The 2024 biopic on Italian communist leader Enrico Berlinguer, “The Great Ambition,” revived the discussion about the role played by Eastern bloc secret services during the Cold War. In Berlinguer’s case, suspicions of an assassination attempt by the Bulgarian and Soviet services are still hotly debated. There are other cases, however, where these discussions are not based on supposition or later testimonies, but on solid archival evidence.
In 1968, a year after the April 21 colonels’ coup in Greece, the Bulgarian secret services floated a plan with the Soviet KGB to assassinate Konstantinos Karamanlis, then in self-exile in Paris, with a booby-trapped book. The plan was never carried out, but its existence, as documented in declassified Bulgarian records, sheds light on the methods of the Warsaw Pact secret services, as well as on the significance attached to the late Greek politician.
Three pages from the seven-page, top-secret document dated March 12, 1968, in which the Bulgaria State Security (DS) agency proposed a slew of ‘active measures’ to destabilize Greece, Greek-Turkish relations and more broadly, the NATO alliance. It included a plot to assassinate Konstantinos Karamanlis in Paris.
