda stations and certain sociopolitical groups in the production of programs.

Kristina Wittkamp analyzes Soviet broadcasting policy during the Cold War, which ranged from station jamming to counter-propaganda to surveying the programming preferences of listeners. With the format station Radio Mayak, a counteroffer to the Western stations in content and politics was even deliberately created. Wittkamp, therefore, offers new insights into the radio politics of the Soviet Union, but she also improves our understanding of the interactions between Western and Eastern radio propaganda.

Here is the Table of Contents: