State Security Committee (Bulgaria)
The Committee for State Security ( Bulgarian Комитет за държавна сигурност / Komitet za darschawna sigurnost abbreviated КДС / KDS), also known as State Security (bulg. Държавна сигурност / Darschawna Sigurnost, abbreviated ДС / DS) was the name of the secret and the secret police of Bulgaria during the time of the Socialist People's Republic of Bulgaria . This was founded in 1944 under the guidance of Georgi Dimitrov , while still in exile, and based on the model of the Soviet KGB . The secret service was dissolved after the overthrow of the communist head of state Todor Zhivkov as part of democratization .
Known activities
The Bulgarian secret service played an active role in the so-called “ Bulgarization processes ” against the ethnic minority of the Balkan Turks in the 1980s, as well as against writers and dissidents .
He is also considered to be the commissioner of the murder of the writer Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge in London in 1978, which was known as an umbrella attack . A similar assassination attempt against the Bulgarian dissident and journalist Vladimir Kostov in August 1978 in the Paris subway failed.
It is now believed that prior to 1989 the DS also had complete control over the trade in arms , drugs , alcohol , cigarettes , gold , silver and antiques in Bulgaria and the entire Balkan Peninsula . It is therefore obvious that the structures of crime organized in a manner similar to that of the Mafia in Bulgaria, which emerged in the 1990s, were established by many former agents of the DS.
Furthermore, the secret service was accused for a long time as the main contractor of the pistol attack on the then Pope John Paul II by Mehmet Ali Ağca . 2006 was a committee of the Italian Parliament to the conclusion that the attack on the instructions of Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet secret service GRU was commissioned - in cooperation with the Bulgarian secret service and the Ministry of State Security of the GDR .
Document retention
The secret files of the KDS or DS caused great controversy in Bulgaria too. However, most of these were destroyed by agents after the collapse of the communist regime in 1989. The democratic forces of the opposition, newly established from 1990 onwards, made the communist functionaries who continued to rule until 1997, who now again formed the government and the prime minister as members of the Bulgarian Socialist Party , responsible for the destruction of files that could incriminate their members. In 2002, the former interior minister and vice-president Atanas Semerdzhiev was found guilty of personally ordering the destruction of 144,235 files from the DS archives in 1990 and thus undermining the then still young democracy.
Camps, imprisonments
- The Belene labor and re-education camp , so-called by the regime , 1944 - 1962
literature
- James Bamford: The Anatomy of the Most Powerful Intelligence Agency in the World. Bertelsmann, Munich / Gütersloh 2001, ISBN 3570151514 .
- Helmut Roewer , Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl : Lexicon of the secret services in the 20th century . Herbig, Munich 2003, ISBN 3776623179 .
- Christopher Nehring : Cooperation of the GDR foreign intelligence with the intelligence of the People's Republic of Bulgaria. Regional branches of the KGB? "
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Michael Winfrey: Uproar in Bulgaria at death of secret files keeper. January 20, 2007, accessed July 5, 2018 .
- ↑ Tatyana Vaksberg: Bulgarians Agree to Open Secret Service Archives. Parties finally reach consensus on public right of access to communist-era files. In: Balkan Insight . October 12, 2006, accessed on July 5, 2018 (English, article only available against payment).
- ↑ See Stefan Samerski : Teufel und Weihwasser. The Pope and the Erosion of Communism , In: Osteuropa 59 (2009), pp. 183–193, here: p. 188.