Defection, Spies and the Shadow of Georgi Markov (466)

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0:35Oggy Boytchev:He died in my arms as I was pulling him out of the back of the pickup truck. The paramedic looked at me and said, I'm afraid he didn't make it. And I said, what do you mean he didn't make it? He said, he's dead. That moment, I had relived for a long time after that. In 1986, Ogie Boitsev made a split-second decision that would change his life forever. In this second episode with Ogie, he recounts details of his extraordinary escape to becoming a broadcaster with the BBC World Service. He describes the emotional impact of leaving his family behind, the pride his father felt hearing his son's voice broadcasting back into Bulgaria, and the dramatic events that followed the collapse of communism.

1:29Oggy also takes us inside the Bulgarian section of the BBC where the memory of murdered dissident Georgi Markov still lingered. He reveals stories of another mysterious death linked to the section, recalls interviewing KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky about Markov's assassination and reflects on later accounts with spies, intelligence chiefs and world leaders during a distinguished BBC career alongside legendary journalist John Simpson. I'm delighted to welcome Oggie to our Cold War conversation. Before we start, I just want to let you know that Oggie has written several books, the latest of which is The Istanbul Connection, a gripping, morally complex thriller that explores the blurred lines between ideology and manipulation.

2:17It's available via a link in our episode notes, and any purchases will help support the podcast. at what point do you think i need to get out of bulgaria i'm not going to get anywhere here

2:32Oggy Boytchev:from my days in red riverbank when i was under 10 and that was a discussion which we had openly and sometimes in a cryptic way with my parents they've always said you have no future here you will have to get out at some point when it's convenient and without jeopardizing your life. There were ways to cross the border illegally into Greece or Turkey, but that would have involved a huge risk to life and a huge risk to the lives of my family there. So I had to be very careful. But the seed of that was put in my mind back in Red River Bank, that I had no future in Bulgaria. That was on the assumption that the communist regime would last forever.

3:33Oggy Boytchev:And my father never believed that the communist regime would collapse, not in the 1960s and the 70s. he thought that the regime was so repressive that there would be no way anybody will try to dislodge it. Starting as a shipping agent in Sofia in the early 1980s, I thought, could be a way out. And I just bade my time and waited. So you're biding your time working for this shipping company. What's the opportunity that arrives? A Bulgarian cargo ship was stranded in the Swets Canal and the shipping company couldn't find anybody who spoke English who could go and deal with it. So I was sent on a three-day business trip to Cairo and Port Said.

4:31Oggy Boytchev:I flew to Egypt on Bulgarian Airlines I flew to Cairo It was picked up by the shipping agent an Egyptian company taken to Port Said where the office was the following day I was taken to the ship we signed all the insurance documents an assessor says the damage and all that And we decided how long the repairs will take. And I was due to fly back to Bulgaria. I had a ticket on Bulgarian Airlines. So this was the most momentous time of my life. This was the moment which changed my life. I woke up one morning And thought this is my chance If I went back to Bulgaria I would be very stupid That was 3rd of January 1986

5:44Oggy Boytchev:So I get up, I go to the agent's office And ask him to buy me a ticket to London without explaining why I want to go to London. And Egypt being Egypt, he just took my$200 and bought me a ticket on Egypt Air to London. He didn't ask whether I had a visa or not. So, jumping into the dark, I had no idea whether the Egyptian authorities will let me out of the country without a British visa. I had a pretty good idea that if I made it to London, I would be okay. They will let me in. What happens next is probably more debatable. What kind of stay I will get. But simply by listening to the BBC, I knew that 1986, I wouldn't be returned back to Bulgaria straight away.

6:47Oggy Boytchev:So the agent takes me to Cairo Airport. in the morning and Cairo Airport is in a lockdown the army had taken over because the airport officials and passport officials are on strike so all the desks are manned by conscript soldiers who could hardly read let alone a Bulgarian passport so I was just waved through no one even questioned no one asked whether I had a British visa no one asked why I was going to London and all that that was the day before I was due to fly to Bulgaria so I arrived in London dressed in my pinstripe suit and a suitcase and see the queue at passport control and say to myself, no, I can't go here.

7:56Oggy Boytchev:I need to find somewhere else. So I see a desk which is totally empty and it says the Blue Channel. This is where people with pets go. And I go to the elderly woman at that desk, give her my Bulgarian passport and say, I am Ognyan Bojciv, I come from Bulgaria and I want political asylum. And everything happened very quickly. She just picked up the phone, two people arrived, took me with them, took me to baggage control. They escorted me to baggage control to get my suitcase. they immediately examined the suitcase opened the suitcase and i could hear one of them saying to the other he's all prepared for the english weather thinking that i wouldn't understand oh no so i was kept at hitrow for about a week i was interrogated said if they alternated between, and I could tell whether it was an immigration official or it was MIS-5, because they had completely different demeanour and completely different questions to ask.

9:19Oggy Boytchev:The MIS-5 woman was very interested in my father, had to get a very detailed account of who he was, almost intimate details as if to prove that he was my father. And after a week at Heathrow, an immigration official came to me with a piece of paper and said, you're free to leave. This is your document. We've arranged for you to stay at the Polish war veterans hostel in Victoria. And I said, but I haven't got any documents. What if a policeman stops me and asks for my documents? And she just smiled and said, police in this country don't normally stop people and ask for documents. So that was my first schooling into the sort of British way of life.

10:21Oggy Boytchev:So the rest was pretty smooth. went to this hostel, which was a converted Victorian house at the back of Victorian station, manned by an elderly Polish family. And then, cut the long story short, I applied for various jobs, including the Bulgarian section of the BBC. And within six months, I was asked to sit an exam at Bush House in London, passed the exam, then there was another six months of vetting. Then I was given a casual contract for the Bulgaria section of the BBC World Service, which in present-day parlance will translate as a zero-hours contract. They call you when they need you. But for me, that was fine.

11:19Oggy Boytchev:So this is how I started. Wow. Wow. Now, and this was the first time you'd been outside of Bulgaria. So that must have been quite mind-blowing, even going to Egypt and then to the UK. Oh, getting out of Victoria Station was, I wouldn't describe it as shocking, but it blew my mind. First thing, first, I thought everything looked very clean. All cars looked very clean. The black caps looked shiny because I came from a country where everything was gray and dirty. There was no color, even in Sophia. So the first encounter, I just stood outside Victoria Station before making a move and just watched the world go by with the neon signs and the people rushing.

12:16and yeah but i got used to it pretty quickly how did you make contact with your parents to let you

12:28Oggy Boytchev:know where you were not immediately i waited for three or four days i only had 50 dollars in my pocket left. So I changed them into pounds, got a lot of coins. And on the third day, I went to a coach station, which was not very far from the hostel, and used one of the public telephones there. I still remember it cost me three pounds to call Bulgaria for a few minutes. my mother answered she was very calm the first thing she said where are you I said I was in London she said the police had been here to talk to me and your father which I immediately knew meant be careful what you say and that was it she said are you ok I said I'm fine I'll call you back later when I have more news.

13:35Oggy Boytchev:Yeah, I didn't speak to them as regularly as people probably would have expected from somebody who's left his parents, because I never told them that I was going to do that. I myself didn't know that I had the strength to do it when I was in Cairo. But then a few months later, when I called them, They said, we heard you on the BBC World Service in Bulgarian. I wasn't appearing under my real name on advice from the section head, but I invented a name which was a sort of anagram of my dad's name. Apart from knowing my voice, they knew that the voice belonged to me because of the name. So this is how it started.

14:30Oggy Boytchev:and I never looked back. It must have made your dad's day hearing your voice, but must have made him so proud that you were there broadcasting back to Bulgaria as part of the resistance against communism. Oh, he was immensely proud. He was immensely proud and he told me so. When 1989, when communism fell so dramatically, they came to see me in 1991, to see me in London. And he made it clear because he wasn't a very emotional person. He never hugged me or kissed me or said that he loved me or anything. He was a very sort of old school, stern person. he said how proud he was and he suggested that I should go back to Bulgaria and take part in the new political system which I considered for a very brief moment and it was a very brief moment because at the time my career at the BBC was beginning to take off I had moved from the Bulgarian section to the World Service newsroom There was a prospect of moving to the domestic radio, to Radio 4, which I did eventually.

15:52Oggy Boytchev:So I thought weighing up, going back to Bulgaria and starting from scratch on some unknown political landscape, or staying in Britain where I could see my career at the BBC progressing, I decided not to do it. So did you have dual nationality or did you become a British citizen? Oh, I became British citizen at the first opportunity. When I say the first opportunity, it took a few years. I got my British passport in 1994. So that was eight years after my arrival. I wasn't able to travel freely. I had a British travel document, which gave me very limited ability to travel, although the BBC did send me to, I think, in 1992, to Skopje, to the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, when there was a sort of something like a civil war between the Albanians and the Macedonians.

17:08And the BBC sent me to interview the then president, Kirill Gligorov, because I told them I had family there, which was true.

17:17Oggy Boytchev:And they did help me get access to the president's office. So I travelled on this British travel document, which was a very unpleasant experience. I flew into Thessaloniki in northern Greece from London and then got on the train. The Greek authorities let me in on the travel document, but the Macedonians looked at it as if I was coming from Mars and said, no way are you coming into our country. So I had to call the president's office from a pay phone at the train station at the border. And it was resolved, but not immediately. I missed the trains. Yeah, that was the first experience of me travelling abroad on a British travel document, and I never wanted to repeat it.

18:11Oggy Boytchev:But after I got my British passport in 1994, there was no stopping after that. So you joined the Bulgarian section of the BBC following your defection from Bulgaria. Now, I imagine the shadow of Georgi Markov's murder is still hanging over that. For those of you who haven't listened to part one of this interview with Oggy, Georgi Markov was a famous Bulgarian writer who was close to the communist leader of Bulgaria. He defected to the UK in 1969 and found work with the BBC World Service Broadcasting back into Bulgaria. He was murdered by a poisoned umbrella on Waterloo Bridge in 1978. Oh, very much.

18:57Oggy Boytchev:Although people didn't openly talk about it, it was there. It was just the murmurs in the background. This is the desk where he sat. This is where he met his wife Annabelle and all that. He was a charming man. When he talked to you, this is what the female members of the sections were saying because he was known to have been a great womanizer. when he talked to you he would just crouch next to your desk and look you in the eye like a little puppy and so you pick up these details not the political stuff because no one knew and probably no one wanted to talk about the gory details of the murder but I thought I got to know him much better through the little details that people let slip in conversations about him.

20:03Now, what I wasn't aware of until you sent your note through is another member of the Bulgarian section of the BBC died mysteriously about months after Markov.

20:16Oggy Boytchev:Yes. And this is the unspoken thing at the section because when I joined in 1986, Lots of people will talk about Markov. Almost no one wanted to talk about this guy called Vladimir Simeonov, who had joined the section a few months after Markov and died a month after Markov's murder. Now, this was just how it was presented to me at the time. I became quite friendly with the head of the section, a guy called John Woodward, who is sadly dead. He died a few years ago, but he was an incredible personality. and I loved him because he championed me through the section and he was the first one who told me that if I wanted a career, I had to leave the section and go and work in what he called the mainstream BBC.

21:26So even John, with whom I had lots of conversations,

21:32Oggy Boytchev:when I asked him about Vladimir Semyonov, he just shut down. No one wanted to talk about it, which I found really bizarre. He was a young guy in his early 30s. He lived alone in a small terrace house in Plastow in East London. And about a month and a half after Markov's death, he was found dead at the bottom of the stairs in his house. The post-mortem was inconclusive. This is what I got from various official sources after that. Although there was no sign of struggle, there were signs which pointed to strangulation before death. But the verdict of the coroner was open verdict, so he couldn't quite decide what caused death.

22:30Oggy Boytchev:So when I heard about it, for me, that was a sort of red light flashing saying anyone around me in the section could be an informant of the Bulgarian Secret Service. Because this was the implication, what I got from the various murmurings at the section that Vladimir was probably a plant in the section. There is no evidence of that. I don't want to slander anybody unnecessarily. But these were the rumours that I heard at the time when I was working there. In 1991, as part of your work for the BBC, you interview Oleg Gordievsky, who was the KGB resident in London, who was also a spy for the British Secret Services.

23:27and you ask him about Markov's murder.

23:33Oggy Boytchev:Yes. Gordievsky had, at that time in 91, had just published a book with Professor Christopher Andrew about himself, was doing media rounds. But when I say media rounds, he didn't come to Bush House as Oleg Gordievsky. He came heavily disguised. only the section head John Woodward and I knew who he was he was led through security wearing a false beard a false moustache dark glasses almost ridiculously disguised and a hat so we came to the studio and amongst other things obviously for us the main interest was Markov and his murder because of the nature of the murder. It caught the public imagination in the Western world.

24:30Oggy Boytchev:The term Bulgarian umbrella was born at the time. I do remember having joined the section for a few months and I was traveling back to East London where my flat was at the time and I was carrying an umbrella and the tube, the carriage was crowded and by accident I put my umbrella on somebody's foot. It was a guy dressed like a city type, dressed in a pinstripe suit. And I said, I'm so sorry. And he turned around to me smiling and said, it's okay, so long as it's not a Bulgarian umbrella. I didn't know what to say. I just smiled back and moved on. So the Bulgarian umbrella caught the public imagination.

25:20Oggy Boytchev:in the West. So when we talked with Gordievsky about Markov, he said that for sure he knew that the KGB had helped the Bulgarian Secret Service, the DS, the Rzadna Sigournos, with the technical details, as he put it, which means providing the mechanism, the poison, the way to use it, and all that. Now, who carried out the actual murder is open to debate their various theories, but he was absolutely certain that it was masterminded by the Bulgarian Secret Service at the behest and the explicit request of Todor Zhivkov. This is what Gordievsky told me. now with all these things even the most detailed KGB archives you always need to take with a pinch of salt you have to double source them which is not always possible that was enough for me to make a program about Markov based on what Gordievsky told me the main thing was he was absolutely certain that the Bulgarian Secret Service carried out the assassination and the technical help was provided by the KGB.

26:52Thank you for sharing that. So your career in the BBC goes from strengths to strengths and you become John Simpson's producer.

27:03Oggy Boytchev:That took a few years. It took me through the Broadcasting House newsroom where I was on attachment as a foreign duty editor for a while, working on Radio 4. Then to when BBC's international channel was set up, used to be called BBC World News, I joined the newsroom almost right from the beginning. From there, I moved into the main TV newsroom at Television Centre, to the World Affairs Unit, various iterations, working abroad. and in London. I became eventually John Simpson's producer in 2003. Our first proper big assignment was in northern Iraq, in Kurdistan, ahead of the Allied invasion, March 2003.

28:00Oggy Boytchev:We went to Kurdistan through Turkey, through the Turkish border, and hoped that when the Americans seized Baghdad, we would be able to go from Kurdistan to Baghdad by land. It didn't work out exactly as we planned it, but it was an experience which made an indelible mark on all of the team, not just me and John because first part of the team was involved in a landmine accident in outside Sulamania which is close to the Iranian border where our Iranian cameraman was killed by a landmine our producer Stuart Hughes lost his leg and correspondent Jim Stuart and correspondent and Jim Muir was injured.

29:03Oggy Boytchev:And while I was dealing with this, just when everything was going back to a semblance of normality, Stuart was evacuated to Cyprus, Jim Muir was back to normal, Kaveh, the cameraman, Kaveh's body was transported to Iran. Our team in Al-Saito Bill was bombed by an American. jet. A bomb was dropped on the convoy. We were tagged along at the back of the convoy. It was a convoy by Kurdistan special forces trying to find out whether Saddam Hussein's front line has moved, whether he's withdrawn the soldiers from the border with Kurdistan. And that accident resulted in 47 people dead, mostly Kurdish fighters.

30:04Oggy Boytchev:Our translator, Cameron Abdul-Rozak, was killed. He actually died in my arms while I was transferring him from a Kurdish pickup truck to an American ambulance. as I was pulling him out of the back of the pickup truck telling the American paramedic that I would like to treat him as a member of the BBC team. The paramedic looked at me and said, I'm afraid he didn't make it. And I said, what do you mean he didn't make it? He said, he's dead. But that moment, I had relived for a long time after that, because I hadn't had anybody die in my presence, in my life before that, let alone somebody who had been working closely in northern Iraq.

31:06Yes, that incident produced one of the most memorable pieces ever to go out on the BBC with the famous drop of blood on the camera lens

31:21Oggy Boytchev:while the cameraman was filming. And it went around the world. That shot was on the front pages of all the newspapers in the UK and America. the following day. But for us, it wasn't a moment of celebration. In any other circumstances, we would have been celebrating the success of our news team. We had to go to the funeral of our translator. This is what bonded me and John Simpson. And we never looked back. We worked together. He asked for me every time at the beginning, Every time he was sent somewhere, he asked for me. And yes, we worked for about nine years together.

32:12Wow. Wow, I can't imagine an experience like that. You must have interviewed some fascinating people then with John over the years.

32:23Oggy Boytchev:Yes. The most memorable was, and all for the wrong reasons, was President Assad of Syria. not because he said anything illuminating, that he was so mild and so accommodating. I was directing the interview and then the cutaways after that in the Palace Gardens and all that. His security services were trying to rush us through. He said, no, I'll do it again. You can do this shot again. And he looked so ordinary and so mild and unassuming that I just couldn't believe that such a man could be responsible for such nasty things done to his people and to his opponents. So this is what made it memorable, almost incongruously memorable.