MARKOV, GEORGI• 329tural Committee to explain his new satirical play,The Man Who Was
Me. Instead of attending the meeting, Markov fled to Bologna, where
his brother Nikola had also defected in 1974; Nikola still lives there,
as a stamp dealer.
Using the pseudonym David St. George, together with coauthor
David Phillips, Markov wrote a political satire,The Right Honorable
Chimpanzee(1978). He also made broadcasts on the BBC World Ser-
vice and Radio Free Europe in Munich, which were considered suf-
ficiently damaging by Bulgarian dictator Todor Zhivkov for him to
personally order the DS’s chief of foreign counterintelligence, Gen-
eral Vlado Todorov, to arrange the author’s assassination. As he
crossed Waterloo Bridge walking to work at the BBC in September
1978, Markov was stabbed in the leg by a pellet gun concealed inside
an umbrella. A tiny pellet, visible only under a powerful microscope
and made of a rare platinum and iridium alloy containing traces of
ricin, was later recovered from a wound, but Markov died in the hos-
pital four days later, prompting a lengthy investigation conducted by
theMetropolitan PoliceandMI5.
According to Colonel Stefan Svreddlev, a DS officer who defected
in 1971, the agency compiled lists of 17 different categories of sus-
pect Bulgarians, and Markov’s death conformed to the pattern of ex-
ecutions carried out by the DS’s hit men:
From my own experience I know of cases of kidnapping and murder of
Bulgarian exiles abroad by the state security. The organization that killed
Georgi Markov was the Bulgarian state security. And, from my experi-
ence, the assassin would have been someone sent from Bulgaria. In that
way it’s much easier to conceal all the clues in the crime.Late in 1989 Zhivkov was arrested, and a lengthy investigation into
Markov’s death was launched by Leonid Katzamunski, the head of
the new government’s investigation department. In October 1993
General Oleg D. Kalugin, a formerKGBexpert incounterintelli-
gencewho had boasted of having supervised thedieoperation, was
briefly detained in London and interrogated about his knowledge of
the murder. As yet, no one has been charged with Markov’s murder.
Markov’s autobiography,The Truth That Killed, was completed after
his death by his widow Annabel.