Data presented by a historical commission last week showed that 45 senior Bulgarian diplomats, including the current ambassadors in London, Berlin, Rome and Tokyo, collaborated with the much feared former Darzhavna Sigurnost security service under Communist rule.

The center-right cabinet in Bulgaria, a member of the European Union and NATO, has begun a process to recall general consuls and charge d’affaires. But it needs the president’s sanction to withdraw 33 heads of diplomatic missions abroad.

“Bulgaria cannot afford to have that stain on its image: that 20 years later it is still working with people trained by the former Darzhavna Sigurnost,” Foreign Minister Nikolai Mladenov told a news conference.

President Georgi Parvanov, who often criticizes the cabinet, has said he opposes any en masse recall of diplomats and that he wants to look into each case separately. He suggested that most of the diplomats cited had diligently served the state.

The president, who faced no deadline to respond to the government’s request, declined to comment on Thursday.

Parvanov himself was cited as a collaborator with the old secret police by the historical commission in 2007. He denies being a secret service agent, saying he had only written a book review for a man who later turned out to be an agent.

In a bid to win over Parvanov to a recall of diplomats and avoid accusations of double standards, Prime Minister Boiko Borisov earlier this week sacked a minister without portfolio and a deputy interior minister identified as ex-secret agents.

Collaboration with communist-era secret police remains a sensitive issue throughout the former Soviet bloc. But Bulgaria has been among the last to deal with its painful communist past.

Once Moscow’s most obedient ally, Bulgaria operated one of the most notorious spy networks in the Cold War era. It was implicated in plots ranging from a failed assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II to the killing of an exiled dissident in London with a poison-tipped umbrella.

Word from the commission that half of the Bulgarian ambassadors to EU member states were agents prompted the government to seek changes in laws to ban former collaborators with the communist secret police from diplomatic posts.

In 2006, Sofia passed legislation to open the archives of the former secret police but the measure does not oblige former agents to quit current posts, nor are they banned from applying for public servant positions or running for political office.