POPULAR films and books have created the image of investigative journalists as mostly male, pushy, nosy, sometimes aggressive and often annoying people who have furtive looks and a taste for conspiracy theories. 

Alexenia Dimitrova, one of the leading investigative journalists in Bulgaria, is none of these things. On the contrary - she is softly spoken and somehow frail-looking, with a pleasant air around her.

Notwithstanding this aura of gentleness, she had the courage to delve into some of the darkest secrets of Bulgaria's communist past hidden in the State Security Archives and in some American secret archives, and write about what she found. Her book, The Iron Fist - Inside the Archives of the Bulgarian Secret Police, was published in English in London earlier this year. It is to be published in Bulgaria in November under the title Voinata na Shpionite ("The War of the Spies").

Dimitrova started writing the book by chance after a conversation with her publisher, John McVicar, who suggested that she should write a book about what she had found in the Bulgarian State Security secret archives over the 15 years she spent looking into them, and in the files she obtained since 1999 from US intelligence organisations. 

"My idea was to present strictly documentary evidence of what I found in the Bulgarian and the US files, but he suggested that I should also include a personal perspective," she said.

She regrets that the publishers did not include any facsimiles of the archive documents with which she wanted to illustrate the book.

"I am a little saddened, because I think that the readers who did not experience communism first hand should see hard proof that those files really said what I claimed they did," Dimitrova said. "I wanted them to see that some person called Alexenia did not make it up. I wanted them to see that all those horrible things were happening, sanctioned from above, and this was simply a brutal machine."

That is why the Bulgarian-language version, apart from having a different title, will be illustrated with about 100 facsimiles of both Bulgarian and US documents.

Dimitrova said that while she was writing the book, and after publishing it, her only concern was about being sufficiently objective.

"This is why the Bulgarian version will have a post script saying that this book might earn me lots of new enemies, because I am sure that there will be many people who will disagree with what I wrote, but surely will also earn me lots of new friends because I show the truth the way it is."

Another interesting fact about the English version of the book is that, according to London-based publication BG Ben, and her publishers, the Bulgarian embassy in London refused to provide a room for the book launch. The embassy said that because of the bombings in London, they would be unable to hold a cultural event in the embassy.

"I am very sad because it seems only an excuse," she said.

When she heard about the decision, she wrote to the head of the consular service, Minko Noev, saying that she doubted that the bombings meant that cultural life in the Bulgarian embassy in London would die and that they would close their doors altogether.

Dimitrova's London publishers then offered to hold a function in the Colombian embassy, where they had good connections.

"I told them that I will not come since I, as a Bulgarian, want to have my work presented on Bulgarian-related territory," she said. "I am sad because it seems to me that, even though I don't want to believe it, someone is scared and is acting in this way because of what is in the book.

"I was afraid that someone would think that, by writing the book, I was taking sides. For this reason I asked my Bulgarian publishers, who wanted to publish the book here in May, to postpone it until after the elections because I was afraid that someone might say that I was pouring water into someone's mill." (A Bulgarian expression meaning to act towards someone's advantage.)

The Iron Fist, of course, has had an impact on those in the West who have already read it. Most of the comments on Amazon.com, where it is being sold, were by children of old Bulgarian immigrants, as well as by ordinary Americans who said that the book was great, and that it gave real insight into what was going on in Bulgaria during communism.

Apart from that, Dimitrova has been contacted directly by several readers, most notably by an Italian living in France, Paolo Zola.

"I was impressed because usually I am contacted by the descendants of Bulgarian immigrants, or by people somehow related to Bulgaria, while this person was in no way connected to Bulgaria," she said. "He wrote me that when he was a boy in Italy, he had seen a performance by one of the Bulgarian folk ensembles and had fallen in love with all things Bulgarian. Then he started studying Bulgarian, and not long ago he was here to look for other books on the totalitarian regime."

Another surprise letter was from an American who collects military memorabilia from former Soviet countries and asked Dimitrova to send him copies of some of the archive files, if she could. And so she did.

"Otherwise most of the e-mails and calls I receive come mostly from second or third generation Americans and Canadians of Bulgarian descent," she said.

When she is not busy reading the secret archives of the State Security or the CIA, Dimitrova has another major project, for which she received the Chernorizets Hrabur award for investigative journalism in 2004.

In the summer of 2002, as she was surfing the internet, she came across a website for people looking for their long-lost relatives across the world.

She saw that there were Bulgarian immigrants or their descendants looking for relatives who had remained in Bulgaria, and with whom they had lost contact during the long years of communism.

In a chapter in The Iron Fist, Dimitrova described several such stories, some with a happy ending and some not.

There were stories of children looking for their mothers, daughters looking for their fathers and brothers and sisters looking for each other.

"I got curious when I found this website," she said. "Then my Editor-in-Chief, Venelina Gocheva, suggested that I do a story about this. Then letters started pouring in, and ever since then I have done a 'reunion' story each week."

In the three years in which Dimitrova has compiled her lost relatives page in the mass-circulation Bulgarian-language daily 24 Chassa ("24 Hours"), she has managed to help 75 separated families whose members were looking for each other.  

In her office she keeps two thick files - one of the closed cases and one of the ongoing ones. Both are almost equally thick.

"I thought that eventually the flow of letters would wane within a year or two, but it is astonishing that people keep on writing me and coming to see me," she said. "It is scary how many families were separated. And now there is a trend of parents looking for their children or vice versa."

In her quest to help separated families, Dimitrova sought help in many places and in many countries, but it is not easy.

"In the US, for instance, there are many free public records and it is not hard to find people, but in Australia and Argentina, for instance, is really difficult, because the records are not easily available," she said. "For this reason just last week myself and a colleague from one of the Melbourne dailies, The Age, wrote a story about six cases in which Bulgarians were looking for their relatives in Australia. In most cases it is about mothers looking for their children or brothers and sisters looking for their siblings."

"Maybe we can do something together, if some of your readers could help somehow, it would be nice," she said. 

Now that she has the Australian Salvation Army helping her out, Dimitrova is more optimistic about Australia, but she now has trouble achieving success with cases concerning people in Argentina and other South American countries.

 "The Argentinian ambassador in Sofia advised me to ask the Bulgarian embassy in Argentina for help," she said. "But the Bulgarian consul there made it clear that it was very hard to do anything for me. On the other hand, there are very helpful Bulgarian officials in other embassies like in France, Australia or Germany."

The Bulgarian embassy in Canada is also aware of Dimitrova's project and has more than once referred to her Canadians looking for their Bulgarian relatives.

Dimitrova has come across many heartbreaking and interesting stories. As she leafs through her folder of clippings of articles about lost relatives finding each other after many years apart, her voice quivers.

There is the story of an American woman who came to Bulgaria to fulfill her deceased husband's last wish to go to his mother's grave, take some soil and bring it back to scatter it on his grave. There is the story of a father who was looking for his two children taken abroad by their mother after the divorce. There is also the story of a mother, dying of cancer, looking for her son who immigrated to the US.

In 95 per cent of cases, when she finds relatives, they respond very positively and start exchanging letters, calls and visits.

There are five per cent in which relatives are found but have no interest in resuming relations.

There has also been a case when a Bulgarian woman sued Dimitrova for defamation because she published the story of a French woman looking for her Bulgarian father's relatives.

"Thank God, the prosecutor dismissed the case," Dimitrova said. "It all started when one day I got a letter from a French woman telling me that her father was a Bulgarian who studied in France in the 1930s and fell in love with her mother. Then he returned to Bulgaria and married another woman and started a family. I published the story, and a few days later, an enraged woman of about 60 stormed into my office and started screaming at me about how dared I write that her father, already deceased, had a child born out of wedlock.

"I tried to persuade her to look on the bright side, that she has a sister, but the woman was enraged. She sued me because her mother got upset after finding out about this, but the prosecutor dismissed the case."

Dimitrova keeps on getting phone calls, e-mails and letters from people trying to find their relatives. Every indication is that there will be more and more coming.

"Well, after all it is really nice that I got the Chernorizets Hrabur award for something good, which gives results," she said. "Because I have written many other investigative pieces about scams, money laundering and whatnot but they change nothing."

If you are or know of someone who is looking for their lost Bulgarian relatives or have the resources to help out in some way you can contact Alexenia Dimitrova at: dimitrovabg@yahoo.com.