Sofia, Bulgaria Dead Drop
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Sofia, Bulgaria was the site of a CIA debriefing trip described by John Kiriakou, in which he located and questioned a retired Bulgarian general about his proximity to the 1975 assassination of CIA station chief Richard Welch in Athens.

The Fort Polk file

Kiriakou says he found an old FBI course-evaluation form signed by a Bulgarian general who, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, had attended a 1991 training course for Eastern European officers at Fort Polk, Louisiana, covering subjects like shooting and driving, and that no one had ever debriefed him further, despite the CIA having his name on file. CIA analysis subsequently flagged that the same general had been Bulgaria's defense attaché in Athens in 1975, and had been walking his dog one block away on the night of December 23, 1975, when Richard Welch was assassinated, yet he had never been asked what he saw.

The debriefing

Kiriakou flew to Bulgaria and found the retired general working as a security officer at a bank; he debriefed him over coffee about the Welch assassination night, twenty-five years after the fact.

Lodging

In Sofia, Kiriakou stayed at the Hotel Rila, which doubled as a brothel, for $16 a night, rather than the five-star Sheraton (the former Communist Party headquarters) at $300 a night. Under a new CIA rule letting officers keep unspent per diem, he pocketed roughly $350 per trip, which he spent at the art market by the Cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky.

Espionage in Washington

Discussing the broader scale of foreign intelligence activity, Kiriakou has separately said he has seen estimates of 10,000 spies operating in Washington, D.C. He recalls that while researching terrorism for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he traveled to Yemen to meet the FBI's legal attaché, who, before any negotiation over information or additional funded FBI positions, recited Kiriakou's full biographical file back to him from memory, down to his birthdate, hometown, and high school.

See also

- Central Intelligence Agency
- John Kiriakou
