In September 1978 Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian émigré writer, waited at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge on his way to work at the BBC World Service. Feeling a sting in his right thigh, he looked round to see the man behind him picking up his apparently fallen umbrella. The man apologised in a foreign accent and hastily crossed the road where he hailed a taxi. Markov felt feverish that night, was admitted to hospital and within four days was dead. ‘The bastards poisoned me,’ he told doctors, as they struggled to identify what was wrong with him.
‘The bastards poisoned me,’ Markov told doctors, as they struggled to identify what was wrong with him
What was wrong was ricin, a poison with no antidote. It was identified after Markov’s death by a combination of alert medical staff and scientists at the Porton Down research establishment. The ‘bastards’ were the communist government of Bulgaria, headed by the dictator Todor Zhivkov, who had ordered the murder. The ricin pellet and its delivery mechanism – the umbrella – were provided by Russia’s KGB. The man who fired it was Francesco Gullino, an Italian conman, smuggler and pornographer, who had been recruited by the Bulgarian intelligence service.
The background to the murder was Markov’s career as a writer in his native country, where he made the necessary compromises to become a member of the Writers’ Union and was befriended by Zhivkov. However, his writing sailed too close to the wind and he had to flee, becoming one of a number of Bulgarian dissidents who broadcast the truth about their country via the BBC and other organisations such as Radio Free Europe. His revelations about the luxuries of Zhivkov and the communist elite provoked the dictator to seek Russian help in eliminating him. They called such actions Wet Jobs.
More recent poisonings in the UK by the Russians themselves – of Alexander Litvinenko and the Skripals – have accustomed us to the idea that this is what Russian governments do to people who oppose them. Not before time: in Lenin’s earliest days he established the Special Room, later called Laboratory 12, to make poisons. But until Markov and his unfortunate successors, it was never widely acknowledged in the West. Putin has now written it into Russian law and publicly boasts of it.
The Umbrella Murder, an engaging account by the Danish journalist and TV documentary producer Ulrik Skotte, is no mere recitation of what has been published before. Rather, it is a description of the author’s 30-year search for Markov’s killer, culminating in a confession on camera. It is a model for every would-be investigative journalist, a triumph of teamwork, persistence and essential record-keeping.
The story began in a Copenhagen café when Skotte, then a young TV sports reporter, met Franco Invernizzi, an Italian filmmaker with anarchist leanings, who claimed to be sitting on ‘the biggest story of the century’. He had identified the notorious Umbrella Murderer, he said. Indeed, he knew the killer, but needed help to prove it. It could be dangerous, he warned, not only because the man was a known killer – possibly a multiple killer – but because he was protected by mysterious bodies who did not want the truth to come out.
Skotte was sceptical but interested. Unable to get his employers to take the case seriously, he proceeded in his own time and at the expense of his family, disentangling Invernizzi’s wilder conspiracy theories from what was evidence-based. And there was evidence – a confusing mass of papers, tapes and film accumulated by Invernizzi in his obsessive quest. As a result of the collapse of the Soviet empire, there were also released Bulgarian files that pointed to Gullino as the man. Gullino was interviewed by Scotland Yard but, in the absence of a confession and without the missing pages of files, there could be no prosecution. Invernizzi, however, convinced Skotte that between them they might nail the villain on camera and on tape. But it could be a long, difficult and perhaps dangerous job.
And so it proved. The book is as much about Skotte’s evolving relationship with Invernizzi as it is about his gradual understanding of who Gullino really was, how he came to have done what he did, whether he was still involved in Wet Jobs and who, if anyone, was protecting him. His previous employers? The Mafia? The Russians? The Italians? Neo-Nazis? (He liked to photograph women in Nazi uniform.) A drugs cartel? At times Skotte is infected by Invernizzi’s conspiracy mania. He fears he’s being followed. He sees someone and thinks: ‘He looked like a spy.’ But after Invernizzi’s death in mysterious circumstances, Skotte gathers a good team around him and they investigate the hard way – through meticulous, boring, detailed research.
The climax is worth the wait. They track Gullino down and confront him. He died shortly after, unpunished but not unexposed, aware that we knew the whole sordid story of a shiftless life of squalor and deceit.
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