The attack
Georgi Markov was a Bulgarian novelist and playwright who had been successful inside the system and then left it, defecting in 1969. He settled in London and from 1972 broadcast against the Bulgarian government — for the BBC World Service, and also for Deutsche Welle and Radio Free Europe. His material was specific and personal about the leadership in Sofia, and it reached Bulgarians in Bulgaria.
On 7 September 1978 he was crossing Waterloo Bridge when he felt a sharp jab in the back of his right thigh. He turned and saw a man behind him bending to pick up an umbrella. The man apologised in a foreign accent and left in a taxi.
Markov went to work, developed a fever that evening, and was admitted to hospital. He died on 11 September, four days after the jab.
Waterloo Bridge, where Markov was struck in the thigh on 7 September 1978. Wikimedia Commons — Mark Percy, CC BY-SA 2.0
The pellet
The post-mortem is the reason this case is not a rumour.
Pathologists working with scientists from Porton Down, the British defence science establishment, recovered a metal sphere from the tissue of Markov's thigh. It was 1.70 millimetres across — roughly the size of a pinhead — and made of an alloy of ninety per cent platinum and ten per cent iridium. Two holes of 0.35 millimetres had been drilled through it, meeting to form an X-shaped cavity inside.
The cavity had carried ricin. The working explanation for how it was released is that a sugary coating sealed the holes and dissolved at body temperature; that is a scientific hypothesis about the mechanism rather than something recovered from the body, and it is worth marking as such.
Ricin has no antidote, and the quantity needed is far too small to see.
Ten days earlier the same method had been used in a Paris Métro station against another Bulgarian defector, Vladimir Kostov. Two attacks of this kind, on two defectors from the same country, inside a fortnight.
What the umbrella is doing in this story
The umbrella has become the fixed image of this killing — a gun built into an umbrella, firing a pellet by compressed air — and it is worth separating what is established from what has been inferred, because the two are not equally solid.
Established: a platinum-iridium pellet containing ricin was recovered from Markov's thigh, and he died of ricin poisoning. That is physical evidence, examined by a government laboratory.
Inferred: the delivery device. What Markov reported was a jab, and a man behind him picking up an umbrella. The umbrella-as-weapon is the conclusion drawn from those two facts together, and it is a reasonable conclusion. It is not the same order of evidence as the pellet, and the detail repeated most confidently for nearly fifty years is the one resting on the least.
This is a pattern worth noticing, because it recurs throughout this archive: the vivid mechanical detail travels furthest and is supported least, while the solid finding underneath it gets less attention for being less cinematic.
Why nobody was charged
The attribution has never seriously been doubted. Markov was a defector attacking a Communist government by radio, in a decade when Bulgaria's state security service was closely integrated with the KGB, and the weapon required specialist manufacture.
A suspect has a name. Francesco Gullino, a Dane of Italian descent, worked for Bulgarian state security under the codename Piccadilly. The documentary record shows he received special training in early 1978, made several trips to London that year, and afterwards received a payment of thirty thousand dollars and free holidays. Markov's cousin Lyuben Markov publicly identified him as the man.
Gullino was questioned in Denmark in 1993. He was never charged, and the reason given is specific: Bulgaria did not supply the documentation that a prosecution would have needed.
There is a further reason, and it is the most consequential fact in the case. The Bulgarian secret police had sixteen folders of records on Markov, whom they had filed under the codename Vagabond. All sixteen were destroyed immediately after the fall of Communism.
On 11 September 2013 — thirty-five years to the day after Markov died — the Bulgarian statute of limitations expired and the investigation closed. The prosecutors' own formulation was that they were categorical this had been a murder, and had failed to find its perpetrator.
What the case establishes
The usual difficulty with a state assassination is deniability: no object, no laboratory finding, nothing that could be put before a jury.
That was never the problem here. The pellet exists and was analysed. The poison was identified. A parallel attack on a second defector occurred ten days earlier. A named suspect was trained, travelled and paid. The prosecuting authority of the country responsible has stated in terms that it was murder.
And no one has ever been charged, because the files that would have proved it were burned by the service that had kept them, in the window between one government falling and another taking over. That window is the thing to take from this case. Accountability did not fail at the point of evidence or at the point of attribution. It failed because the people who held the paperwork had a few months in which nobody was watching them, and they used it.