News you may have missed #409

  • Probe unearths secrets of Bulgaria’s assassination bureau. Previously unknown details on Service 7, Bulgaria’s Cold War-era assassination bureau, have been unearthed by one of Bulgaria’s leading newspapers, following a probe into 5,000 pages of declassified archives from the country’s former communist intelligence service, the First Directorate of the Committee on State Security.
  • US Pentagon bars troops from reading WikiLeaks. Any citizen, any foreign spy, any member of the Taliban, and any terrorist can go to the WikiLeaks web site, and download detailed information. Members of that same military, however, are now banned from looking at those internal military documents, because “doing so would introduce potentially classified information on unclassified networks”.
  • Analysis: Chasing Wikileaks. “[W]hatever the imperfections of WikiLeaks as a startup, its emergence points to a real shortcoming within our intelligence community. Secrets can be kept by deterrence –that is, by hunting down the people who leak them […]. But there are other methods: keep far fewer secrets, manage them better –and, perhaps, along the way, become a bit more like WikiLeaks. An official government Web site that would make the implementation of FOIA quicker and more uniform, comprehensive, and accessible”.

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Bulgarian investigation reveals radio personalities worked for secret services

A Bulgarian commission examining files from the nation’s communist period has revealed the names of 66 employees of state-owned Bulgarian National Radio (BNR), who worked for the country’s secret services before 1989. The individuals, who previously worked as operatives or officers for Bulgaria’s Committee for State Security (CSS), include a former BNR deputy general secretary, as well as a former general secretary and numerous media celebrities. Prominent among numerous controversial allegations of CCS operations during the Cold War is the 1978 assassination in London of exiled Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov, with the aid of a poisoned pellet shot from a modified umbrella. CSS has also been accused of complicity in the 1981 assassination attempt against the late Pope John Paul II. [JF]