INTERVEW with Alexina Dimitrova

By CIME Staff

1. As a member of the Press Complaints Commission in Bulgaria, what are the most typical complaints you encounter and how do you decide to deal with them?

AD: I was member of the Press Complains Commission in Bulgaria for 4 years since 2005. Practically these were the first 2 terms of the Commission’s activities after its launch in 2005. We have received all kind of complaints, but among the most often ones were from people, whose opinion has not been covered properly or has not been covered at all in a journalistic investigations, if they have been a related party. This is an improper approach. For this reason, the Commission wrote and published special recommendations on how to cover all affected parties. For the same reason I always have been teaching my students or mid career trainees to look for and to hear the opinion of all parties involved in a journalistic investigation. If for one or another reason they are not able to do this, I give them idea what they must do with purpose to act ethically.


2. Before the Dossier Act was passed in 2002 in Bulgaria, granting access to read the state archives to journalists, what originally inspired your interest in investigative journalism?

AD: The last Dossier Act was passed in 2006 but long before this the journalists had access to the archives – practically after the fall of Berlin Wall. So more or less I have been working in these archives since then. In 1998 I started to use actively also the American Freedom of Information act and to request under it US documents related to Bulgaria mostly from the Cold War era period. The reason for this was that in that time I discovered that many of the archives in Bulgaria were destroyed or were still closed. In the last 12 years I have sent about 600 requests to about 10 US institutions like Department of State, FBI, CIA, Department of Defence, INSCOM etc. to ask for documents related to Bulgaria. Many of the documents declassified by my request I used in my 2 books – “The Iron Fist”, published in London in English, and “The War of the Spies”, or in my publications in 24 Hours Daily. However together with these documentary investigations I have always been doing other investigations. They were inspired mostly by my curiosity to see how the formerly political power turned into economical one after 1989. I have published numerous investigations about so called red money flowing and its later return back as investment in the Bulgarian economy. I have always been interested in corruption and improper activities. But in the last 8 years I also put much of my efforts in so called good investigation – I started a column in 24 Hours Daily to find and reunite people from around the World with their families in Bulgaria who split during the communism for one or another reason. These investigations request enormous efforts on 5 continents gathering information for many generations, but I really enjoy them.


3. According to the World Press Review, it has been said that while news magazines have decreased in demand, newspapers are still in steady demand. Is this due to better journalism? Or is this due to more exciting political change in the last ten years, and or greater interest in politics?

AD: I would say both. I am very glad that Bulgaria has very well developed journalism and very good journalists. Seems to me that the journalism in Bulgaria was one of the first fields that started transforming quickly and very successfully in the transitional period.


4. As the founder of SEEMO, how have you seen an improvement of journalistic practice and community?

AD: SEEMO is a great organisation and I am very glad that I had the chance to start working with them. It not only plays a watchdog role on the journalism in the region but inspires the journalists for certain professional and educational activities. The Secretary General Oliver Vujovic is an inspiring person, who very well understand the needs of the journalists in the region and does his best to help them in every way he and IPI could. One of the most important professional things nowadays is the working journalist to have access to proper mid-career education, which keeps them in the streamline of the world’s professional trends. For this reason I am really keen on my training activities of students and colleagues around the world in the last 10 years, where I am invited to share my experience as working journalist in fields like access to information, using FOIA internationally, doing cross-border investigations etc.


5. In researching for your book on Bulgaria's communist secret past, what sort of ethical issues did you come across?

AD: In my first 2 books I practically had no ethical dilemmas. They appeared only recently when I was writing the last two books. “The Secret Files of the King”, which was published in 2009 was based on my research in 17 previously unknown files – about 3000 pages, from the Bulgarian Intelligence before 1989. These are documents gathered between 1946 and 1993 for the Bulgarian King Simeon and his family. The royal family was sent to exile in 1946. In 1996 King Simeon returned for first time to Bulgaria and in 2001 became Prime minister. Throughout the years there were lots of speculations about his personality and his role. For this reason I decided to request the documents for him. The ethical dilemma was to open or not the names of the people who gave information for him and his family to the Bulgarian secret services. These people are protected by the Privacy Act, but still some of them became clear from the context. In my last book “The Murder Bureau”, a documentary investigation of a Smersh-style Cold War clandestine operation in Bulgaria, based on nearly 5000 pages of previously unknown documents, I had similar dilemma. The rare records reveal the existence of the super-secret “Service 7”, a counter-espionage unit charged with carrying out the most sensitive covert operations against enemies of the Bulgarian state. “Service 7” began operations in mid 1963, long before the notorious assassination of the Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov.

By 1972 it had engaged in at least 10 cases of eradication, kidnapping or discrediting of Bulgarian émigrés in Italy, Britain, Denmark, West Germany, Turkey, France, Ethiopia, Sweden and Switzerland. The targets of these operations carried such code names as "The Black", "Traitor", and “X”, “Hamlet”, Betrayer and Widower. The law protected the real names of these people, but I discovered from the context who most of them were. I avoided the dilemma to publish or not their names, through finding them or their living relatives and including their opinions in the book.


6. What was the best advice someone gave you when you were starting your career as a journalist?

AD: I have not heard only one advice and only from one person. Throughout the years, I had the chance to meet and to work with some of the best Bulgarian journalists. Every of them have given me certain experience, knowledge or understanding about high-level professional standards and criteria. I can summarize them in several words – to be impartial, to gather your information from as many sources as possible, to present the facts in a balanced unbiased way, to hear all possible parties involved in one story without any prejudices to any of them, and never ever to build the success of your article to people’s sorrow.