Olympic wrestling champion revealed as former spy

TWO-time Olympic wrestling champion Boyan Radev of Bulgaria has been revealed as an intelligence officer with the former communist-era State Security secret service.

Radev, who won Olympic gold in Tokyo 1964 and Mexico City 1968, was on the list of former agents and collaborators of the communist secret services revealed by the commission on the opening of communist-era secret services' dossiers.

Radev was appointed as a junior intelligence officer at the Interior Ministry's Sofia unit in 1964, the year he won his first Olympic title. His appointment was made at the request of State Security.

In 1965, Radev was promoted to senior intelligence officer and was subsequently promoted to deputy head of department in the State Security's intelligence unit.

This was the position he held until 1991, almost two years after the fall of communism, records showed.

"All athletes at the time were working for the Interior Ministry," Radev told Kapital weekly.  

"This was how things were back then. I was ready to do anything in order to be an athlete because this was what I could do back then.

"We were given ten leva for every star on my uniform and for my first Olympic title I got $250 and for the second they gave me $500. Today I get a pension of 700 leva a month for raising the Bulgarian flag so many times."

After the fall of communism, he reinvented himself as an art collector, with some reports suggesting that he has one of the richest collections of Bulgaria artists and archaeological artifacts.