Thirteen pages of a “life dissertation”.
1987, April 2, headquarters of the №36050 division of the Bulgarian People’s Army, Momchilgrad. The office of the chief of artillery intelligence. I, the private, sit at his desk and write “The Doctor of My Life” – those 13 pages of handwritten explanations on plaid sheets, on which it depends whether I will go to a military court to disband the army or not. Based on these explanations, the Deputy Chief of Military Counterintelligence of the Army Headquarters decided that I was “either innocent as an angel or the worst scum he had ever met,” choosing the first option and terminating the investigation. Naturally, during my studies at the Theological Academy “St. Kliment Ohridski ”- Sofia I am under constant surveillance with all the negatives of this, but at least I knew that I was being watched, that maybe against me special technical means are used, now known as special intelligence means (in the sense of today’s Bulgarian Law on Special intelligence means these are the technical means and the operational means for their application), but above all to take into account the human factor. The office of the Holy Synod was buzzing with paid, operative workers and agents, as well as volunteer informers and others with the lowest spiritual temperature.
Thirteen years later.
2000, April 2, Plovdiv. I am receiving a letter №219846 / 31.03.2000 from the Commission under the VAT Act regarding my request in connection with Art. 7 (1) of the Law on Access to the Documents of the Former State Security (SG, issue 63 / 06.08.1997), by which I was invited on 12.04.2000 at 13:00 in the reading room of RDVR – Plovdiv to get acquainted with the documents collected for me by the former State Security. In order to find some answers personally, I wanted to photocopy these thirteen pages (in the file numbered from pages 50 to 56), which I consider no less important for my life, even than the title “teacher of the Holy Orthodox Church ”, A Byzantine scientific title similar to the medieval“ doctor of the church ”in the Western Christian world, awarded to me by a deliberate patriarchal letter (pitakion) in October 1999 by the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I.
Then I had to give a plausible answer to the denunciations against me that I had unregulated contacts with foreign citizens, that I was pro-monarchist, the grandson of a Plovdiv industrialist, a religious propagandist (admitted to the Theological Academy before the barracks), and to express remorse for disturbing the minds, hearts and souls of the officers and soldiers in the unit.
I found that the WRC officers had given the chief informant (listed by his three names in my file, but in my opinion, it is unnecessary to mention the same) mainly operational tasks to determine my views on foreign policy issues. The main problem for the services turned out to be my statements against the policy of the leader of the Libyan revolution, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, after the criminal bombings of April 14, 1986 over what President Reagan called “terrorist locations” – Tripoli and Benghazi in the Libyan Jamahiriya. the Arabic word dzhumhuriya – a republic that can be translated as a people’s state). Apparently, at the time I repeated some of Ronald Reagan’s statements, quoted in the newspaper “Abroad” or in broadcasts of the Bulgarian editions of the western “enemy” radio stations, which my anti-Libyan statements were brought to the Military Counterintelligence. The Reagan administration saw Gaddafi as an unwanted player on the international stage because he supported Palestinian terrorist groups, revolutionary Iran during the war (1980-1988) against Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and separatist terrorist groups such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Motherland and Basque Freedom (ETA). I was obliged to give up in writing my “wrong” worldviews, I quote myself, namely: “the American thesis that Libya threatened the interests of the United States, or Nicaragua, with its 3 elevators and 1 excavator. I agree with Lenin’s statement about the mistakes of his brother and his terrorist environment, in the sense that terrorism not only does not contribute, but also hinders the revolution. So I also reject the fact that Libya has been a hotbed of international terrorism, a hotbed of which Syria was recently declared. ” The following 2 decades categorically proved my opinion and position at the time that this cunning Bedouin tyrant was not a friend of the Bulgarian people.
In 2010, under the Law on Access to Documents of the Former State Security and the Former Intelligence Department of the General Staff, I again reviewed the cadastral archives available to me, lustrating myself, requesting a letter certifying that no information had been found. I have cooperated or been recruited by the services of the totalitarian regime in any form.
Over the years, I have not experienced myself as an “active fighter against the Libyan Jamahiriya”, but with the case of innocent Bulgarian medical workers, the gossip about their personalities, our national Bulgarian dignity, justice, over 400 infected Libyan children and their families, as well as many Compatriots and people from all over the world have signed online petitions and other gestures of sympathy for a fair outcome of the case. In 2005, however, being on a short-term specialization for comparative analysis between Bulgarian and Geneva legislation on religious rights and freedoms with temporary accreditation to the press center at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, I mobilized as an Orthodox clergyman. the Bulgarian lobby in the World Council of Churches in Geneva, with the active support of the Help the Needy Foundation – Plovdiv and the intercession of the great Bulgarian church historian and former longtime Deputy Secretary General of the WCC prof. Todor Sabev (+ 2008), to support the cause of the Bulgarian nurses sentenced to death. By God’s will, on the most Bulgarian holiday, May 24, 2005, I had the honor to personally present to the Bulgarian Ambassador at the reception in the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Bulgaria to the UN a copy of the letter of Pastor Dr. Samuel Kobia, then Gen. Secretary of the World Council of Churches, to the Libyan leader M. al-Gaddafi, in which a request was made for mercy to the five Bulgarian and Palestinian doctors on behalf of all 347 member churches from over 120 countries on all continents, representing all Christian traditions.
To what extent this document has contributed to the favorable development of the fate of the six medics, whether our country has used it as a trump card in the negotiations with the Libyan side, I can not judge. For me, this was a kind of culmination of my personal “jihad”, a sacred struggle against the Libyan dictator.
