For members who've been around awhile, I saw something while looking around for possible topics for the editorial by The Third Estate Sunday Review. (We all hurry around the web to try to find a topic and then we pitch them while the group chooses which topic they want to go with.) (Read their editorial, by the way.)
An article (by Scott Shane) in the New York Times on December 15 contained the following:
Mr. Kalugin speaks from unusually direct experience. In 1978, he passed along orders directing Soviet agents to supply the Bulgarian secret service with a spring-loaded umbrella that was later used to deliver a dose of the poison ricin, killing the Bulgarian dissident Georgi I. Markov in London.
The article was entitled "Poison's Use as Political Tool: Ukraine Is Not Exceptional" and we addressed it in two entries that day, "Questions while reading today's New York Times" and "Judith Regan, Zeller's writing for the Times; Oleg Kalugin; Georgi I. Markov; Democracy Now!; Daily Howler."
The Sunday Times of London reports a development in the assassination of Georgi I. Markov. From Jack Hamilton and Tom Walker's "Dane named as umbrella killer:"
It remains one of Britain's most famous unsolved murders -- made all the more notorious by the James Bond nature of the killing. The murder weapon was an umbrella, partly developed by the Soviet KGB, which fired a pellet the size of a pinhead, containing the poison ricin.
Last week, in a serialisation containing leaks of secret service files in the Bulgarian daily newspaper, Dnevnik, the identity of Markov's killer was finally revealed.
He was named as Francesco Giullino, a Dane of Italian origin who travelled Europe in a caravan pretending to be an antiques salesman: in fact, he was a Bulgarian secret agent.
The documents, uncovered during six years of research by Hristo Hristov, a Sofia-based investigative journalist, reveal how the Communist-era Durzhavna Sigurnost (DS), the Bulgarian equivalent of the KGB, had ordered Giullino to "neutralise" Markov.
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