Secret agent author
BULGARIA SAYS SHE WAS A SPY. SHE CALLS IT ‘FAKE NEWS’
Julia Kristeva, at 76, is one of Europe’s most decorated public intellectuals. Her more than 30 books have covered topics including linguistics, psychoanalysis, literary theory and feminism. Her many prestigious honours include the Vaclav Havel Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize and France’s Commander of the Legion of Honor.
Now, a furor has arisen over whether it is time to add a more surprising line to her resumé: Bulgarian secret agent.
The notion surfaced last week, when the Bulgarian government commission charged with reviewing the files of the country’s notorious Communist- era secret service released a terse document alleging the Bulgarian-born Kristeva, who has lived in France since 1966, had served in the early 1970s as an agent known by the code name “Sabina.”
The allegation was greeted with shocked disbelief by those immersed in the work of Kristeva, who is known for her staunch defence of European democratic ideals and opposition to all “totalitarianisms,” as she puts it, whether state communism, U. S.-style identity politics or religious fundamentalism.
The mystery only deepened Friday, when the commission, in response to intense international interest, took the unusual step of posting online the entire dossier on Kristeva.
The hundreds of pages of documents include Kristeva’s supposed registration card as an agent of Bulgaria’s former Committee for State Security and extensive reports of alleged conversations with her handlers in Parisian cafes and restaurants between 1971 and 1973. But there is not a single intelligence- related document written or signed by her.
In an interview Thursday, Kristeva vigorously dismissed the accusation as “fake news” and a “barefaced lie” — “mud being slung at me,” she said, by unspecified people who wished her harm.
She reiterated her denials Friday. She had never been approached by anyone claiming to be a State Security agent, she said emphatically, and certainly never agreed to collaborate.
“These allegations are completely false,” she said, speaking in French. “I find it quite extraordinary that the commission, which read t hese allegations, never thought that the secret services could have been lying.”
To Kristeva’s defenders, the case is murky, recalling something out of Franz Kafka — or perhaps one of her own murder mystery novels, which mix racy conspiracy plots with heady metaphysical speculation.
“Everyone is trying to keep an open mind, but nobody who knows anything about her or her work believes this,” said Alice Jardine, a French literature professor at Harvard who is writing a biography of Kristeva.
Instead of showing Kristeva was a spy, she added, the dossier — which also includes intercepted letters and other surveillance of Kristeva — shows “how she was targeted and spied upon.”
In Bulgaria, where opinion is divided, the case has stirred debate about what counts as collaboration and the reliability of the state security archives.
Some argue Kris te va might have spoken to agents without realizing it. Others have called the evidence insufficient and expressed doubt about the fairness of the procedure for branding someone a collaborator. ( On Friday, the commission announced its website had been attacked by hackers.)
Kriste va was born in Sliven, Bulgaria, in 1941, to Christian Orthodox parents. In the recent documentary Who’s Afraid of Julia Kristeva? she describes arriving in Paris in late 1965 to study literature on a French government scholarship, with the equivalent of $ 5 in her pocket.
By 1971, the year of her alleged recruitment, she was established and well- connected enough to be deemed a useful source of information by State Security. She was writing prolifically and was part of a group of politically engaged intellectuals around t he avant- garde journal Tel Quel, including the critic Roland Barthes, the novelist Philippe Sollers (whom Kristeva married in 1967) and the philosopher Jacques Derrida.
In January 1971, she reportedly asked to give testimony only orally, rather than in writing, and her handlers, identified by code names, agree.
In multiple reported meetings between that year and 1973, Kristeva allegedly offered information on French political and intellectual figures, Arab progressive movements, Bulgarian émigrés and other subjects, most of which is deemed “of little interest.”
According to the dossier, the agency formally released Kristeva from the ranks in 1973 after handlers cited frustration with her “completely pro- Maoist” politics and her general lack of commitment. But operatives continued to communicate with her as late as 1978 with the hope of reactivating her.
In an interview Friday, Kristeva acknowledged she had known Vladimir Kostov, a former Bulgarian spy described in one document as having met her in France in the 1960s to “psychologically prepare” her for possible work as an agent, and who some have suggested might also be behind one of the code names in the dossier. (After defecting, Kostov survived an apparent poison umbrella attack in the Paris Metro in 1978.)
But she said she was unaware Kostov — whom she worked with at a newspaper in Bulgaria, and recalled encountering again in Paris around 1974 or 1975 — had worked with State Security.
As for the commission, she said it put too much trust in the story the dossier told.
“They saw it as a document, and not as a manipulation,” she said.
Since the fall of Communism in 1989, Kristeva has been vocal about her harsh judgment of the former Bulgarian regime.
On Thursday, she reiterated her belief that her father had been “involuntarily assassinated” in 1989 in a Bulgarian hospital where, she said, “experiments were carried out on the elderly.”