Bulgarian scientific and technical intelligence in Japan during the Cold War

Abstract

Since Bulgarian-Japan relations have already been well researched by the scholar Evgeny Kandilarov, this study aims to pose an accent on a very specific aspect of their Cold War interaction. Based primary on Bulgarian declassified documents of ex-socialist secret services it attempts to supplement Cold War studies and knowledge about Sofia-Tokyo relations as a part of Japan’s relations with the Soviet Union and the East European countries as a whole. It provides analysis regarding aims, methodology, expansion, cooperation, and results of Bulgarian scientific and technical intelligence in Japan during the Cold War years. This study proposes that since Western democracies restricted access of socialist countries to high technology by COCOM and since Japan achieved unimaginable economic and technological growth in the end of 1960s, KGB and all Eastern European secret services estimated Japan as a destination with significant opportunities for scientific and technical intelligence. Bulgarian communist leader Todor Zhivkov was one of the greatest admirers of the Japanese economic model and thus, scientific, and technical intelligence became a priority line for Bulgarian residence in Japan. It was not only a countermeasure in view of COCOM restrictions but transformed into an important element of socialist strategy for modernization. Japan was not the only one of capitalist countries, which became an object of industrial espionage, but it took key place for completing important scientific and technical tasks in the field of electronics, robotics, chemical industry, equipment etc. This knowledge was more or less implemented in industry and contributed to the Bulgarian economic and technological modernization.