00:00A stranger bumped into Georgi Markov at a London bus stop, apologized, and walked away.
00:05Three days later, Markov was dead. It was 1978. Markov was a Bulgarian dissident living in exile,
00:11and someone wanted him gone. The autopsy found almost nothing, just a tiny wound on his leg.
00:17Investigators nearly missed it entirely. Then they found it. A platinum pellet smaller than
00:21a pinhead buried beneath his skin. It had been packed with ricin, one of the most lethal poisons
00:27on Earth. A single drop can kill a grown man. The umbrella the stranger carried was not just an
00:32umbrella. The KGB had engineered it into a compressed gas weapon designed to fire the pellet on contact
00:38and leave no trace. No bullet. No blood. No evidence. Just a polite apology and a quiet death days later.
00:45For years, investigators had almost nothing to go on. The full truth only came out through defector
00:50testimony decades later. The KGB had turned political murder into an engineering problem,
00:55and for a long time, it worked perfectly.
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