The Double Life of Agent Piccadilly. The file of the only agent suspected of the murder of the writer, Georgi Markov and the key archive of the First Main Directorate of the SSS
The archives of the Bulgarian State Security Service
Bulgaria is one of the last countries in the former Eastern Bloc which has not yet resolved the matter of the legacy of the archives of the repressive machine communist regime until 1990. In 1994 the National Assembly passed a decision stating that the documents of the former State Security Service were no longer a matter of state secrecy but this resolution was to have no practical consequence.
Only in 1997 did the government of Ivan Kostov pass a Law on Access to Secret Security Service (SSS) documents which also allowed the naming of collaborators. It also allowed for research to be conducted into the archives, but only those which were within the premises of the Ministry of the Interior.
In the summer of 2001 the scope of the law was extended and a new commission with responsibility for the archives was appointed with greater legal powers. Despite this the archives of the SSS remained under the control of the various special services. When the government of Simeon Saxe Coburg Gotha came into power and with the support of the Bulgarian Socialist Party and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, the law on access to files was repealed and access to the archives was suspended.
In the summer of 2006, only a few months before Bulgaria became a full member of the European Union, and after strong public pressure, the ruling coalition of the BSP, MRF and Saxe Coburg’s party passed a new law on the SSS archives. It was ratified in December 2006. Representatives of the civil society managed to impose the fundamental philosophy that all the archives of the SSS should be transferred to the supervision of a new independent commission. Although the law was ratified the selection of the committee was delayed by six months. In addition access to the archives was blocked by the government of the socialist Sergei Stanishev for nearly eighteen months. It took until June 2008 for them to fulfill their legal obligations and provide the building necessary to collate all the archives of the SSS. By September 2008 the basic principle of the law had not yet been implemented, i.e. full and unhindered access to the archive legacy of the repressive communist machine.
