Bulgaria's State Agency for National Security (SANS) had operated on a chaotic basis and some agency staff had behaved like organised crime groups, former SANS deputy chairperson Ivan Drashkov told bTV on October 28 2009.

Drashkov was dismissed from his post by then-prime minister Sergei Stanishev in October 2008 after alleged wrongdoings, but was reinstated recently after a court found that his dismissal had been unjustified.

"I waited so long to speak to the media because I wanted all state institutions to check the allegations against me, and now, when (the allegations) have been rejected, I am ready to discuss the issue of how SANS was run," Drashkov said.

He said that, from May 2008, the then-head of the agency, Petko Sertov, had in effect abdicated his duties and there was no control over how the agency operated.

"No one knew what his obligations were, there was no internal hierarchy, everybody issued orders to anybody, Sertov was signing orders which often contradicted other orders, it was chaos," Drashkov said.

There were some SANS officers who operated as if they were organised crime groups. "They conducted operations and interrogations. Employees were asked to do things without the knowledge of their direct superiors, without reporting to them," Drashkov said.

He said that he had heard that groups of SANS employees made extortion attempts against reputable business people.

Drashkov said that there had been an incident in which one SANS officer physically attacked another SANS employee in his office. He declined to identify who was involved.

Drashkov also spoke about the SANS report which returned to the limelight on October 24 2009 when former SANS employee Alexei Petrov presented it to Prime Minister Boiko Borissov.

The report, dating from 2008 when Stanishev was still in power, reportedly contained classified information about alleged corrupt activities of top government employees.

According to Borissov, there were five copies of the report. One was sent to the Prime Minister, one to the Speaker of Parliament, one to the President, one to the Prosecutor-General's Office and one was kept at SANS.

Of the four reports sent out by SANS, only the one sent to Stanishev was not returned to the agency. Cabinet office records show that the report was received by Stanishev but after that the trail goes cold.

Drashkov neither denied nor confirmed writing the report. "If I do so I will be breaching the Classified Information Act," he said. However, he did confirm writing a memo on the problems that SANS had and the different groups of special interests that had built up inside the agency.

The writing of this memo coincided with the writing of the report. "The truth is that when I was leaving the agency on October 10 2008, I sent a memo to the Prime Minister, the President, the Speaker of Parliament and to the Prosecutor-General".

This had been his final attempt to alert the authorities about the way SANS was functioning, Drashkov said.

"I tried several times to meet the then-prime minister Sergei Stanishev and explain the situation to him, but I was denied such a meeting. I was ready to meet Stanishev in the presence of Sertov but that was denied. That's why I sent the memo, but nothing happened," he said.

"When the scandal about the tapping of journalists' phones erupted, I was alleged to have ordered the operation; I asked to see Stanishev but again I was denied."

"Then we organised a petition signed by more than 300 SANS employees, hoping that Stanishev would consider this a serious event (the fact that more than 300 intelligence officers were unhappy about the way their agency was operating), but he did not come," Drashkov said. He said that later it had been proven that it had been Sertov who had ordered eavesdropping on journalists' telephone conversations.

Drashkov said that he was giving serious consideration to returning to the agency, on the basis of his legal reinstatement, now that Sertov was no longer the head of the agency.