“The idea is to establish a scholarly archive … so that records cannot be destroyed,” says the leader of the team, Allen Weinstein, head of the Center for Democracy, a Washington public-policy group. But some of the files have disappeared already, and former communist officials are stonewalling. Italy has launched a new investigation of its own, and Bulgarian officials say the case is mainly Rome’s problem. More hope is held out for a parallel investigation into the 1978 murder of Bulgarian exile Georgi Markov, who was killed in London by a poison pellet, apparently carried in the tip of an umbrella. Bulgaria’s chief investigator in that case, Leonid Katzamunsky, calls it a “clear political act, executed most probably by our secret police.” As for the hit on the pope, Zhelev told an Italian interviewer: “I am certain that our Communist regime was capable of such an act.”
