Bulgaria Calls Home Its Spies in Good-Faith Act : E. Europe: Archives will be open to foreign scrutiny. The move could resurrect the past’s damaging episodes.

Seeking to stand tall under the glaring light of glasnost , Bulgaria has ordered its spies in from the cold and furled its poison-tipped umbrellas.

The Balkan nation that once directed one of the world’s most sinister secret services has declared a formal end to all hostile intelligence activity and opened its archives to foreign scrutiny.

The gesture is intended to demonstrate the good faith of Sofia’s reform-minded leadership, which has declared itself fully committed to building democracy after Eastern Europe’s longest-reigning dictatorship.

While the public renunciation of spying has been welcomed both at home and abroad, openness in the business of espionage may serve to resurrect some of the most damaging episodes of Bulgaria’s past.

It has also forced the caretaker government now in power to acknowledge what was obviously widespread spying by its embassies in the West.

Deputy Foreign Minister Nikolai Bogdanov declined in an interview to specify how many foreign-based operatives had been ordered out of Bulgaria’s missions abroad but conceded: “The number is not small.”

Some Western embassies appear to have been almost entirely staffed by spies.

“We fear we will be obliged to transfer people from one country to others to prevent leaving them empty,” Bogdanov commented coyly.

Turnover at Western embassies will be exceptionally high this summer, not only as a result of the spy recall but because a 20% reduction of Foreign Ministry staff has been ordered for budget reasons, the former diplomat said.

Bulgaria closed 20 embassies in Latin America, Asia and Africa last year. It must reduce its remaining foreign service to 347 diplomats and an equal number of technical staff by July 1.

The massive Moscow embassy will be cut by 60%, but embassies in Washington and London may actually be expanded to emphasize Sofia’s interest in improving relations with key Western countries, Bogdanov said.

One intelligence operative will remain at each embassy in North America and Western Europe, but the individual’s identity and mandate will be announced to the host country. The intent of the new “open residence” posting will be to provide cooperative assistance in deterring terrorism and international crime, rather than snooping around secured areas in search of secrets.

President Zhelyu Zhelev says Bulgaria’s intelligence network has withered since the ouster of Communist hard-liner Todor Zhivkov 18 months ago, after which the Sofia government made an abrupt change toward rapprochement with the West.

“I don’t think there was extensive intelligence activity over the past year,” Zhelev said, noting that foreign embassies have had their budgets slashed and their missions radically redefined.

“But there is also a moral reason,” added Zhelev, who has been head of state since last August. “We couldn’t possibly, under the present circumstances of asking these countries to support our democratic and economic reform, have been conducting hostile intelligence activity.”

Bulgaria’s motive in ending espionage is to cleanse a national image tarnished by unsolved mysteries, such as the murder of exiled writer Georgy Markov in 1978 and the alleged “Bulgarian connection” in the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in 1981.

A parliamentary investigation into domestic intelligence files has exploded into scandal among Bulgarian politicians; the exposure of the foreign archives also poses the risk of dredging up disturbing pages from the past.

Communist officials steadfastly denied any Bulgarian role in the attack on the Pope, and the Interior Ministry has compiled a library of testimony and evidence said to prove its claim of innocence.

Three Bulgarians--two diplomats and a Rome-based businessman--stood trial in Italy in 1985-86 on charges of conspiracy in the papal attack. The court failed to convict them for lack of evidence. But it also declined to invoke the option of declaring them acquitted on grounds of innocence.

An international commission headed by Allen Weinstein, president of the Washington-based Center for Democracy, has been authorized by Zhelev to probe the voluminous files of the so-called Pope plot.

The panel of a dozen or so historians will arrive in Sofia just a week before the 10th anniversary of the May 13, 1981, attack at St. Peter’s Square. The researchers will spend as much as a year exploring various conspiracy theories.

While authorities assure Western governments that the new Bulgaria no longer conducts hostile intelligence-gathering, spies sent out by the old regime were apparently at work through most of last year.

Two Californians were arrested last May and charged with trying to smuggle a powerful supercomputer to Bulgaria in violation of U.S. restrictions on high-technology exports to Eastern Europe. U.S. government officials then speculated that Bulgarian agents were acquiring the sophisticated computer on behalf of the Soviet Union.

Bulgaria’s close relationship with the Kremlin may explain the small Balkan state’s unusually extensive intelligence network during the height of the Cold War. Often dubbed the Soviets’ 16th republic, Bulgaria was more dependent on trade and political ties with Moscow than any other nation of the now-defunct Warsaw Pact.

Top Bulgarian agents are thought to have been trained by the KGB and employed as accomplices in acquiring sensitive material abroad, partly in the belief that they would be less conspicuous than Soviet agents.

Perhaps the most notorious incident linked with Bulgarian espionage was the murder of Markov, an anti-Communist dissident who had denounced Zhivkov’s regime from his home-in-exile in London. He was killed by a jab from a stranger’s umbrella, which embedded a poison pellet in his thigh.

A full review of the Markov case was ordered last year, after Zhivkov’s ouster, but investigators have not announced any new findings.

Bulgarians, however, learned in a broadly publicized interview with a former Soviet KGB officer last month that Markov’s killing was allegedly ordered by Zhivkov.

The former Communist leader now standing trial for embezzlement personally ordered the interior minister at that time, Dimitar Stoyanov, to seek the KGB’s help and guidance to liquidate Markov, former KGB officer Oleg Kalugin told Bulgarian television in April.

Western diplomats say the formal curtailing of espionage is an encouraging assurance that Bulgaria has truly broken with its past. They see little danger to the reform-minded leaders of being tainted by disclosure of their predecessors’ deeds.

“Most people already believe the Bulgarians did this,” one envoy said of the Markov murder. “They don’t need to see the actual poison-tipped umbrella in court to be convinced.”