-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- from: http://www.geocities.com/cleaver_uk/index.htm Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.geocities.com/cleaver_uk/index.htm">Bureau of Public Secrets</A> ----- MI6 - The Markov and Maxwell MurdersThis 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. The murder of 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 Observer 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. 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… ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Watch This Space.....for more revelations... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ email [EMAIL PROTECTED] if you have information on the British establishment which needs a more public airing! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! 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