Biography

THE BIOGRAPHY

Georgiev was born on March 27 (March 14, old style) 1907 in Sofia to a lawyer's family. He graduated in law in Paris, after which he returned to Bulgaria and worked as a lawyer, including in the office of Nissim Mevorach.

A member of the Communist Party, after the September 9th coup in 1944, Ivan-Assen Georgiev became the Secretary General of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In 1946, he was sent to Paris with the delegation for the signing of the peace treaty, after which he remained working as an advisor at the Bulgarian embassy. In 1950, he was returned to Sofia, due to suspicions of disloyalty, and from the beginning of the following year he taught ancient law at the Sofia University "Kliment Ohridski".

In 1956, he was again sent on diplomatic duty to the Bulgarian mission to the United Nations in New York. At that time, he began to cooperate with the American Central Intelligence Agency. In 1961, his term in New York expired, but he remained at the Foreign Ministry and was elected chairman of the International Institute of Space Law. According to the American press of the period, Ivan-Assen Georgiev brought information to the CIA for five years, for which he received remunerations that reached the amount of 200,000 US dollars. According to the same source, Georgiev lost motivation to cooperate because he felt that the CIA treated him like an ordinary police investigator, and he had the ambition to be Secretary-General of the United Nations. Under the pseudonym Georges Duval, Georgiev provided the secret information in New York to Cyril Black, son of the educational activist Floyd Black. He was recalled to Bulgaria in December 1961.

In 1962, the State Security Service began investigating Ivan-Asen Georgiev on suspicion of espionage, and on September 3, 1963, he was arrested in Moscow. After a noisy trial, in which the prosecution was presented by the Prosecutor General Ivan Vachkov himself, on December 31, he was sentenced to death. According to American press sources, these events escalated into aggressive demonstrations in front of the American embassy in Sofia.

Ivan-Asen Georgiev was shot on January 4, 1964 in Sofia.