The assassination of Georgi Markov bore all the hallmarks of a Russian wet job

In September 1978 Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian émigré writer, waited at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge on his way to work at the BBC World Service. Feeling a sting in his right thigh, he looked round to see the man behind him picking up his apparently fallen umbrella. The man apologised in a foreign accent and hastily crossed the road where he hailed a taxi. Markov felt feverish that night, was admitted to hospital and within four days was dead. ‘The bastards poisoned me,’ he told doctors, as they struggled to identify what was wrong with him.

What was wrong was ricin, a poison with no antidote. It was identified after Markov’s death by a combination of alert medical staff and scientists at the Porton Down research establishment. The ‘bastards’ were the communist government of Bulgaria, headed by the dictator Todor Zhivkov, who had ordered the murder. The ricin pellet and its delivery mechanism – the umbrella – were provided by Russia’s KGB. The man who fired it was Francesco Gullino, an Italian conman, smuggler and pornographer, who had been recruited by the Bulgarian intelligence service.

The background to the murder was Markov’s career as a writer in his native country, where he made the necessary compromises to become a member of the Writers’ Union and was befriended by Zhivkov.  However, his writing sailed too close to the wind and he had to flee, becoming one of a number of Bulgarian dissidents who broadcast the truth about their country via the BBC and other organisations such as Radio Free Europe. His revelations about the luxuries of Zhivkov and the communist elite provoked the dictator to seek Russian help in eliminating him. They called such actions Wet Jobs.