On 7 September 1978 Georgi Markov â??an acclaimed Bulgarian dissident and writer living in Londonâ?? walked across the Waterloo Bridge and waited for a bus to take him to his job at the BBC. He felt a sharp sting in his right thigh and whirled around to see a man picking up an umbrella from the ground. The man mumbled â??Iâ??m sorryâ? in a foreign accent and hailed a cab. Four days later, Markov was dead. Killed by a poisonous umbrella.
Markovâ??s assassination may be the most â??Bond-likeâ? episode of the entire Cold War. But to chalk up the bizarre killing up as â??just another Cold War hi-jinxâ? is inadequate. Markovâ??s murder epitomized the Eastern Blocâ??s inability to stomach dissent. The totalitarian system â??in this case Todor Zhivkovâ??s Bulgaria, with help from the Soviet KGBâ?? eliminated Markov just as it had the millions of dissenters before him.
Markovâ??s end was the same as his predecessors, but the means of his assassin were quite different. A month before his death, Markov received a phone call informing him that he would â??die of natural causes, killed by a poison the West could not detect or treat.â? His dangerous ideas would be extinguished when he died a â??natural,â? quiet, unremarkable death.
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