Bulgaria Targets Major Agencies for Secret Service Collaborators

The so-called “Files Commission” is investigating Bulgaria's communist-era police files. File Photo

A special panel, investigating Bulgaria's communist-era police files, will expose officials working in major agencies, including the State Agency for National Security, Agriculture State Fund and the Commission for Protection of Personal Data, who have been as state security agents and collaborators.

“As of next month the commission will disclose the names of top journalists and managers at regional print editions and media, who collaborated with the secret services for the last twenty years,” Evtim Kostadinov, head of the called Files Commission, told on Sunday the Bulgarian National Radio.

The blacklist of former state security agents and collaborators already features Socialist President Georgi Parvanov, MPs, former constitutional judges, supreme magistrates, investigators, members of parliament, prominent and well-known former and current Bulgarian journalists.

The files of the former Committee for State Security are a thorny issue in Bulgaria, especially when it comes to the past of high-ranking officials.

Bulgaria's communist-era security service is believed to have remained potent after the fall of communism with the ex-operatives closely linked to the political and business establishment.

The State Agency for National Security (DANS), the most prominent among those to be targeted by the files commission, was set up as an institution by former Socialist Prime Minister Sergey Stanishev himself by pooling together three previously existing counter-intelligence services.

It started operating on January 1, 2008, and has managed to generate a number of scandals ever since – including the spying on leading journalist (i.e. the Galeria case) and the missing top secret reports – a case under which Stanishev himself is facing charges of mishandling classified information.

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