“In her wildest dreams Agatha Christie couldn't have conjured a more bizarre murder and a more bizarre murder weapon than the one that killed a Bulgaria writer named Georgi Markov who, while living in exile in London, wrote commentaries for Radio Free Europe.”
(Ed Bradley, 60 Minutes, CBS Television News Program, October 20, 1991)
On September 7, 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian émigré, who lived and worked in London, was assaulted in broad daylight on London’s Waterloo Bridge. His life and death show evidence of how far a regime will go to silence its opposition.
Time magazine, in February 2010, ranked the murder of Georgi Markov at number 5 of the “top 10 assassination plots”, just below the murder of Leon Trotsky in 1940 and the attempt on Adolph Hitler in World War Two.
On June 15, 1969, Georgi Markov's play "The Man Who Was Me" was previewed before a general audience and party officials in Sofia, Bulgaria. While the audience enthusiastically responded to the play, the party members did not. The play was stopped. A close friend warned him to leave Bulgaria. As part of his preparations to leave, he burned his diaries of fifteen years. Using a passport and visa issued three months earlier, Georgi Markov defected to the West, crossing into Yugoslavia. He saw Bulgaria for the last time.
He settled in England and became a broadcast journalist for Radio Free Europe, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), and Deutsche Welle, the German international broadcast service.
Markov's large audience in Bulgaria listened to his prime-time Sunday-night broadcasts over Radio Free Europe. He dared to tell his audience that Bulgarian President and Communist Party chief Todor Zhivkov wore no clothes.
In June 1977, Communist Party Chairman Zhivkov chaired a Politburo meeting and stated he wanted the activities of Markov stopped. The Interior Minister reacted and requested KGB assistance in the killing of Markov. Though he wanted Markov killed, he wanted no trace to Bulgaria. The Chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, agreed to the assassination as long as there would be no trace back to the Soviets. Thus, the Bulgarians and Soviets were operating under a double case of “plausible denial. “
Former KGB general Oleg Kalugin has publicly admitted his role and the role of the KGB in supplying the Bulgarian intelligence service with both the weapon and the poison. Purportedly, the highly secret KGB laboratory known as the "Chamber" developed both the weapon, concealed in a US-manufactured umbrella, and biotoxin ricin impregnated in a wax-coated pellet the size of a pinhead.
Markov received various warnings and anonymous threats to stop broadcasting his inside knowledge of Zhivkov and the obsequious circles of Bulgarian intellectuals and government officials. Markov persisted until his death and peeled away the artichoke leaves of lies and corruption in Bulgaria.
A grotesque black comedy followed with three attempts to kill Markov in 1978. The first attempt was in Munich in the spring, when Markov visited friends and colleagues at Radio Free Europe. An agent failed in an attempt to put a toxin in Markov's drink at a dinner party held in his honor. The second failed attempt was on the Italian island Sardinia while Markov enjoyed a summer vacation with his wife Annabel and daughter Sasha. The final and successful attempt was in London on President Zhivkov‘s birthday, September 7, 1978.
On that day, Markov worked a double shift at the BBC. After finishing the early morning shift, reportedly, he went home for rest and lunch. Afterward, he drove to a parking lot on the south side of Waterloo Bridge to take a bus to his office at the BBC. As he neared the waiting bus queue, he experienced a sudden stinging pain in the back of his right thigh. He turned and saw a man bending to pick up a dropped umbrella. The man, facing away from Markov, apologized in a foreign accent, hailed a taxi, and departed. He has never been identified.
Though in pain, Markov continued on his way to the BBC building. He then noticed a small blood spot on his pants, told colleagues what happened, and showed one friend a pimple-like red swelling on his thigh. Afterward, at home, Markov developed a high fever. His wife called a colleague at BBC, who took Markov to St. James hospital, where he was treated for an undetermined form of blood poisoning. He did not respond to doctors’ efforts, went into shock, and after days of delirium, pain, and suffering, Georgi Markov died in London at age 49 on September 11, 1978.
British authorities later ruled that Markov had been “unlawfully killed” and died of "septicemia, a form of blood poisoning caused by bacterial toxins, possibly a result of kidney failure."
An investigative reporter in Bulgaria, Hristo Hristov, published two books in English based on his years of research into Bulgarian intelligence files. His books include a copy of the passport and photographs of an Italian art dealer and small time-criminal, code name “Piccadilly,” seemingly used by Bulgarian intelligence service in the murder. In August 2021, the Austrian news agency APA reported that an Italian with a Danish passport Francesco Gulino, known as "Agent Piccadilly," was found dead in his home in the Austrian city of Wales. He lived in abject poverty. A doctor confirmed the death of the 75-year-old former secret agent. Police said that there was no evidence of violent death.
A copy of an umbrella that was adapted into a “pistol” and believed by many to have been used to deliver the ricin that killed Markov is on display at the International Spy Museum in Washington D.C. Former KGB General Oleg Kalugin, however, stated to a Bulgarian newspaper interview in 1998: “The umbrella was only a cover. Georgi Markov was killed with a small special instrument. A weapon like a pen manufactured in the Soviet laboratories.”
The minute pellet that contained the poison is on display today in the Crime Museum at New Scotland Yard in London. It has been estimated that one ounce of ricin could kill as many as 90,000 persons. British scientists later estimated that only about 450 micrograms were used to kill Markov.
One Bulgarian general committed suicide rather than face trial for destroying thousands of pages of information about Georgi Markov. Another general was found guilty, spent a few months in jail, and reportedly now lives quietly in a villa in Bulgaria. The case has been investigated by generations of Scotland Yard policemen and remains open in England. In Bulgaria, the case should have been closed in 2008 due to a thirty-year statute of limitations, but authorities decided to keep it open another five years.
In 2006, WNET of the television public broadcast service (PBS) network in New York aired a program on Georgi Markov’s death called Secrets of the Dead: Case File Umbrella Assassin. The producers have made their findings available on the Internet, including a re-enactment of the murder, a photograph of the pellet, video clips, and an interactive “Teacher’s Toolbox” for educators and students to “examine the evidence.”
Also included in the program was an interview with American Dr. Christopher Green, who had assisted in the forensic investigation in 1978. Dr. Green said:
We had pretty much all of the story from a forensic point of view. We had the body, the thing in the body that he was hit with -- the pellet -- and the stuff from the pellet. We knew that the material used to kill him, ricin, had been under development by a foreign service linked to the incident. We also knew that he had been a target of assassination attempts in the past. The story of him being a target was very well known. Therefore, we had information on the means, motive, and opportunity.
And yet, with all the public information and years of official investigation, no one has been charged with the crime. The dots have not been completely connected. The final piece of the puzzle to complete the picture remains to be found. Georgi Markov’s death proved how far a totalitarian regime would go to protect itself from the truth. The murder of Georgi Markov seems destined to be another footnote in the history of the Cold War. Georgi Markov deserves a better fate.
Georgi Markov was buried in Saint Candida and Holy Cross Churchyard cemetery in Whitchurch Canonicorum, Dorset, England. The epitaph on his gravestone is reads in Bulgarian on one side and English on the other side:
In Memory of Georgi Ivanov Markov
Novelist & Playwright
Most dearly beloved
By his wife Annabel
His Daughter Sasha
His Family & his Friends
Born Sofia 1. 3. 39
Died London 11 .9. 78
In the Cause of Freedom
Further Information:
To listen to Georgi Markov speak over the BBC in 1976 about his favorite music, visit http://mycentury.tv/bulgaria/181-georgi-markov-qmy-kind-of-musicq.html
Chapter 3 in my book Cold War Radio: the Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950 – 1989 (McFarland & Co, 2009).
Markov’s Radio Free Europe programs posthumously were collected and translated into English as The Truth That Killed (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, 1983).
For information from former Soviet KGB officers about the Markov murder, see Oleg Kalugin, Spymaster; My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage against the West (New York: Basic Books, 2009). And, Oleg Gordievsky and Christopher Andrew, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York: Harper Collins, 1990).
The interactive television program Secrets of the Dead: Case File Umbrella Assassin on the murder of Georgi Markov, including the interview with Dr. Christopher Green, can be viewed at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/previous_seasons/case_umbrella/index.html
For full details of “Piccadilly”, including photographs, see Hristo Hristov’s books, The Double Life of Agent Piccadilly and Kill the Wanderer at http://hristo-hristov.com/
