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Bulgaria

Bulgaria set to recall communist spy diplomats

Bulgaria said Wednesday it may recall many of its diplomats following revelations that they were spies during the communist era. Archives of the country’s Darzhavna Sigurnost secret police show 88 foreign ministry employees worked as agents or collaborators for the secret services.

Reuters
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Ambassadors and top diplomats in Berlin, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Moscow, Rome, Beijing and Tokyo worked as agents or collaborators for the secret service.

On Tuesday, the parliamentary committee in charge of opening the Darzhavna Sigurnost archives published on the Internet the names of 192 ex-intelligence agents who became diplomats abroad after the fall of communism.

Out of that total, 88 are still employed by the foreign ministry, including 33 ambassadors, eight interim ambassadors and four consuls-general.

"The government will ask the president to recall, after careful assessment, everyone with proven links to the former Darzhavna Sigurnost," Foreign Minister Nikolay Mladenov told a news conference in Sofia, adding that it was "absolutely unacceptable" that 40 per cent of Bulgaria's 114 embassies and foreign representative offices were headed by a former intelligence agent.

Bulgaria's envoys to 13 of the other 26 European Union capitals, as well as its representatives to the United Nations in Geneva and New York and all of its ambassadors in neighbouring Balkan countries were on the list.

Mladenov said he will draw up a bill banning all former secret service agents and collaborators from working for Bulgaria's foreign office.

Under current legislation, no-one can be punished or face any legal consequences if they are named as former informants or spies.

Previous attempts to bar them from holding top public positions have been overruled by the constitutional court.

Bulgarian President Georgy Parvanov, who was unmasked as a former collaborator in 2007, objected to what he described as "a political purge".

"It was these diplomats, and not the current government, who brought Bulgaria into the EU and Nato," said Parvanov.

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