site.btaMilitary Intelligence Chief Reveals Interference in Service, CC-DB Co-leader Sees Case as Smear Campaign against Himself

During a parliamentary hearing Wednesday, the Director of the Defense Intelligence Service (DIS), Brigadier General Venelin Venev alleged that there has been an attempt at interference in the work of DIS and said that the suspected mastermind is General Atanas Atanassov, one of the co-leaders of Continue the Change - Democratic Bulgaria coalition and a former head of the National Security Service.

The motion for this hearing has been entered by Hamid Hamid and Stanislav Anastasov (Movement for Rights and Freedoms) and Delyan Dobrev (GERB-UDF). It was triggered by media reports saying that DIS intelligence officers had been targeted for recruitment by a national security adviser to former Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov, who reportedly offered them a career promotion in exchange for personal loyalty to Atanas Atanassov.

It transpired from Gen. Venev's answers during the hearing that the said two DIS officers reported the recruitment attempt to their superiors and were credited for their disclosure after going through a lie detector.

"DIS was the subject of a targeted intimidation campaign," Venev added. He explained that the State Commission for Information Security has launched an investigation into possible violations of the Classified Information Protection Act. The prosecution service has also been alerted and the State Agency for National Security is looking into the matter as well.

The Defence Intelligence Service reports directly to the Prime Minister.

Taking the floor during the hearing, Atanas Atanassov read out a text message in which an unknown sender tells an unknown recipient about the two DIS officers' report, the attempted recruitment and Atanassov's role in it. The message read in part, "This is spying. I was back from Amman yesterday and now I am sitting down to prepare an alert to the prosecutor but I am not going to send it yet. Then I will inform my minister, as I am supposed to do and then there are several options, including an informal meeting with that little policeman Atanassov. Only then, if he refuses to stop his talk of reforms, I will send it to all news media."

Atanassov believes that the military intelligence is digging up dirt against him because of his efforts to get the service reformed.