874.00/5–3145: Telegram
The United States Representative in Bulgaria (Barnes) to the Secretary of State
[Received May 31—2:48 p.m.]
286. I have been informed today on the most reliable authority that the body of Mara Racheva was placed in a coffin and deposited in the local morgue and that thereupon her family was informed such funeral services as they might wish could be held. However, according to a report that has reached me a mob subsequently stormed the morgue and seized the body to reveal to the world what had happened to Racheva. According to this report all fingers showed signs of deep burning, there were two bullet holes in the torso, legs and arms had been broken by stretching and twisting and the back of the neck revealed knife cuts. The Sr. Regent Ganev and many others with whom I have spoken have no doubt that Racheva was tortured to death by militia, possibly under direct orders from the Central Committee of the Communist Party and Yugov, Min of Interior.
In this connection I believe I should record my conviction that if I am not successful in effecting the departure of Dimitrov from Bulgaria he will never be taken alive by the militia from my house. He told me the other day that he has experienced too much physical torture in the past to believe that he could endure more and still resist becoming a complacent tool in the hands of the Communists against everything he has fought for during his political career, namely, freedom of political thought and action, and that he could [still] resist denunciation of his political friends and supporters. I believe that should I ever deliver him up to the Bulgarian authorities it would be as a corpse. I told all of this to the PriMin yesterday and asked him how as an individual he would feel if he were in my place. While he did not say it in so many words, he implied he would [Page 243] feel just as I do which is that I cannot accept any assurances in the name of the Bulgarian Govt for the complete safety of Dimitrov.
Rptd to Moscow as No. 145.