On April 7 2008, Kircho Kirov, head of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), described the work of the commission in charge of declassification of communist-era secret service archives as successful, but asked for changes in legislation that would protect Bulgaria’s national security.

Kirov was speaking at a conference held in Sofia on the occasion of the commission’s one-year anniversary.

The changes that Kirov suggested would prevent the commission from disclosing information about heads of departments and sections within NIS. According to him, these posts did not fall under the definition of “public posts” that the commission is obliged to check.

Furthermore, Kirov asked for changes that would not lead to the commission disclosing information about foreign nationals who had worked for Bulgarian intelligence during the Cold War era. “This would discredit Bulgaria in the eyes of other countries,” he said. “It is naïve to think that we can’t use the experience of what has been achieved years ago simply because a certain state utopia has failed.”

According to Kirov, communication among the institutions called upon by the law to disclose the archives of communist-era services was “difficult, slow and complicated”.

The reason Kirov asked for the amendments was because the predecessor services to NIS worked only outside Bulgaria and had nothing to do with what was happening in the country during communism.

Marianne Birthler, federal commissioner of the federal commission for state security records of the former German Democratic Republic, replied to Kirov that he should not be afraid that revealing all the information from Bulgaria’s communist services archives would damage Bulgaria’s national security.

“I don’t understand why this is such an important issue,” she said. “I can’t see why 20-year-old files are so important. In Germany they are not. It is the sealed archives that are dangerous, not the archives themselves,” she said.

“After all, the danger exists only for those who were employees of the former communist services, not for society. In Germany, Markus Wolf, head of Stasi, GDR’s state security, had tried to describe Stasi foreign intelligence as the clean hand of Stasi, but we found out that it had its share in committing crimes under communism.”

Krzysztof Persak from Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance shared Birthler’s opinion. “It is a myth that communist foreign intelligence was something different and had nothing to do with the crimes committed by domestic special services,” he said.