"The Murder Bureau", a recent investigation of journalist Alexenia Dimitrova, has achieved popularity among Bulgarian readers for exposing a super-secret intelligence unit in communist Bulgaria.

"The Murder Bureau" is a major documentary investigation of a Smersh-style (i.e. "SMERSH" - the counter-intelligence departments in the Soviet Army) Cold War clandestine operations behind the Iron Curtain.

The book by award-winning Bulgarian journalist Alexenia Dimitrova, Special Correspondent for the newspaper "24 Hours Daily", is based on nearly 5000 pages of previously unknown documents only recently discovered in the archives of the First Directorate of the so called State Security, the intelligence and secret police of the Bulgarian communist regime.

The records reveal the existence of the super-secret "Service 7", a counter-espionage unit charged with carrying out the most sensitive - and deadly - covert operations against enemies of the Bulgarian state.

Service 7" began operations in mid 1963, long before the notorious assassination of Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov in London.

By 1972, it had engaged in at least 10 cases of elimination, kidnapping or discrediting of Bulgarian ?migr?s in Italy, Britain, Denmark, West Germany, Turkey, France, Ethiopia, Sweden, and Switzerland .

The targets of these operations carried such code names as "The Black", "Traitor", "X", "Hamlet", "Betrayer" and "Widower ", Dimitrova's book reveals.

The newly-found documents, declassified under Bulgarian information access laws at the request of the author, contradict the claims of former State Security officers that Bulgarian intelligence had never been involved with murders, much less creating a special department to prepare and conduct such activities.

The book also contains nearly 100 document facsimiles, which reveal when and how the super-secret special bureau was created, who its targets were, how the operations were prepared, when and where they were to be carried out, what weapons were used, how the weapons were secured, who the perpetrators were, how they were trained and what support they received from the Soviet KGB.

"The Murder Bureau" significantly expands the popular understanding of Soviet bloc "wet ops" during the Cold War. It reads like a spy novel, but by placing the actual archival documents in the public record anchored in solid historical evidence.

This is the 4th documentary investigation book by Alexenia Dimitrova. The interview of Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency) with Dimitrova on her previous book, "The King's Secret Files" read HERE

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