Paper short abstract:

This paper shows the aims and activities of the Bulgarian intelligence in Japan in the Cold War as well as the achieved results. Secret services were interested in information with respect to foreign policy, military, scientific and technological development.

Paper long abstract:

Following USSR, the Bulgarian People's Republic reestablished diplomatic relations with Japan in 1959. Half a decade later a representative of the secret services was appointed in the Bulgarian embassy in Tokyo to assist his Soviet colleagues. Subsequently, the Bulgarian intelligence activity expanded significantly by sending and recruiting agents, creating connections with Japanese and foreign citizens and gathering information. Sofia was interested mainly in the Japanese foreign and military policy, especially the development of the Self-Defence Forces and the Japanese-American security cooperation. Since the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s a special attention was paid to the Sino-Japanese relations.

Japanese economic growth and technological advance was another attractive field for the Bulgarian side and particularly for the Communist leader Todor Zhivkov. The strict restrictions on technology transfer imposed on the states in Soviet block by the West turned the access to high technologies into an issue of great importance for the former. Thus, collecting scientific and technical data became a priority for the Bulgarian intelligence in Japan. As a result, its activities in this regard expanded and intensified dramatically in the 1970s - 1980s.

Unlike the other ex-socialist states, the Bulgarian archives with respect to the activities of the Bulgarian secret services in the Cold War Era are almost fully opened for the academic researchers nowadays. This is also true for the documents of the Bulgarian Communist Party's central organs - the Political Bureau and the Central Committee. Free access to the Bulgarian primary sources allows the researchers to make contributions to the history of the Cold War, especially in the field of the intelligence studies. Providing new facts and analyzing them by using the chronological and the thematic approaches, the current paper aims to reveal the purposes and scope of the Bulgarian intelligence in Japan during the Cold War and thereby to address the broad topic concerning the Japanese relations with the socialist countries in this period.