The Poisonous Umbrella

Another odd Bulgarian death

Vladimir Simeonov, 30, a Bulgarian defector working in London for the BBC, failed to show up for work last week. Concerned, a colleague went to his east London row house to investigate. He found Simeonov dead, clad in a bathrobe and pajama bottoms, face down at the bottom of his stair well.

Normally, Simeonov's apparent fall would have been dismissed as an accident. Police found no telltale injuries on his body, and a post-mortem indicated death by asphyxiation: the victim had suffocated in his own blood after breaking his nose. But two of Simeonov's countrymen had just come forth with bizarre tales suggestive of a cloak-and-dagger conspiracy concocted by the legendary S.M.E.R.S.H. Since one of the two, Georgi Markov, 49, a friend of Simeonov's and also a BBC broadcaster, had just been murdered in diabolical fashion, Scotland Yard was asking some very stern questions about Simeonov's "fall."

The mystery began Sept. 7, as Markov was walking near Waterloo Bridge to the BBC's External Services Building. In front of a crowded bus stop, he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his right thigh and turned to see a heavy-set man carrying an umbrella. "I am sorry," the man muttered in a thick accent, then hopped into a taxi. The same evening, Markov developed a high fever. Four days later he died, but not before telling friends that he thought he had been stabbed by a poison-tipped umbrella wielded by a Communist agent.

At first a post-mortem study yielded no poison. But what doctors did find under Markov's skin was a tiny platinum-iridium pellet, 1.7 mm in diameter, with two holes, each a mere .4 mm wide, drilled in at right angles. The holes could have contained a toxic substance, either bacterial or chemical--quite possibly not traceable.

When the discovery of the pellet was made public, Vladimir Kostov, another Bulgarian defector and a friend of Markov's, reported a similar incident in Paris. Three weeks earlier as he left the Etoile Metro station, he too had felt a stinging pain. He was ill for a few days, but did not report the incident to the police. When he did so, doctors found a pellet, identical to the one in Markov's thigh, buried in Rostov's back.

As Scotland Yard pushed its investigation of the London deaths, suspicion centered on Bulgaria's security service. Both Markov and Kostov had been well-known intellectuals in Bulgaria, with friends in the Politburo. Before defecting in 1969, Markov had won national acclaim as a writer and TV commentator. One of his later plays, The Assassins, dealt with a plot to kill a general in a police state. His defection, and his subsequent BBC and Radio Free Europe broadcasts, had been an embarrassment to the Sofia government and triggered a shake-up in its propaganda establishment. The 1977 defection of Kostov, formerly a political commentator and correspondent for the state radio and television, meant more loss of government prestige, and of sensitive political information.

There was another reason to suspect Sofia. If Markov had in fact been jabbed by a poison-tipped or poison-firing umbrella--or had been shot with a pellet gun by a man holding an umbrella--only a security service would probably have such sophisticated gadgetry at hand. Today's secret agents and hit men have access to numerous James Bondian devices that can make murder look like natural death --poison delivered by aerosol spray, tiny darts fired from pens or cigarette boxes. In the late '50s a KGB agent killed two Ukrainian exile leaders in Germany by squirting prussic acid into their faces from a fountain pen; the symptoms made it appear that the men had died of simple heart attacks.

During the past year, Bulgaria's President Todor Zhivkov has been trying to improve relations with the West. Bulgaria claims that Markov and Simeonov were liquidated by Western intelligence services seeking to besmirch the country's image. To lend credence to that pitch, the regime offered to help British authorities dealing with the case. It was an offer the British just might be able to refuse.

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