Word: bulgarians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...normally cautious Italian politicians exuded confidence that they possessed the evidence to incriminate, at the very least, the Bulgarian secret service. Although final proof is still lacking, the government's decision to go public with charges that had until then appeared only in the form of rumors and leaks in Italian newspapers has created one of the worst crises in years between a NATO country and a member of the Warsaw Pact. Foreign Minister Emilio Colombo announced that the Italian government had taken measures to reduce sharply Bulgaria's diplomatic presence in Rome and to make it harder...
...intelligence officers remained cautious. The U.S. refused to make any statement supporting or denying the Italian charges. In Paris French Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson noted that "the Italians are serious people. [Colombo] would not have taken the steps that you know about if there had not been some Bulgarian elements involved...
...Italian charges prompted an emotional response last week from the Soviet Union. Leonid Zamyatin, spokesman for the Central Committee, angrily denied any Soviet or Bulgarian involvement in the papal shooting. He accused Western intelligence agencies and the Western press of conducting "a malicious campaign that has not a grain or iota of truth." Added Zamyatin: "If these insinuations continue, it will be seen as a deliberate campaign of aggravating world tension, an evil-minded campaign to discredit Bulgaria and the Soviet Union in the eyes of Catholics...
...Bulgarian agents have engaged in a number of dubious activities on behalf of the Soviet Union throughout the world. For years Western intelligence experts have believed that Bulgaria shipped millions of dollars worth of arms to right-wing terrorists in Turkey, helping create the anarchy that almost toppled the Turkish government in 1979. According to Israeli intelligence officials, more than 1,000 Palestinian terrorists have been trained in Bulgarian camps over the past decade, and all the heavy armaments used by the P.L.O. in Lebanon were shipped from the Black Sea port of Varna. Nicaragua's former Ambassador...
...every level, ties between the Soviet Union and Bulgaria are close, partly reflecting Bulgaria's longstanding gratitude for Russian help in expelling Turkish occupiers in 1878. Most Western intelligence officials agree that on international missions at least, the Bulgarians act only on direct orders from Moscow. The relationship between the KGB and its Bulgarian counterpart, says Stefan Sverdlev, a defector who was a colonel in the Bulgarian secret service until 1971, "is like that between master and slave." True as that may be, it does not constitute any proof of Soviet involvement in the Pope's shooting. Indeed...