Bulgaria: Name That Tune

Bulgaria’s Ivan-Assen Hristov Georgiev, counselor of the Bulgarian mission to the United Nations from 1956 until 1961, was so successfully obscure that scarcely any of his diplomatic colleagues missed him when he returned home from Manhattan. Last week the man no body remembered was the man everyone was talking about.

On trial in a crowded Sofia court room, Georgiev, 56, confessed to a double life of spying for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which he said provided him with $200,000, three secret bank accounts in Switzerland, and a harem of mistresses at home and abroad. In return, Georgiev said, he tipped off the CIA to Communist strategy at the U.N., supplied secret intelligence about the Sino-Soviet split. He was so good at his job, Georgiev reported modestly, that the CIA gave him a diploma for efficiency, and the courtroom audience tittered when the ex-diplomat said he once asked the CIA to nominate him to succeed Dag Hammarskjold as U.N. Secretary-General.

Walk in the Park. What makes a good Red spy? In Georgiev’s case it seems to have been Nikita Khrushchev’s destalinization speech to the 20th Soviet Party Congress. This so shook his ideological faith, Georgiev explained, “that I felt theoretically unstable.” So unstable, said the prosecutor, that the defendant hardly had time to unpack his bags before he was in touch with a chap from the CIA. There followed a walk in Central Park, and instructions on the dos and don’ts of espionage. There was a spooky man named Anderson, whose name was really something else. Geogiev was supposed to have met him time and again at addresses in Manhattan that, according to the current city directory, do not exist. The CIA, he said, supplied him with all of the spy’s normal accouterments: treated paper, invisible ink, a miniature tape recorder and microphone designed as a tie clasp, code books and a tiny shortwave radio.

When he was transferred back to Sofia, said the charges, Georgiev remained in the service of the imperialists. Promptly at 9:30 a.m. on the first and third Friday of each month, he would switch on his radio and slip open his code book. All he really had to know was a little classical music. If the mes sage was preceded by excerpts from Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, it was genuine; if it began with parts of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, Georgiev knew the message was a ruse designed to foil would-be counterspies. For a while, Georgiev played Name That Tune like an expert. Then, in September, he was somehow nabbed by Bulgarian police, and his seven-year career as a professional spy was ended.

Death, Please. As he entered the courtroom last week, Georgiev gave the audience one quick glance, then grimly pressed his lips together and listened to an hour-long reading of the indictment without a change of expression. He was “politically and morally corrupted to the marrow,” declared the prosecutor. Why bother to disagree? With a shrug, and in a firm, soft voice, Georgiev requested his own death sentence.