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The Poison Umbrella
440 Plays1 month ago
This week we travel back in time to look at the death by poison-tipped umbrella of a Bulgarian dissident living in London in the 70s. Ah the past - things sure were wacky back then. Not like right now, when everything is as normal and stable as it could possibly be and if you'll excuse me I'm going to stand in a corner screaming for the next 17 months.
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Transcript
Emergency Mention by Knowledge Fight
00:00:04
Speaker
Okay, the emergency meeting collection has been turned off. The flurry of panicking has now subsided. Why are we at panic level two, Electric Boogaloo? The big boys mentioned us, Josh. The big boys mentioned us. This is a safe space. The big boys aren't here. Tell me what the big boys did. They mentioned us, Josh. They mentioned us.
00:00:27
Speaker
yeah Who? Dan and Jordan. The Knowledge Fight guys. The big boys. Really? That's news. I always thought Dan might be a listener. Jordan, I think, is the kind of person who would scream out. That's not how people talk. That's still mentioned on a major podcast. This could be our big break. It's only been 10 years. Well, well.
00:00:49
Speaker
Well, it's not that they listen, or at least it's not that we can say that they listen, but we were mentioned in a shout-out. Why are they shouting us out if they don't listen to the podcast? well Well, well, right, right. So one of our listeners joined their version of their Patreon to say that they learnt about their show by listening to ours. yeah You don't seem very excited by this news.
00:01:14
Speaker
Well, I mean, let's just say that with every passing moment of the explanation, the news goes from woo-hoo to woo. But the big boys, Josh. The big boys. It's only a ringing endorsement, is it? Being mentioned in a call-out. And how many people take that seriously? They have a huge audience. Probably less than 5% even pays attention to those call-outs. And if that only 20% might bother looking up our... 20% of 5%, Josh. 20% of 5%.
00:01:44
Speaker
Yeah, hold on. Even if only 10,000 people listen to Knowledge Fight, which is a very conservative number, that would be 100 new listeners. And it only goes up from there.
00:01:58
Speaker
Okay, so why have you just called an emergency meeting to follow up on the previous emergency meeting? The big boys mentioned us, Ian. The big boys mentioned us. We have got to get our shit together.
00:02:12
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Im Dintas.
US Election Impact on Non-Americans
00:02:26
Speaker
Hello, it's the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Addison and in Zhuhai, China. This time it's personal. It's Dr. Ian Myer-Extender. Hello there. I'm very depressed by electoral news, which hopefully is not depressing by the time that this episode goes out, but probably is going to be depressing. And in fact, will be depressing to at least someone, although presumably Not joyful if it turns out to be depressing to the kind of people who listen to our podcasts, which I realize suddenly sounds very arch, but at the same time, I think we have a very discreet read readership, listenership, ownership.
00:03:08
Speaker
a communitarian communist society that is involved in the podcast's guide to the conspiracy, whether you're somehow reading the podcast or listening to it, or somehow even watching it.
00:03:24
Speaker
See the Josh? I actually saved that mangle with a pom and dignity. It's masterful. But yes, no, the point is we're recording this on the evening of the 6th of November and as we speak, America appears to be in the process of voting in Donald Trump for a second time. Have you listened to him? You know what he sounds like when he talks, right? yeah He sounds like us. We're trying to record a podcast and someone isn't editing out the fluffs.
00:03:52
Speaker
Yeah, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's not up to us. It's whatever's going to happen, it's going to happen. so But that's kind of the worst part as foreigners, i.e. as non-Americans. Every four years we have to get to grips with America's truly stupid electoral system.
00:04:12
Speaker
and we have absolutely no say in how that system works. It is incredibly stupid, it's non-representative, and yet somehow the rest of us have to not only live with it, but live with the consequences every four years, and not every four years, the time between the elections.
Challenges in Academic Publishing
00:04:33
Speaker
It's truly irritating.
00:04:34
Speaker
truly, truly irritating, especially when Americans make the wrong decision. Yeah, basically. Still nothing we can do about it now. um what what What have you been up to when you haven't been following elect election results? Submitting papers. That's what I've been doing. Sounds more interesting.
00:04:54
Speaker
I mean, it's and actually it's its own particular kind of hell. and that Every journal has a slightly different style as to how you're meant to submit a paper online. Now, the general gist is you submit an anonymized version of the paper and a non-anonymized version of the paper. And the anonymized version goes to the reviewer. But every journal has a slightly different standard as to how they want the anonymization to be done.
00:05:24
Speaker
And every journal also has varying degrees of information they want on the non-anonymized version, which they only tell you about after you've submitted the paper. And they go, oh, by the way, you're missing a conflict of interest statement on your paper, which we did not tell you you needed to include. So you put it in. And they go, oh, and also, by the way, now you've put the conflict of interest statement in. You're also missing x and y, so you find out bit by bit all the things you were meant to include in the paper, which the journal never told you about, but editors seem to magically think you're going to intuit should be in the papers in the first place.
Historical Assassinations: Espionage Focus
00:06:04
Speaker
Well that sounds moderately painful. I mean it's not as painful as an American election, but it is my own private, my own private Idaho, a state that went to Donald Trump.
00:06:16
Speaker
Yep, yep. Anything fun then? Anything interesting at least? I can't mention in the fun things. I've been up to Josh. This is a family podcast.
00:06:29
Speaker
very well Well then maybe we should get into the main bit of the episode. Which is a family friendly topic of assassinations. Exactly. we've um We've chosen to flee from the present day, somewhat understandably, into the into the the the comfort of the past when men were men and women weren't so happy about it and you could just murder a person on the street with an umbrella. I mean, it's it's it's unfunny because it's true.
00:06:57
Speaker
ah Play a chime. I'm talking to myself now because I think I'm editing this one. Play a chime, Josh, and then let's talk about it.
00:07:07
Speaker
So Josh, tell me about the Bulgarian umbrella. Well, we'll get to the Bulgarian umbrella. Let's let's talk about the person upon whom it was used. It's the latest dance craze. It's sweeping the nation. Do the old Bulgarian umbrella. It's a good thing this isn't a visual medium because here I, Josh and I, are just doing the Bulgarian umbrella on camera and you can't see what those moves look like. I assure you I am not.
00:07:36
Speaker
ah But yes, we're back to, is this the Cold War? 1978, a Cold War. That's the end of the Cold War end. Was that sort of 80s, 90s? I don't even remember. Well, I mean, some people date it to the fall of the bur Berlin Wall. Other people it to the economic reforms in Russia, which is kind of late 80s, early 90s.
00:08:01
Speaker
It's one of those things we know when it actually ended, but when it started ending is a whole different kettle of fish. And of course, various luminaries have claimed to be the people who precipitated the end of the Cold War. along i mean Ronald Reagan made that claim. David Hasselhoff has also made that claim. Two equally great political figures of our lifetime.
00:08:26
Speaker
Yeah, true. But no, so we've already know we're we're definitely in the middle of it then, in the middle of the Cold War, and we've got a good old fashioned spy assassination type of fear. none of this None of this drone strike crap. Back then, if you wanted someone dead, you needed to you needed to walk up to them and stab them with an umbrella. That was the only way of doing it back then.
00:08:48
Speaker
yeah I mean guns hadn't been invited. They'd been invented but they hadn't been invited to spy craft. I mean as we know the Chinese invented guns and gunpowder a long time ago but they had't been no one had been invited to use a gun up until the present day. It's it's yeah an unwritten and untalked about fact about westerns. They weren't shooting each other with revolvers, they were shooting each other with badges. Which we didn't need. yeah Now, what we're talking about today is the murder of Georgi Markov. He was a Bulgarian dissident writer and and not beloved of the Bulgarian government at the time, and due to that he was unfortunately assassinated on a London street in 1978 by an operative connected to the Bulgarian Secret Service and the KGB. More on him later.
00:09:42
Speaker
But Mr. Markov, he was ah he was an author, he was a playwright, he was a journalist, and his various works, his books, plays and articles, they were they were critical of the communist government of the time and of its current leader, Todor Zhufkov. Many of his books had been banned from libraries and bookstores in Bulgaria. He apparently, young after he eventually left Bulgaria, went to England and started working for the BBC, and t um ah issued a series of reports for the BBC and Radio Free Europe, which apparently Bulgarians sort of secretly tuned into. So he was he was not a man who the who the government of Bulgaria was particularly fond of, and they would much rather he had gone away. And so they arranged for that to happen at the time of his death in 1978. So by this stage, here he had moved to England. He was living in London, working for the BBC.
00:10:38
Speaker
ah And he was murdered with the... you i'm assuming I'm assuming you've all heard of this, the poison umbrella case. This is the poison umbrella case we're talking about now. If you've heard anything about spies and wacky spycraft assassinations and stuff, you've probably heard of the case of a person who was shot with ah with some sort of an umbrella gun and poisoned.
00:10:58
Speaker
but See, I was thinking about this before, in that the poison umbrella has been a punchline in quite a lot of media. To the point, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people think, oh yes, poison umbrella, that's one of the imaginative ways that writers have come up with how people could be killed using spycraft.
00:11:24
Speaker
As opposed to realizing, no, no, the poison umbrella may have inspired several jokes, but they were inspired by an actual incident of someone either being stabbed or shot by an umbrella. Because that's yeah a quite important point here. We're actually not quite sure of the mechanism of the poison umbrella.
00:11:45
Speaker
We just know an umbrella was used to poison a man at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge in London on the 7th of September 1978. Yes, for that is when Mr Markoff was waiting for his bus to take him to his job at the BBC and while he was standing there at the bus stop he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his leg which he said was similar to sort of ah an insect bite or a sting.
00:12:10
Speaker
He turned around and saw a man picking an up an umbrella ah and and thought that was kind of strange. By the time he had gotten to work, there was a bit of a swelling on his leg where he had felt the sting. By the evening, he had developed a bad enough fever that he had been admitted to hospital, and four days later he unfortunately died in hospital.
00:12:31
Speaker
Now he was post-mortemed.
00:12:37
Speaker
We'll see a little bit later, it seemed the police, like he he had said, i I think I've been poisoned. This this this feels like you know some sort of an assassination attempt by the people who want me dead. The police, it sounds, weren't instantly convinced, but eventually um they ordered a post-mortem and a fairly thorough one was done.
00:12:57
Speaker
And i mean and they were they they were unconvinced because his story was, I was standing at a bus stop. I felt a pain on the back of my leg. I turned round and someone was picking up an umbrella and I think he poisoned me.
00:13:12
Speaker
And that's not a very convincing story. You have to say it does sound a little bit fanciful. but so so strange You got stung by a bee and you're blaming someone with an umbrella for your bee sting. But of course it turned out actually he wasn't stung by a bee. He was stung by some kind of KGB wasp.
00:13:32
Speaker
Exactly. Well, so the post-mortem turned up something very strange and interesting. The coroner took tissues took a tissue sample from the site of of that the the quote unquote sting on his leg and a tissue sample from the other leg to compare the two. And when looking at the tissue sample from the infected leg, he found a tiny metal pellet less than two millimeters in diameter.
00:13:56
Speaker
made of, I think, but was it iridium and platinum or something? It was a particular alloy, presumably to make something that small but machine-hole. A tiny tiny round pellet with with even tinier holes drilled into it that appear to have been able to have hold like something like a poison. um and they They suspected that probably how it would have worked is you have your tiny pallet, you take a tiny drop of poison into it, you seal up the holes with with some sort of with a wax or some sort of sugar or something something that will melt, that will be solid at um in the open air, but will melt in with the simply the heat of being inside a human body and thereby release the poison.
00:14:41
Speaker
Especially since given in the suspected poison in this case is ricin, a substance you do not want to be handling even in small doses accidentally?
Investigations into Georgi Markov's Murder
00:14:51
Speaker
No. So as far as I can tell, we don't know for certain that it was ricin, but ricin seems to be the only poison that that that fits the bill. So they were pretty much convinced that was it.
00:15:05
Speaker
although I don't know if you can test for it or I'm not even sure. But yes, very, very nasty poison. ah Something that even a tiny amount in your system can kill you.
00:15:16
Speaker
So that was that was that was the the start of it. Now, we've been working off a couple of articles. The Guardian had an article last year about a documentary regarding this murder. And in that article, they link to an archive of their reporting from the time. And it's quite interesting to read through their articles. so It starts on the 12th of September, 1978. So this is now five days after he was stung, the day after he died. The headline is Defector's Mystery Death.
00:15:45
Speaker
so it's still a mystery at this point. I notice at one point in the story they say a puncture mark was found on Mr Markov's thigh but the fact that his death did not lead to a post-mortem examination immediately may mean that the police are skeptical about Mr Markov's known fears of the Bulgarian secret agents.
00:16:02
Speaker
signing yes So yeah, so today later, and the postmortem hasn't been done yet, I guess, so it yes, it wasn't immediate. But of course, he is a kind of Bulgarian celebrity in the sheer fact that he was a Nolan defector who had a radio presence on the BBC, and thus his death is kind of noteworthy enough to get reported upon. And that does make you wonder whether that was the kind of thing that made the police go,
00:16:29
Speaker
Yes, well I guess we probably should do it post-mortem then, if the media's going to make a fuss about it. But so a day later, 13th September 1978, they now have the article, Radio talks may hold key to umbrella death, post-mortem finds no natural causes.
00:16:45
Speaker
And in this one, they do actually, they mention this the the whole umbrella deal. So they they quote, Mr. Teo Lurkov, about a Bulgarian who worked alongside Mr. Markov, was also one of the author's closest friends, said yesterday that Mr. Markov had told him in detail about the incident in which his thigh was pierced by an umbrella in the street outside Bush House. Mr. Markov told him that a well-built man with a foreign accent had pushed him in the leg with the point of his umbrella and said, I am sorry, and disappeared into a taxi, taking, of course, the umbrella with him, which is why we don't know exactly the mechanism by which all this happened. Now, so that was the 12th and the 13th of September. By the 30th of September 1978, the headline is now Mark of Death, Now a Case of Murder.
00:17:38
Speaker
very much so. So this article now says, or now includes, Georgy Markov, the Bulgarian who died in mysterious circumstances 18 days ago, was murdered. Scott and Jad said yes to that.
00:17:53
Speaker
Are you going to keep doing that? Maybe. I guess I'll find out. Evidence to back this comes from the discovery of a tiny metal pellet in Mr Markov's leg, which is identical to a pellet removed from the back of another bu Bulgarian exile earlier this week.
00:18:11
Speaker
I really wish you'd kind of emphasise the end of sentences so it leads up to that most dramatic stage. I suppose. Because yes, it turned out Markov was not the only guy they tried this on. He was he was um the first, and as far as I'm aware, the only one to die from it, but another man suffered the same sort of attack. We'll get to him.
00:18:34
Speaker
ah But continuing with the um the Guardian's coverage, so it now jumps ahead to the 3rd of January 1979, and here it's reporting on the um the the conclusions of an increase into his death. So the headliner's Markov was, quote, unlawfully killed. um
00:18:55
Speaker
I like that. Unlawfully killed. That's a euphemism for murdered. Also, well, are we talking lawful killing? I mean, I guess actually the UK, she still has executions at this point. Do they actually in 1978, are they still executing people? I don't know and from crimes France, I know France, though, they always say France's last execution was the same year Star Wars came out, so that was 77, so the British, I don't know, they might have... yeah And not a way to kill Alec Guinness. Look, Alec, you've committed a dreadful crime by being in this film, so I'm afraid to say it's off with your head. Also, welcome to the premiere of Star Wars by George Lucas. Yes.
00:19:33
Speaker
No, so i mean this this article points out that ah the identity of his assassin remains a mystery that Inquest heard yesterday. ah So I believe that the, however, I don't know the legal technicalities, but apparently that they couldn't conclude a verdict of murder or manslaughter because of you what what what you Whatever the rules are for what what what evidence. and and So I actually can't see how you can have a distinction between murder or manslaughter. who One is a lawful killing and the other is not. I mean, murder is by definition an unlawful killing. And manslaughter, you are unlawfully killing people. You're just not guilty of a criminal act when you do it.
00:20:20
Speaker
Well, as you go, great as you well yeah it does depend. yeah But I assume i assume that that they are specific crimes with specific definitions, so I guess the increase couldn't prove that whatever happened is fit to those exact definitions. I mean, can you be charged with manslaughter with self-defend, to which point it might be a law for killing, but you've committed manslaughter rather than... Maybe I'm just not the legal mind I think I am as associate professor of philosophy. Yes, no, neither of us neither of us is a lawyer, so we would just have to take it take their word for it that unlawful killed was the strongest wording that this this inquest was able to conclude. And that's it for for then. We then jump ahead all the way to the 20th of June 2008 with the headline, Final Attempt to Solve Markov Umbrella Killing.
00:21:11
Speaker
which says Scotland Yard detectives have twice visited to Bulgaria in three months in a final attempt to solve the murder of Georgi Markov, in which the Bulgarian decision was jabbed with a poison umbrella while waiting for a London bus in 1978. So by 2008 they still hadn't officially solved, and i butt and they never they never officially have, as far as I'm aware. Well, so here's the interesting part.
00:21:34
Speaker
In 2013, the Bulgarian government closed the case. So as far as they're concerned, it's an unsolved murder, but it's also not an ongoing investigation. That is not true in the UK. In the UK, there's still an ongoing investigation. And I guess that's because the Bulgarians have said, look, an ex-patriot was living in the UK, they were killed.
00:21:59
Speaker
There may have been some attachments to the Bulgarian government of the day, but all leads are exhausted. We are no longer investigating this case. Whilst the British are going, someone was killed on our soil, likely due to foreign interference, and therefore we will continue investigating it until such time that we get a satisfactory answer.
00:22:21
Speaker
so let's let's Let's talk about this
Functionality of the Poison Umbrella
00:22:24
Speaker
umbrella gun. now Did you know you can see a reconstruction of this in the Spine Museum in Berlin, Germany? Yeah, I've i've seen a diagram of of how they think it could have worked. And and think how it could could have worked really is the important part here. Because according to some accounts we're talking about an umbrella gun. So something which actually fired a projectile. Some accounts we're talking about an umbrella which kind of had some kind of pneumatic system where you stabbed someone in the leg and it injected the pellet into Makov's thigh.
00:22:59
Speaker
So we're not quite sure how the umbrella worked. No one has the has said umbrella in their custody. And so if you go to the spy museum website and actually look at the picture of the umbrella, they are quite happy to admit that it is a somewhat imaginative reconstruction of how they think the umbrella might have looked and worked at the time.
00:23:22
Speaker
Because I've read a couple of different accounts, so we just heard um from the Guardian reporting that that Mr Markov's friend said that he had he'd he'd been poked in the leg by someone with a foreign accent who said, I'm sorry, and and jumped in a taxi.
00:23:37
Speaker
I had read other accounts suggested that that initially Markov, he just sort of said he felt a pain in his leg and turned around to look and saw a guy picking up and um an umbrella and and initially suggested that maybe the the the dropping of the umbrella was just so that he would have an excuse to to have turned away from Markov when he looked around.
00:23:57
Speaker
so that I wouldn't see his face or you suggesting that the umbrella wasn't even the delivery mechanism at all and that it was it was just the dropping of the umbrella was a cover for however he had injected this thing into the guy. But then but yeah, i've heard I'm not quite sure where those accounts came from. The Guardian report very much gives you the idea that yes, he was jammed with an umbrella.
00:24:18
Speaker
And that is how the poison is delivered. And indeed, ah sometime later, a man called Oleg Kalugin, who was a former KGB defector living, or still is, as far as I'm aware, living in the West, he has gone on the record and said that Markov was killed by Rysin, delivered vi via an umbrella gun. um According to him, the attack was was personally approved by Yuri Andropov, who at the time was the head of the KGB. Andropov is a name I've heard before? Well, I mean, he i mean yeah, a former head of the KGB, former head of the USSR, but importantly for the story, had been the ambassador to Hungary during the first and unsuccessful Hungarian uprising of 1956, due to his intervention at the time, so he basically asked Khrushchev to authorise Soviet military intervention, Andropov became known as the butcher of Budapest,
00:25:16
Speaker
and he became very fixated on that particular attempted revolution in Hungary because he was aghast at how quickly it sprung up and how it was almost successful and thus he became very interested in communist defectors living overseas? Yes, yes, if he was if he was worried that this might happen again, he'd want to head off anything that that could precipitate it. So, according to Mr Kalugan, the KGB helped with the sort of the preparation of the assassination, although KGB agents were sort of forbidden from actually taking part in it. So, according to him, he says,
00:25:59
Speaker
ah Through the KGB laboratory, we transferred the poison that was then used in the umbrella. There was literally a milligram of poison, a small drop of rice, and placed in a capsule at the tip of the umbrella. When the umbrella opened, it flew off at a distance of three to five meters, which is enough to prick someone. So hes there he's talking about some sort of an actual projectile, or or at least something that that that fires it out, certainly with enough force to break the skin and get inside, or break break the fabric of someone's trousers and get into their skin.
00:26:28
Speaker
and but Well, we'll return to that again, I think, when we talk about that other
Prime Suspect: Francesco Guglino
00:26:32
Speaker
case. But um the other the other interesting fact about this particular murder is the identity of the murderer himself, because we we have an idea ah that there there is there is a prime suspect. So um in 2006, there was a Danish TV documentary called The Umbrella Murder about this case.
00:26:55
Speaker
And in that documentary, the prime suspect was an Italian-born Bulgarian by the name of Francesco Guglino, or possibly Giulino, I'm not sure there, I've seen two different spellings. According to one article, he was yeah he was known as Agent Piccadilly.
00:27:11
Speaker
It doesn't say who gave him that name. I assume that's a Scotland Yard code name. It saysly sounds like a British name. I couldn't find some some history for that particular name. So yes, presumably it was Scotland Yard or some police officer who said, look, our suspect is an agent of a foreign power. We'll call them Piccadilly because of their proximity to the Waterloo Line.
00:27:37
Speaker
Yes, did that they just dropped that in there. Francesco Guglino known as Agent Piccadilly. anyway ah so he he He sounds like an interesting fellow. um He was yeah born in Italy but but grew up in Bulgaria. In 1970 he was arrested in Bulgaria for smuggling.
00:27:53
Speaker
And it sounds like he was and basically at that point they said, well, you're a you're you're ah you're an interesting fellow, you've got a set of skills on you. it's let's um here's Here's your choice. You can go to prison for a long time, or you can come and work for us as an agent of the Bulgarian Secret Service. and so Which is how the Secret Service is under the old Communist b block, tended to work.
00:28:17
Speaker
Yes. So we the Bulgarian government has files on him, which these days are visible. Yes, because after their revolution which ousted the communist government, they made all of their security force or security files publicly available. In fact, most of the former communist block countries did that with the exception of poor old Romania.
00:28:44
Speaker
where the Sakura Tate files just disappeared and are apparently still being used as blackmail material in local and national elections to this day.
00:28:57
Speaker
so in In this case, the Bulgarian government's files on mrskaguulina Mr. Gulino, they have a lot of information about his early training and information on some of the many of the missions that he was sent on. They don't contain any information specifically from around the time of Markov's killing. Except that we do know he was in London.
00:29:18
Speaker
we know he was Well, london are we don't know that from the air files, apparently, yeah. So I'm not sure if it's a case of the Communists knew that, you know, revolution was coming, their days were numbered, so they made a point of at least excising any information that would look bad for them. Or, I mean, maybe the later Bulgarian government thought, well, this is kind of an international incident. let's just um Let's just not shine any light onto that. But either way, that information was there. But yes, as you say, there is evidence from sort of the passport stamps showed that he was in London at around that time and then
00:29:52
Speaker
a little while later in their files, there's reference to him being spotted by another Bulgarian agent in Rome and of Mr. Gulino, I forget exactly who I was, giving him some sort of a signal, sort of holding up a newspaper or something. And it's not, that the the the files don't say what the specific significance of that signal was, but it certainly sounds like a spy sort of covertly giving ah a mission accomplished sort of a sign to another agent.
00:30:20
Speaker
So, yeah, again no no hard evidence, but there is say ah circumstantial evidence. and And this was known. So by the 1990s, British authorities had come to view him as the prime suspect. He was he was picked up and interviewed in 1993 by Scotland Yard. ah Supposedly, that he obviously has has denied all his life that he had anything to do with it. And apparently, yeah, he was he was picked up by Scotland Yard, he was interviewed.
00:30:48
Speaker
but they reckon they did not have enough evidence against him to to charge him with the crime. Now ah Ulrich Scotter, who's the director of the Umbrella Murder documentary, his pet theory is that Gulino may have cut a deal. In this Guardian article about his documentary that we've read, it says,
00:31:09
Speaker
They had all the evidence he was a spy. He's by far the biggest spy case we ever had and he was left untouched, said Scotter, who obtained a transcript of the 1993 interrogation. He is following up leads, suggesting Bellino may have cooperated with Western services, giving evidence on other major cases in exchange for remaining free, although as yet there is no hard evidence. So...
00:31:31
Speaker
some so some Some innuendo there, some suggestion. and Yes, and there's a lot of suggestion here with respect to, well, he acted in a particular way which made us suspicion of his activities at the time, and yes, he always explicitly denied committing the assassination. But he also constantly intimated that he knew something about it, if not had been involved in it.
00:31:58
Speaker
Yes, I mean, we we know we he definitely was an agent of the but Bulgarian Secret Service. and We know he'd been involved in a bunch of other stuff. We know a fair bit about him thanks to the recordings of Gianfranco Ivanizzi. Mr. Scott knew this fellow, Mr. Ivanizzi.
00:32:17
Speaker
um who was an Italian Danish film director who knew Mr. Galino personally, and it turned out was in the habit of secretly taping conversations between the two of them. And apparently those give you a bit of insight into Mr. Galino's character. He was, you know, lying about everything to everyone.
00:32:34
Speaker
among other things apparently. He was quite quite a fan of your Nazis and your Mussolini's. He had a copy of Mein Kampf I think and and so he he was... A fan of fascism you say? that I mean that seems to be coming back into style. Maybe he was just avant-garde.
00:32:51
Speaker
And in another instance of even more, even less direct innuendo, the article kind of suggests that Galino had Mr. Invenizzi killed. It says that he, it turned out that he, Invenizzi, had appeared in a documentary about the mark of murder and talked about Galino. The filmmakers promised to anonymize him, but they didn't do it properly, and Galino was furious. Later, the pair went for dinner, and the day after that, Invenizzi died. Scott has said, recounting the memories of Inveneze's family, so they seem to be suggesting that this dude had his mate killed because he didn't like that he'd thrown suspicion on him in another documentary. Yes, it does have that kind of thing. They had a meeting and the next day he died, like the last time he had a meeting with a friend, at least we think, and then born the person was dead four days later.
00:33:43
Speaker
So yes, Mr. Galeno was never arrested. He died in 2021, a free man. um ah mr Mr. Scott ah had interviewed him shortly, not not long before he died. And even right up until that point, he denied having anything to do with Markov's death. So we we'll never know for sure, but he certainly seems to have been the main suspect.
00:34:04
Speaker
Yeah, so every yeah it remains an unsolved crime, but still an active investigation in the United Kingdom. And that that's quite fascinating, especially given other unsolved crimes of assassinations in the UK in the present day. Yes, because this, of course, does have similarities to other cases we've seen. Obviously, the main similarity is, and now and down let's get into this point, the other guy who was also shot with a poison. um Well, yeah, so this is the bit which is kind of fascinating about the theory between was it a stabbing or was it a shooting? Because this other person who it is claimed was attacked by an umbrella does seem to have been shot by an umbrella gun and not stabbed by an umbrella dagger. Yes, I mean, he doesn't, as far as I'm a aware, mention a gun at all. But so we're we're now talking about Vladimir Kostov, who was another Bulgarian defector, much like Mr. Markov. He was um
00:35:02
Speaker
in Paris at the time. And so in his case, he yeah that they they retrieved, like we said earlier, they retrieved a pellet from his body. He got lucky, apparently. um This pellet had a ah white ah wax coating around it that hadn't melted properly inside his body as it was supposed to.
00:35:20
Speaker
And so only a tiny, tiny amount of the already tiny amount of ricin entered his body. And apparently it is possible to be effectively vaccinated against ricin if you get a really, really, really tiny amount of it in you. And that seems to be what happened to him. He was second. I imagine that's one of those things where, because even a milligram of ricin can be fatal,
00:35:44
Speaker
working out the smallest minimal dose that vaccinate you and doesn't kill you is an inviable way to protect your agents against you. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, so so basically, it seems like he he simply got lucky. um and And he ended up surviving his case of rice and poisoning. But yeah, the account of it is interesting. So so from one of those Guardian articles back in 1978, they say, Mr. Kostov says that as he was leaving the Arc de Triomphe metro station on August 27,
00:36:14
Speaker
So that's this is actually before the Markov incident. He heard a crack which sounded like an air gun report and felt a sting on the right side of his back. Although the wound became inflamed, he quickly recovered. The existence of a pellet found by doctors on Tuesday and in the presence of two Scotland Yard detectives strengthened suspicions that the umbrella with which Mr Markov was injured was a sophisticated gun.
00:36:38
Speaker
assuming they use the same, the exact same device each time. So the the date of that article was that post the killing of Markov. Yes. Because he Scotland Yard doesn't typically operate in gay parade. Well no, so he was that this incident happened before the Markov incident, but because he survived,
00:37:02
Speaker
he never got a post-mortem. So it wasn't until after Markoff had the post-mortem, they found the pellet in him. So then they went to this other guy who'd reported something similar and said, hey, do you mind if we take a sample of that when you got shots? We sort of cut into your back and see whether you've got a pellet there. So yeah, yeah. So so those those are the two cases we know of, and I've i've not heard of any others. But of course, and in more recent times,
00:37:31
Speaker
We've had some fairly high profile poisonings of of of dissident expats.
Comparisons with Recent Poisonings
00:37:37
Speaker
Obviously Alexander Litvinenko, with the polonium in his tea, and the screepiles and those two other people who unfortunately were exposed to the same same pathogen with nova chalk. Yeah, the names of a chalk in a perfume bottle.
00:37:55
Speaker
And these things, these always seem like messages because if you want to kill a defector, especially if you've read a large amount of spy fiction written during the Cold War, you do a simple breaking and entering and you kill the person in the process so it looks like a crime gone wrong.
00:38:17
Speaker
These are all examples of very arcane, very complicated ways of killing people that seem to exist more as a way of getting a message across than it is simply a vendetta against a particular individual. Which is not to say that they didn't intend to kill these particular individuals, but they what they really wanted to do was send a message which is, we can get you and you are not going to be able to work out how or when.
00:38:51
Speaker
Until it's too late, yeah. Yeah, I mean, especially the case, it was like Liv Vinenko. How long did he survive? He he spent... Weeks, i mean I think six weeks or so. when He was... He was chelation in hospital. And the actual cost of killing him was in the millions, if not billions of euros for getting that amount of polonium to put into his system.
00:39:17
Speaker
So it was a an extraordinarily expensive assassination. yeah And specifically designed so that he could sit in his hospital bed for weeks at a time saying, it was definitely Putin who did this, Putin killed me. yeah and And I mean, in Makov's case, and of course with Kostov's case, they had to actually invent an umbrella gun.
00:39:37
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, you can't just buy one of those off Taobao. You have to, a you have to build it yourself. Yes. so this is of if it we enters There's no wiki how showing you how to build an umbrella gun back in 1978. And presumably, actually, they're building this in 1977. Yes, yes. So It's ah very much as a case of yeah that they wanted they wanted Mr Markov's death and and ideally Mr Costov's death, although that unfortunately for him didn't work out, to to serve as a message I guess to other Bulgarian defectors that just maybe you know you're you're next unless perhaps you keep your head down and stop criticising the Bulgarian government.
00:40:22
Speaker
And that, I think, is all we have to say about the case of the Umbrella Gun Poison Murder case. The case of the Bulgarian Umbrella, not just a dance craze, a way of killing your victims. hey So, we're going to bring this episode to a close, but that's that's not all. We, of course, will record a bonus episode for our patrons who would never, ever poison you with an umbrella.
00:40:48
Speaker
although I'm fairly certain that if if any of us were to try to poison one of our patrons with an um with with an umbrella gun, it would have no effect. Their just inherent goodness would shield them. They're immune to ricin, is what I'm saying. Become a patron of the podcast that's going to the conspiracy. Ricin will no longer have any effect on you.
00:41:08
Speaker
So I'm just getting a note here from our legal expert, which is say that all promises about being immune to ricin based upon becoming a patron of the podcast's guide to the conspiracy should be considered null and void. Listening or subscribing to the podcast's guide to the conspiracy in no way vaccinates you against ricin poisoning and indeed may actually lead to excessive death by ricin by mere association.
00:41:33
Speaker
All I can say is, as far as I'm aware, none of our patrons have died of ricin poisoning yet. So draw what conclusions from that that you will. I mean, I'm not even willing to go that far, actually. I really, really can't go that far. Right. Well, whatever. Whether or not they're immune to ricin, they are definitely not immune to getting a bonus episode because we're going to record one for them. I guess, I mean, I guess we have to talk about what's happening in the u US right now.
00:42:03
Speaker
Yeah, although we've got a little bit of that. We've got some other stuff. Yeah, and amusing aside, but yes, at time of recording, Trump has won Pennsylvania and is now 267 votes to Harris's 224, you need 270.
00:42:20
Speaker
to win, it seems very likely Trump is going to exceed that margin and become the next president of the United States of America, or depending on how you want to phrase it, once again, the president of the United States of America. That's going to throw off the by two now, isn't it? Because there's the whole thing here. He's going to be 45 and 47.
00:42:45
Speaker
Yeah, and because there was also, it was one of them, it was like Grover Cleveland, one of them also had continuous terms. So now there have been two times more presidencies than there have been people who were president, which is whatever the case.
00:43:02
Speaker
It's bad news for people in general, although it's good news for those of us working on conspiracy theories, because let's let's say it if Trump becomes president, there's going to be a lot of conspiracy theories. There's going to be a lot of conspiracy theories. Probably a lot of conspiracy also.
00:43:21
Speaker
Well, I mean, that's often what generates the conspiracy theories, unfortunately. So, that'll do for now. we're just goingnna We're just going to go and soak it all in, I guess. ah for for that For the rest of you, ah you can go do whatever it is that you do. And if you're a patron, hopefully that's you know listening to the bonus episode. Either way, goodbye. Goodbye.
00:43:49
Speaker
The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, Associate Professor M.R.X. Denton. Our show's cons- sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please, do consider joining our Patreon.
00:44:28
Speaker
And remember, Soylent Green is Meeples.