[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 13 (Thursday, February 10, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: February 10, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
            ARMS FOR THE REVOLUTION: THE BULGARIA CONNECTION

                                 ______


                           HON. HENRY J. HYDE

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, February 10, 1994

  Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, I commend to my colleagues an article entitled 
``Arms for the Revolution: The Bulgaria Connection'' which appeared in 
the New York Times on January 27, 1994. It persuasively confirms what 
many of us suspected all along, namely that Bulgaria was an eager 
purveyor of money and arms fueling international communism around the 
globe. The article follows:

                [From the New York Times, Jan. 27, 1994]

            Arms for the Revolution: The Bulgaria Connection

                          (By Raymond Bonner)

       Sofia, Bulgaria.--During the cold war, members of the 
     Soviet bloc provided covert assistance to fellow 
     revolutionaries throughout the world. The country most often 
     accused was Bulgaria, whose leader for 35 years, Todor 
     Zhivkov, was a hardliner committed to Lenin's call for 
     international revolution.
       The accusations were routinely denied and were difficult to 
     prove, if not impossible, especially when Western officials 
     said the charges were based on ``intelligence sources'' that 
     they could not disclose.
       The collapse of the Soviet Union has opened up some windows 
     into the dark past, but only slightly, with revelations 
     trickling out as a few contrite former Communists open their 
     archives or make confessions of sorts.
       The Communists in this Balkan country have shown little 
     contrition, and their role in stirring up trouble and 
     spreading Communism would remain a secret were it not that 
     the country's chief prosecutor now, Ivan Tatarchev, is a 
     fierce anti-Communist determined to put some Communists in 
     jail.


                        working with little help

       He may not succeed, but his investigators have uncovered 
     volumes of incriminating documents that illuminate cold-war 
     history. Many documents are decisions of the Central 
     Committee, often only one page, at the top of which the party 
     officials have signed, in blue and black ink.
       The investigators are working with the barest of resources 
     as they pore over thousands of pages of Central Committee 
     documents, which have not been released to the public.
       ``There have been times when we thought we had completed 
     the investigation and then we found new things,'' said 
     Mikhail Doichev, a lawyer who is leading the investigation.
       It seems that every Communist government found the 
     Bulgarians a soft touch: Ethiopia, Yemen and Angola received 
     military aid, as did the Palestine Liberation Organization. 
     The Communists in Bangladesh asked for food and drink for a 
     party congress, and got $25,000 in cash after the Bulgarians 
     decided the food would spoil in transit.


                        most went to sandinistas

       Young Turkish Communists received full scholarships and at 
     the end of their education in Sofia were given 500 West 
     German marks, about $290 at today's exchange rates, ``for 
     travel to the place of destination,'' according to a decision 
     by the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1984. The Israeli 
     Communist Party received thousands of tons of newsprint.
       In the 1980's, revolutions in Central America attracted the 
     most attention. The Sandinistas in Nicaragua were major 
     recipients, getting more than $50 million in weapons and 
     equipment. Cuba was in second place.
       One of the most startling revelations is that Bulgaria 
     provided military assistance to the Communist Party of 
     Honduras in the early 1980's. At the time Honduras was a 
     peaceful country, thought to be free of the revolutionary 
     fervor that had brought the Sandinistas to power in Nicaragua 
     and was fueling the guerrilla war against the Government in 
     El Salvador.
       But there was a Communist Party in Honduras, though it 
     lagged behind in beginning ``the armed struggle.'' The 
     Honduran Communists recognized that their ``politicization of 
     the masses'' had been slow, but in early 1982 they 
     confidently informed their Bulgarian comrades that ``the time 
     is right to start the armed struggle,'' according to a 
     memorandum prepared by the military department of the 
     Bulgarian party.


                         masking the provenance

       The Hondurans needed arms but they did not want Soviet-bloc 
     arms because they wanted to be able to deny that they were 
     receiving assistance from Communists, which would be hard to 
     do if revolutionaries were caught with these weapons.
       So the Hondurans proposed that the Bulgarians send Soviet-
     made weapons to Nicaragua, and that the Sandinistas in turn 
     send a comparable amount of American and Israeli weapons from 
     their stocks to Honduras. The Sandinista leaders agreed, 
     according to Bulgarian documents, but only ``under the 
     condition that they will judge when and in what way to give 
     the arms to the Honduran Communist Party.''
       In an unrelated deal, the Sandinistas received weapons from 
     Bulgaria after their leader, Daniel Ortega Saavedra, traveled 
     to Bulgaria in 1987 and met with Mr. Zhivkov. The Bulgarians 
     agreed to reschedule the payments for weapons that had been 
     sent in 1981 and, with no pretense of payment, to send 4,000 
     Kalashnikovs, 200 light machine guns and 10,000 anti-
     personnel mines.


                          planes, not donkeys

       In a deal in early 1982 that will answer many suspicions 
     but raise even more questions for historians, the leader of 
     El Salvador's Communist Party, Jorge Shafik Handal, prevailed 
     upon the Bulgarians to provide pilot training for Salvadoran 
     guerrillas. Pilots were needed for the ``small planes the 
     Front uses for the supply of arms and ammunition,'' Mr. 
     Handal said, according to a document dated June 4, 1982.
       During the war, the Salvadoran guerrillas emphatically 
     denied that they were being supplied by air, saying the 
     weapons were smuggled on donkeys from Honduras. And the 
     Bulgarian documents do not say who was providing the planes 
     for the Salvadorans.
       On another occasion, Mr. Handal made a pilgrimage to Sofia 
     as the representative of the five groups that made up the 
     Salvadoran guerrilla front, which generally denied any 
     Communist connections.
       Mr. Handal mentioned that East Germany had provided $2 
     million in cash the previous year. The Bulgarians came up 
     with 225 automatic rifles, 500 pistols and a ton of 
     explosives, ordering that all markings be removed from the 
     Bulgarian-made explosives and that the arms be shipped 
     through Cuba.
       The Bulgarians also gave the Chilean Communist Party 
     $50,000 in dollars in 1985, when Chile was ruled by the 
     right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, and Chilean leftists 
     came to Bulgaria for military training.
       According to a Bulgarian party document, five members of 
     the Chilean Communist Party were admitted at the military 
     academy in Sofia for a two-year course at a cost to the 
     Bulgarians of 143,700 leva; 10 students from the Socialist 
     Party were enrolled at another military school for six months 
     at a cost of 28,300 leva. (At the official rate at the time, 
     a lev was worth about a dollar.)
       Sometimes the foreign Communists devised elaborate and 
     expensive operations to avoid detection.
       Between 1983 and 1989, the Israeli Communist Party received 
     annual shipments of newsprint, about 385 tons a year. The 
     paper was donated by the Soviet Communist Party, but to hide 
     Moscow's involvement, it was shipped across the Black Sea to 
     Varna, in Bulgaria. It was then loaded on other ships and 
     sent to Haifa, Israel.
       To further cover the trail, a trading company in Western 
     Europe that was a cover for Bulgaria's state trading company 
     was used, to make the shipments look like routine commercial 
     transactions.


                        arms for libya and chad

       In another circuitous arms transfer, in 1983, the Central 
     Committee sent 3,000 Kalashnikovs, 100 machine guns and more 
     than a million rounds of ammunition to Libya, according to a 
     Committee document stamped ``Secret.'' The weapons were then 
     sent to Chad, where a Libyan-backed group was involved in a 
     civil war with a group receiving covert assistance from the 
     Central Intelligence Agency.
       ``This is history,'' one investigator said, motioning 
     toward some battered cabinets with documents spilling out.
       But it is history that may not be known for a long time. 
     There are only three investigators and they have only one 
     photocopying machine, which is constantly breaking down. 
     There is one secretary, who also works for other prosecutors. 
     They have no car.
       ``We have to take public transportation,'' said Mr. 
     Doichev, the lawyer, sitting in an office with a cracked 
     linoleum floor, exposed pipes and badly stained wallpaper. 
     And he said he once had to interview someone when it was 
     below freezing and there was no heat in the building.

                          ____________________