The 1978 Umbrella Murder.

0:00 Speaker 1: There is a moment in every murder story where the

0:02 Speaker 1: ordinary world cracks open and something monstrous crawls through. For

0:07 Speaker 1: Georgi Markov, that moment came on a gray London morning

0:09 Speaker 1: in September nineteen seventy eight. On a bridge over the Thames,

0:13 Speaker 1: while he waited for a bus, A stranger bumped into him,

0:17 Speaker 1: a sharp sting in the back of his thigh. An

0:20 Speaker 1: apology murmured in a foreign accent, and then the man

0:24 Speaker 1: was gone, slipping into the crowd, boarding a taxi, disappearing

0:29 Speaker 1: into the cities in different hum Markov didn't think much

0:32 Speaker 1: of it at first. He was a Bulgarian dissident, a writer,

0:36 Speaker 1: a man who had made enemies in high places. But

0:39 Speaker 1: London was supposed to be safe. He was supposed to

0:42 Speaker 1: be safe. He mentioned the odd little pain to a

0:45 Speaker 1: colleague at the BBC World Service where he worked. He

0:48 Speaker 1: went home, He had dinner with his wife, Annabelle. He

0:52 Speaker 1: put their young daughter to bed. By the next morning,

0:55 Speaker 1: he had a fever of one hundred four degrees. By

0:58 Speaker 1: the third day, his white blood cell count had shot

1:01 Speaker 1: to catastrophic levels. His heart was failing. Doctors at Saint

1:05 Speaker 1: James's Hospital in London watched him deteriorate with baffled horror,

1:09 Speaker 1: running test after test, finding nothing they recognized. On the

1:13 Speaker 1: fourth day, Georgie Markov was dead. He was forty nine

1:17 Speaker 1: years old, and no one, not the doctors, not the police,

1:21 Speaker 1: not his terrified wife, could yet explain exactly what had

1:25 Speaker 1: killed him. But they would, and what they found would

1:28 Speaker 1: shake Western intelligence agencies to their core. Rewrite the rule

1:32 Speaker 1: book on Cold War assassination and expose a Bulgarian secret

1:35 Speaker 1: police operation so brazen, so technically sophisticated, so ruthlessly precise,

1:40 Speaker 1: that it reads less like history and more like something

1:42 Speaker 1: dreamed up in a fever. This is the story of

1:45 Speaker 1: the Umbrella Murder. Georgi Markov was born in Sophia, Bulgaria,

1:50 Speaker 1: in nineteen twenty nine, the son of a military officer.

1:54 Speaker 1: He came of age under communism. The Soviet backed People's

1:57 Speaker 1: Republic of Bulgaria had seized power in the late night

2:00 Speaker 1: eighteen forties, and by the time Markov was building his

2:02 Speaker 1: literary career in the nineteen sixties, the Bulgarian state controlled everything,

2:07 Speaker 1: the press, the arts, the universities, the conversations people had

2:12 Speaker 1: in their own kitchens. If their neighbors were listening. Markov was,

2:16 Speaker 1: by most accounts, a genuine talent. His novels were celebrated,

2:20 Speaker 1: his plays were produced, He moved in official circles, socialized

2:25 Speaker 1: with members of the party elite, and for a while

2:27 Speaker 1: it seemed like he might be one of those rare

2:29 Speaker 1: artists who finds a way to survive under totalitarianism, to

2:33 Speaker 1: work within the system without being consumed by it. But

2:35 Speaker 1: something shifted. Perhaps it was the things he saw up

2:39 Speaker 1: close among the party faithful, the hypocrisy, the cruelty, the

2:43 Speaker 1: yawning gap between the ideals the regime proclaimed and the

2:46 Speaker 1: reality it enforced. Perhaps it was simply his own conscience

2:51 Speaker 1: growing louder as the years passed. In nineteen sixty nine,

2:54 Speaker 1: Markov left Bulgaria on a legitimate travel visa, something almost

2:58 Speaker 1: unheard of, and simply went back. He defected. He settled

3:02 Speaker 1: in the West, first in Italy, then in Britain, where

3:06 Speaker 1: he joined the BBC World Services Bulgarian Section, and then

3:10 Speaker 1: he began to do the thing the Bulgarian regime feared most.

3:14 Speaker 1: He talked every week. His voice crackled across the airwaves

3:18 Speaker 1: into Bulgaria, passed the jamming signals passed the state's furious

3:22 Speaker 1: attempts to silence him, and he spoke directly to his

3:25 Speaker 1: countrymen about what their government was really like. He used

3:29 Speaker 1: real names, he shared real stories. He described the private

3:33 Speaker 1: behavior of Totar Zivkov, Bulgaria's communist dictator, with the intimacy

3:38 Speaker 1: of someone who had actually been in the room. Because

3:40 Speaker 1: he had been, Zivkov was reportedly livid. According to defectors

3:45 Speaker 1: and documents that emerged years later, the Bulgarian leader considered

3:49 Speaker 1: Markov a personal humiliation, a man who had been trusted,

3:53 Speaker 1: who had been given access, and who had betrayed that

3:55 Speaker 1: access in the most public way imaginable. Markov wasn't just

3:59 Speaker 1: a day He was a witness, and witnesses in the

4:03 Speaker 1: worldview of a paranoid authoritarian are not to be tolerated.

4:08 Speaker 1: Three previous attempts had apparently been made on Markov's life

4:11 Speaker 1: before September nineteen seventy eight. They had all failed. So

4:15 Speaker 1: the Bulgarian secret police, the Darshevna signast or Ds, turned

4:20 Speaker 1: to their patrons in Moscow and the KGB, it seems,

4:23 Speaker 1: was willing to help. What the KGB provided was not

4:27 Speaker 1: a gun. It wasn't a bomb or poison in a drink,

4:30 Speaker 1: or any of the blunt instruments that state assassinations had

4:34 Speaker 1: historically relied upon. What they provided was something almost incomprehensibly

4:39 Speaker 1: small pellet, a tiny metal sphere roughly the size of

4:43 Speaker 1: a pinhead, machined from a platinum iridium alloy, drilled through

4:48 Speaker 1: with two microscopic holes, each one third of a millimeter

4:52 Speaker 1: in diameter, coated in a wax designed to dissolve at

4:55 Speaker 1: body temperature, and packed in those two tiny holes with risin.

5:00 Speaker 1: Risin is a toxin derived from castor beans. It has

5:04 Speaker 1: no antidote. It works by entering cells and shutting down

5:07 Speaker 1: protein synthesis, essentially switching off the molecular machinery that keeps

5:11 Speaker 1: cells alive. Once a sufficient dose reaches the bloodstream, death

5:16 Speaker 1: is not a question of if, It is only a

5:19 Speaker 1: question of when. The delivery mechanism the KGB devised was,

5:23 Speaker 1: in its own terrible way, a masterpiece of engineering. An umbrella,

5:28 Speaker 1: an ordinary black umbrella of the sort carried by thousands

5:31 Speaker 1: of London commuters on a rainy morning, had been modified

5:34 Speaker 1: to function as a compressed air gun. A mechanism in

5:37 Speaker 1: the handle triggered by a discrete movement of the thumb

5:41 Speaker 1: would fire the pellet into its target with just enough

5:43 Speaker 1: force to penetrate the skin. The wound would be tiny,

5:47 Speaker 1: the victim would feel a brief sting in the confusion

5:50 Speaker 1: of a crowded public place, the assassin would be gone

5:54 Speaker 1: before anyone registered what had happened, and by the time

5:57 Speaker 1: the victim understood that something was seriously wrong, the wax

6:00 Speaker 1: coating would have dissolved. The risin would be spreading through

6:03 Speaker 1: their bloodstream, and there would be nothing, nothing in any

6:06 Speaker 1: medical textbook in the Western world that any doctor could

6:09 Speaker 1: do to stop it. On the morning of September seventh,

6:12 Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight, Georgi Markov crossed Waterloo Bridge on his

6:16 Speaker 1: way to work. It was a Thursday, Bulgarian national Day,

6:21 Speaker 1: a detail that some investigators later wondered about whether it

6:24 Speaker 1: was chosen deliberately, a message, a statement of contempt. The

6:28 Speaker 1: man who approached him on that bridge has never been

6:31 Speaker 1: definitively identified. For decades, the most credible suspect was a

6:36 Speaker 1: Danish citizen of Italian origin named Francesco Galino, who operated

6:41 Speaker 1: under the code name Piccadilly for Bulgarian intelligence. Galino had

6:45 Speaker 1: been in London that day. He had traveled extensively throughout

6:49 Speaker 1: Europe on DS business. He was, by all accounts a

6:53 Speaker 1: skilled and experienced operative. But Gallino was never prosecuted. He

6:58 Speaker 1: denied everything, and the full truth of who pulled the

7:01 Speaker 1: trigger on that bridge, who exactly held the umbrella remains

7:05 Speaker 1: even now somewhere in the shadows. What is not in

7:09 Speaker 1: doubt is what happened next. The pellet entered the back

7:12 Speaker 1: of Markov's right thigh. He felt the sting, turned, saw

7:16 Speaker 1: a man with an umbrella who said something like I'm sorry,

7:20 Speaker 1: and stepped into a waiting taxi. Markov continued to work.

7:24 Speaker 1: He mentioned the incident. He noted that the spot where

7:27 Speaker 1: he'd been jabbed was already swelling into a small red bump.

7:31 Speaker 1: That evening the fever began. The doctors at Saint James's

7:35 Speaker 1: Hospital were not stupid men. They were experienced clinicians working

7:39 Speaker 1: in one of the world's great medical cities, with access

7:42 Speaker 1: to the resources of the National Health Service and the

7:45 Speaker 1: collective expertise of British medicine. But nothing in their training

7:49 Speaker 1: had prepared them for this. They watched Markov's white blood

7:52 Speaker 1: cell count climb to astronomical levels, his immune system screaming,

7:57 Speaker 1: throwing everything it had at an enemy it could not find.

8:00 Speaker 1: They watched his heart weaken, his blood pressure drop, his

8:04 Speaker 1: kidneys begin to fail. He died on September eleventh. For

8:08 Speaker 1: days after that encounter on the bridge, it was only

8:12 Speaker 1: at autopsy that a pathologist probing the small wound on

8:15 Speaker 1: Markov's stye found something strange, a tiny metal sphere barely

8:20 Speaker 1: visible to the naked eye. The pathologist almost missed it.

8:25 Speaker 1: The pellet was sent to Port and down, Britain's Chemical

8:28 Speaker 1: and Biological Defense Establishment. Scientists there examined it under electron microscopes.

8:35 Speaker 1: They found the two microscopic holes. They found traces of

8:38 Speaker 1: a waxy substance consistent with a delivery coating, and though

8:42 Speaker 1: the risin itself had been metabolized, had done its work

8:45 Speaker 1: and vanished into Markov's body, they were able to deduce

8:48 Speaker 1: from the pellet's design and from the symptoms of Markov's death,

8:52 Speaker 1: that risin was what had killed him. It was the

8:54 Speaker 1: first confirmed use of risin as an assassination weapon in history.

8:59 Speaker 1: The KGB had tested it first on horses at a

9:01 Speaker 1: facility in the Soviet Union, calibrating the dose to a

9:05 Speaker 1: human body mass. The pellet found in Markov's leg contained

9:08 Speaker 1: approximately four hundred fifty micrograms of risin, a dose calculated

9:13 Speaker 1: with clinical precision. A lethal dose for a man of

9:16 Speaker 1: Markov size was estimated at around two hundred micrograms. They

9:20 Speaker 1: had given him more than twice what was needed. They

9:23 Speaker 1: were not leaving this one to chance. The investigation that

9:27 Speaker 1: followed was one of the most complex and frustrating in

9:30 Speaker 1: British intelligence history. Scotland Yard worked the case. Mi I

9:34 Speaker 1: six worked the case. The CIA, alerted to the remarkable

9:38 Speaker 1: weapon that had been used, took a keen interest. Defectors

9:43 Speaker 1: from the Eastern Bloc were interviewed. Soviet and Bulgarian intelligence

9:47 Speaker 1: files were quietly scrutinized whenever the opportunity arose, but the

9:51 Speaker 1: Cold War was still very much alive in nineteen seventy eight.

9:55 Speaker 1: Bulgaria was a warsaw pack state firmly within the Soviet sphere.

10:00 Speaker 1: Diplomatic pressure could only go so far, and the Bulgarians,

10:04 Speaker 1: through their ambassador, through their official statements, through every channel

10:08 Speaker 1: available to them, denied everything. The whole thing they said

10:12 Speaker 1: was a fabrication Western propaganda a smear. Zhivkov, the man

10:17 Speaker 1: whose wounded vanity had almost certainly set the murder in motion,

10:21 Speaker 1: continued to rule Bulgaria for another eleven years. He died

10:25 Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety eight, peacefully in his bed at the

10:28 Speaker 1: age of eighty six, never charged, never tried, never publicly

10:33 Speaker 1: held accountable for the murder of Georgi Markov. The d

10:36 Speaker 1: S officer most directly implicated in planning the operation, General

10:40 Speaker 1: Vladimir Katseev, also died without facing justice. And Francesco Galino,

10:46 Speaker 1: if it was Gallino on that bridge, if it was

10:48 Speaker 1: his thumb that pressed the trigger, lived quietly in various

10:52 Speaker 1: European countries, surfacing occasionally in police investigations, always slipping away.

10:58 Speaker 1: When the Berlin Wall fell in nineteen eight, and when

11:01 Speaker 1: the communist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsed one after another

11:04 Speaker 1: like dominoes in the autumn of that extraordinary year, there

11:07 Speaker 1: was hope that the truth about Markov's murder would finally

11:10 Speaker 1: emerge from the open archives. Some of it did. Bulgarian

11:14 Speaker 1: secret police files confirmed that there had indeed been an

11:17 Speaker 1: operation against Markov. They confirmed the involvement of the DS.

11:22 Speaker 1: They confirmed that coordination with the KGB had taken place.

11:26 Speaker 1: A DS general Stoyansavov was charged in Bulgaria in the

11:29 Speaker 1: early nineteen nineties, but he died by suicide before the

11:33 Speaker 1: case could go to trial. Other files had been destroyed,

11:36 Speaker 1: key documents shredded, sources said in the frantic days of

11:40 Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine, as it became clear that the regime

11:43 Speaker 1: was falling and that accountability might finally be coming, Scotland

11:47 Speaker 1: Yard formally reopened the case in twenty eighteen, forty years

11:51 Speaker 1: after the murder, New forensic techniques, new leads, new access

11:56 Speaker 1: to witnesses who had spent decades in silence. In twenty

11:59 Speaker 1: twenty three, Bulgarian authorities announced that Francesco Galino had been

12:04 Speaker 1: found and questioned in Austria. He was elderly by then.

12:08 Speaker 1: He maintained his denial. Austrian prosecutors reviewing the evidence declined

12:14 Speaker 1: to extradite him. The case for now for him, appears

12:17 Speaker 1: to be closed. The murder of Georgi Markov technically remains unsolved.

12:22 Speaker 1: No one has ever been convicted. There is something that

12:25 Speaker 1: Georgie Markov said in one of his BBC broadcasts, a

12:29 Speaker 1: line that his wife Annabel has recalled in the years

12:31 Speaker 1: since his death, he said that a writer's greatest responsibility

12:35 Speaker 1: was to tell the truth, even when the truth was dangerous.

12:39 Speaker 1: Especially when the truth was dangerous, he knew it was dangerous.

12:44 Speaker 1: He knew with the particular clarity of someone who had

12:46 Speaker 1: grown up inside a police state and understood exactly how

12:49 Speaker 1: they worked, that the men in Sophia were listening to

12:52 Speaker 1: his broadcasts, that they were furious, that they were capable

12:56 Speaker 1: of anything. He chose to keep talking anyway, and and

13:00 Speaker 1: in the end, the Bulgarian regime, aided by the most

13:03 Speaker 1: sophisticated assassination technology the Cold War had produced, managed to

13:08 Speaker 1: silence him. They killed him on a London bridge with

13:11 Speaker 1: a poisoned pellet fired from an umbrella. They killed him

13:14 Speaker 1: in the middle of the freest city in the world,

13:17 Speaker 1: on a gray Thursday morning, in a crowd of people

13:20 Speaker 1: who had no idea what they were witnessing. But here

13:22 Speaker 1: is the thing about killing a writer. Here is the

13:25 Speaker 1: thing that authoritarian regimes, for all their cleverness, for all

13:29 Speaker 1: their technical expertise, for all their KGB advisers and secret

13:33 Speaker 1: police generals and modified umbrellas, here is the thing they

13:36 Speaker 1: never seem to understand. Words don't die with the person

13:40 Speaker 1: who wrote them. Markov's broadcasts are archived. His novels have

13:44 Speaker 1: been translated. His memoir of life inside Communist Bulgaria, The

13:49 Speaker 1: Truth That Killed, published posthumously, sits in libraries and on

13:54 Speaker 1: shelves and in the hands of readers who were not

13:56 Speaker 1: yet born when he died. His daughter, who was too

13:59 Speaker 1: young to remember him, has spoken publicly about who he

14:02 Speaker 1: was and his murder. This brazen, sophisticated, cold blooded killing,

14:07 Speaker 1: carried out in the open, in the heart of London

14:10 Speaker 1: by a foreign intelligence service. His murder became one of

14:13 Speaker 1: the defining stories of Cold War history, a story told

14:17 Speaker 1: and retold, a story that made Djivkov's Bulgaria infamous, that

14:21 Speaker 1: exposed the paranoid brutality beneath the regime's respectable surface, that

14:26 Speaker 1: put a human face on what it meant to live

14:28 Speaker 1: under a system that would kill you for telling the truth.

14:31 Speaker 1: The men who ordered Georgi Markov's death wanted to make

14:34 Speaker 1: him disappear. Instead, they made him immortal. This has been

14:38 Speaker 1: dead of night. The case of Georgi Markov remains officially unsolved.

14:43 Speaker 1: If you'd like to learn more, Annabel Markov's account of

14:46 Speaker 1: her husband's life and death, as well as the investigative

14:49 Speaker 1: work of journalist Ristohristov, offer the most detailed picture available

14:53 Speaker 1: of what happened on Waterloo Bridge and why the pellet

14:57 Speaker 1: recovered from Markov's Thyeh is held at Portendown, a small

15:00 Speaker 1: piece of metal that changed the history of Cold War

15:03 Speaker 1: espionage forever. Next week, we go deeper into the archive,

15:07 Speaker 1: Stay in the shadows,