S7, E4: One Defection From Murder

One Defection From Murder Since we’re currently dealing with Russia attempting to become the USSR again, I thought it might be interesting to revisit the history of oppressive regimes and the iron curtain with a story from the 70’s in Europe. So, it’s September 7, 1978, during the cold war, and Georgie Markov is a Bulgarian ex-patriot now living in London. He’s heading to work on his usual route he takes every day. He parks his car and crosses Waterloo bridge to wait for a bus. He’s waiting with a few others at the bus stop when he feels something sting his leg. He turns around to see what it is and sees a man running off with an umbrella. The next night, on September 8, Georgie checked himself into the hospital at around 9pm. Georgie was pretty sick with a fever, but he was beyond desperate for help. Doctors and nurses who are going off shift are taking the next shift around to each of the patients hidden behind curtains. They’re like, this one was cardiac arrest, this one has pneumonia, oh, and this guy – wait until you hear his story. He said he’s been poisoned by the Bulgarian government. They laugh and carry on with their rounds. Even though doctors didn’t exactly believe Georgie’s story, they did their due diligence and took detailed notes. Georgie told them he had defected from Bulgaria and now works for the BBC. He told them he has some big players in the Bulgarian government that are after him. He said he’s been receiving threats and that the KGB were sent out to assassinate him. He believes he’s been poisoned somehow by something that was shot into his leg. Doctors are like, this guy is coo-coo for coconuts. Maybe he’s having a mental breakdown or he could be insane. They do a physical exam and are like, mmmm – doesn’t really look like his symptoms match what he’s claiming. He’s conscious, a bit feverish, but ok. He pointed out a tiny mark on his right thigh that was swollen and red and said this is where he was poked. He’s frantically trying to convince the doctor that this is where he was injected with something, he’s sure. To the doctors, the small – tiny wound looked like it could be an insect sting, a spider bite, an allergic reaction to something. It could have even been that he just backed into something sharp at the bus stop like a metal edge to something. They clearly think Georgie is overreacting. Even Georgie’s friends aren’t really buying his story. Friends describe him as larger than life, a guy who liked to joke around and boast a lot. Like, he would claim he could snatch a fly out of mid air in mid-flight like mr. miyagi. He also told friends he had played soccer for the Bulgarian Olympic team or some other highly prestigious type team. He joked around enough and embellished enough that friends weren’t totally on board with this poisoning tale. One friend though, did say he saw him catch a fly right out of the air like he had always boasted about. A little background on Georgie… he spent most of his life in Bulgaria which at the time was run by a fierce dictatorship run by Todor Zhivkov. President Zhivkov was a die-hard communist; one that wouldn’t tolerate criticism of his regime. He had a tight grip of control over Bulgaria and his administration. He had solid ties to the USSR and the KGB. He was loud and boastful – reminds me a lot of a current Russian oligarch. Georgie Markov was a writer in Bulgaria and became one of the most acclaimed of the country in the 1960’s. Georgie was so influential, that Zhivkov decided it was in his best interest to pull Georgie into his inner circle so any writing he did could be closely monitored and controlled. Georgie was invited by the president on hunting weekends along with him and other leading intellectuals. So Georgie was being treated to a pretty great life within the regime until… he began speaking out against the oppression he was seeing. So in 1969, the Bulgarian authorities decide Georgie’s writing needs to be censored. They ban his books, also banning anyone from reading them. They closed his office and Georgie decided then it was time to leave and defected to England. He found sanctuary in London and got work as a translator at the BBC. He also found love in London and married Anna Dilke in 1975. The couple soon had a daughter and life seemed to be on a good path. After 1969, Georgie’s name ceased to exist in Bulgaria. Not only were all his books removed from all shelves and libraries there – his name was even scratched out of film credits. Not one to stay quiet, he continues to speak out against the oppressive Bulgarian regime. In addition to working for the BBC, Georgie also wrote scripts criticizing Zhivkov for Radio free Europe which is an American radio station. He mocked Zhivkov, calling him a “minor dictator with a second-rate sense of humor.” Despite Bulgaria trying to jam the signal, half Bulgaria was able to tune in to the show. Georgie’s depiction of Zhivkov in a demeaning but accurate way without having any censoring made Zhivkov boil with rage. Georgie was deemed an enemy of the state. Soon, Georgie was getting anonymous phone calls telling him his treason would not go unpunished. They would tell him he was a target that would be poisoned. He was told there was even a file box of poison in it marked with his name. Georgie did tell his wife and friends about this but because of his history of exaggeration, they didn’t take it too seriously. When we come back from the break, we’ll find out what happened to Georgie in the hospital. So, Georgie is still in the hospital 2 days after he first fell ill. His friend, David, visited him there, now in intensive care and he was shocked when he touched Georgie’s hand. He was ice cold. The doctors hadn’t come up with a diagnosis and Georgie was fading fast. His symptoms were too complex to be caused by a single infection. It was clear he had severe septic shock and had been given meds that cover a wide spectrum of bacteria that would be capable of causing it but the medicine had no effect. One doctor surmised that it was something like snake venom since his body wasn’t responding to traditional treatments. Eventually, Georgie developed an irregular heartbeat and he went into full cardiac arrest. On September 11, 1978, at 10:40 am, he was pronounced dead. When police heard Georgie was a defector, they were far more interested in Georgie’s story than doctors had been. Scotland Yard’s terrorist branch immediately launched an investigation. People who had been at the bus stop at the same time as Georgie during when he thought he was poisoned were tracked down. None remembered seeing anything weird. A taxi driver did say he had driven away with a rider at about that time but he didn’t remember an umbrella. Georgie’s wife, Anna, went on the news saying that Georgie had been certain he’d been jabbed with a poisoned end of an umbrella and she herself had seen the mark on his leg. She agreed with him that it looked like a needle puncture. An autopsy was ordered. Whatever killed him hadn’t left a trace in his bloodstream. But, on the side of the body the puncture was on, the lymph glands in the groin were swollen indicating his body was fighting some sort of powerful infection. Georgie’s major organs showed significant damage – they had hemorrhaged. To avoid damaging anything that may still be in the tiny puncture would, specialists were brought in to examine the tissues in and around the area. They chose a research facility called Porton Down which was the top notch medical research company for biomedical weapons during the cold war. Experts from around the world were brought in for the examination. Even a CIA chemical weapons specialist from the US was brought in to help. Sections of the tissue were sliced super thin and the knife blade struck something that was metal. At first, the worker assumed it was the tip of a needle that broke off in the flesh, but instead a teeny tiny ball bearing rolled out. It was so small, it looked like the little ball that’s in the tip of a ball-point pen. But when examined, the ball was even smaller than those in a ball-point pen. They brought the pellet to a ballistics lab to see if they could glean anything from it. Nobody had seen anything like it before. When Portan down had examined and cleaned it, they found no traces of poison in it, but they’re hoping the ballistics lab could figure out what it was made from and get electron microscope photos of it. The pellet was made from platinum iridium. Which is an inert ally probably used as a projectile because the body wouldn’t reject it. There were 2 microscopic holes in the pellet. The pellet itself was harmless, so it obiously wasn’t what killed Georgie. Whatever had been in the holes was likely the culprit. The holes created a reservoir which could then be filled with a toxin. They theorized that the pellet was probably filled with a gelatinous coating to keep the poison contained in the ball. When fired, the pellet would rip through clothing and flesh and the body heat would melt the gel coating and release the toxin into the bloodstream. The poison was still a mystery. Just when they lost hope of figuring it out, there was an unexpected breakthrough. When Vladamir Kostov heard about Georgie’s death in the news, he called Scotland yard. A similar attack happened in Paris just 2 weeks before Georgie’s incident. Vladimir Kostkov, also a Bulgarian defector, had felt something sting his back as he exited the metro in Paris. Unlike Georgie, he had survived. When he had felt the sting, he had turned around and saw someone running away. He didn’t spot an umbrella. Shortly after, he became ill with the exact same symptoms as Georgie. He had gone to the hospital with a raging temp, and a lot of pain. He fortunately, recovered a couple of days later. He too had gotten anonymous death threats prior to the attempt on his life. They did a small operation on Kostkov to see if they would retrieve a similar ball out of him and that it may possibly still have residue of poison in it. When the tissue was retrieved, they too found a tiny sphere. No poison was left inside this pellet either. Police believe Kostkov survived because he was wearing a heavy sweater the day of the attack. They thought the pellet likely didn’t penetrate as deeply as it had in Georgie, so not as much poison was released directly into his bloodstream. To try to determine the type of poison that had been used, they decided to find out how much poison the pellets could hold and with that, they could narrow down the type that was used in the attacks. The pellet could hold just 2/10ths of a mg of poison. That’s 10 times smaller than a lethal dose of cyanide. This was something highly powerful. This would have to be something along the lines of plutonium, abrin, ricin, some snake venoms and even purified botulinum. So, a little bit about these toxins - Ricin and abrin can kill in microscopic amounts. Since abrin is extremely rare, ricin seemed like the more likely culprit. The swollen glands and homorraging organs fit with a ricin poisoning. Ricin is natural in a number of plants, but especially in the castor bean. Castor oil is safe, but when the molecule is purified, it’s one of the strongest toxins known to man. Ricin has a neuro toxic effect as it can seek out and destroy active nerve cells like those in the heart causing severe damage. To see if their ricin theory was correct, the team decided to test a small dose on an animal subject. They said that was the only way to come to a definite conclusion. They got a pig the same weight of georgie and injected it with the same amount the pellet would hold, The pig had identical symptoms, died and in the autopsy, showed identical results. They concluded Georgie’s death was indeed a ricin poisoning. Now where had it come from? Bulgaria itself wasn’t capable of manufacturing this level of toxin. So they must have had help from a political ally with far more experience and technology. Like the KGB in the soviet union. For many years, soviet labs had been doing specific research on abrin and ricin. In both public literature and classified books, it had been shown that the kgb labs were the labs associated with chemical and biological warfare research. At the time of Georgie’s murder, the soviets had a large bio-chemical weapons program. Like inter-continental missles filled with weapons grade small pox, so they were certainly capable of developing high concentration ricin for poisoning. The deployment system of using an umbrella is classic KGB – they know that assassinations are best done quietly and in an unnoticeable way. They wanted something the target would believe it had just been an accident. Like, oops, bumped you, but really injected the poison. The appearance of the death would look like a heart attack had no one realized the person was a target for assassination Ooo – this is cool – in Florida (can’t leave florida out of a story) there’s this researcher who has amassed a large collection of KGB spy equipment and specifically from what was known as lab 12 in the soviet union. It was a secret lab in a small building with no more than 6 employees. This lab was distinctly for bio-weapons research and testing. The KGB had developed a number of assassination tools. Pens, lighters, canes and an umbrella gun. The Florida collector had one even. The umbrella was a normal umbrella, but with modifications. The button you’d normally use to open the umbrella was actually the trigger, gas stored in the cylinder of the umbrella pole was then injected through and forces a tiny pellet out through the tip of the umbrella. The Bulgarians likely used something from the KGB as they didn’t have their own arsenal like this at all. But Proof of the attack was deep behind the iron curtain of the Bulgarian regime. By 1979, Georgie’s murder investigation ground to a halt. For 10 years, it stayed that way. Then came the collapse of the berlin wall in 1990. Riots began around Bulgaria and their president was arrested on grounds of corruption. With the dictator removed, Bulgaria took steps toward democracy. The Bulgarian secret service archives were now accessible. After the fall of the soviet union, a former KGB agent said he had been at the meeting where georgie’s assassination had been planned. He said the request had come directly from bulgaria’s president, Todor Zhivkov. Zhivkov was released from house arrest and gave a press conference. When asked about the murder of Georgie, Zhivkov didn’t deny he had him killed, but instead made a joke about it. He died of pneumonia shortly after his release. In 1991, the new Bulgarian govt began it’s own investigation into Georgie’s case. The policeman assigned to the case and was given access to secret archives. He did find proof that Georgie had been a target of the secret service. There were clues on how they planned to go about it. One document stated that there were palns for him to be neutralized, but the actual documents containting plans had been destroyed. A former head of state in the sovient union had been the one who destroyed evidence. The documents had been destroyed because the Russians probably told them to – they didn’t want to be linked to anything. Investigators badly wanted to find the actual assassin and the investigator’s dogged determination finally came upon something that blew the case wide open. He found the name of a person working for the Bulgarian secret service and had been assigned to deal with Georgi. He was based in Denmark. The document said the agent was code named piccadilly and he’d been given instructions on how exactly to kill Georgie. The man, known as Galino, posed as an art dealer, traveling around, had made several trips to London and had stayed close to where Georgie lived. They were able to track down this man where he was brought in for questioning. In 1993, investigators from Bulgaria, Denmark, and Britain, secretly interrogated this guy. Despite the evidence against him and even though he admitted to espionage, he claimed no connection to Georgie’s case. He was released and he quickly moved out of Denmark. In Britain, the case is still considered open since it hasn’t named a specific person responsible for his death. The Bulgarians weren’t in a huge rush to solve the case – obviously not wanting to be named a part of it and in 2008 the statute of limitations for the case ran out. Even if the suspect was found, he couldn’t be tried in Bulgarian court. They were trying to become part of the EU and having this case quiteted would suit that cause. Many feel they should publically claim their responsibility in the assassinations. Georgie’s family aren’t as concerned about finding the triggerman as they are with getting an apology from the Bulgarian govt. As one family member put it, “The finger that pulled the trigger isn’t important, but the mind that thought it up, is.” Theguardian.com, abc.net., the documentary - the umbrella assassin – killing Georgie markov