| Albanian Subversion |
Article Index for Albanian |
Website Links For Albanian |
Information AboutAlbanian Subversion |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT ALBANIAN SUBVERSION | |
| history of albania | |
| cold war | |
|
The Albanian Subversion is one of the earliest and most notable failures of the Western Counter-intelligence covert operations behind the Iron Curtain . Based on wrong assessments about Albania , and thinking that the country was ready to shake off it Stalinist regime, the British SIS and the American CIA launched a subversive operation using as agents Albanian expatriates. A Soviet Mole tipped of the mission to Moscow , which in turn relayed the information to Albania. Consequently, all agents were caught, put on a show-trial and either shot or condemned to hard labor for life. The Albanian subversion cost the lives of at least 300 men and for a long time has remained one of the most carefully concealed secrets of the Cold War . For the West it was a humiliating operational disaster, whereas for the East, while an operational triumph, news of Western infiltration would have send the wrong message throughout the Communist Block . BACKGROUND The reason behind the operation in Albania was a simple one. The country was the poorest in many of them were steeped in the same Oriental conservatism that finally destroyed the once mighty Ottoman Empire . During World War II , the Albanian society was split into various amorphous groups; nationalists, communist, royalists, traditionalists and collaborationists. From all these factions the communists (national liberation front NLF emerged victorious mainly due to an ideological discipline that was installed into their troops, but also because they were the only fighting force which had fought the Italians and Germans relentlessly. Thus, they were the only grouping, which was not compromised into collaborating with the enemy at the degree that the nationalists and the royalist were. However, Albania stood in an unenviable position after World War II . Greece and Yugoslavia hungered for Albanian lands they had lost or claimed. The Allies never recognized an Albanian government in exile or King Zog, nor did they ever raise the question of Albania or its borders at any of the major wartime conferences. No reliable statistics on Albania's wartime losses exist, but the United Nations Relief And Rehabilitation Administration reported about 30,000 Albanian war dead, 200 destroyed villages, 18,000 destroyed houses, and about 100,000 people left homeless. Albanian official statistics claim somewhat higher losses. OPERATIONAL PLANS In this post war chaos that was Albania the allies decided to launch their operation. The plan called for parachute drops of royalists into the Mati region in Central Albania. The region was traditionally known as a bastion of Albanian traditionalism and moreover praised for their loyalty to King Zog , himself an offspring of one of the regional clans. The original plan was that, if Britain could parachute enough well-trained agents, they could organize a massive popular revolt, which then the allies would supply by air drops. In time, this revolt would spill out a Civil War . The trouble that this would cause the Soviet politics was worth the risk, and if it did succeed, then it could be the starting point of a chain reaction of popular revolutions throughout the Eastern Block. The project appeared so appealing that SIS had no hesitation in putting in into operation. It came under Kim Philby ’s control but was run in detail by an agent who had come into SIS and SOE . The chief of SIS, Stewart Menzies , was not enthusiastic about the paramilitary operation but saw it as a way to appease the former SOE “stinks and bangs people.” In addition, the British wanted the US to finance the operation and to provide bases. Senior British intelligence officer William Hayter , who chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee ( JIC ), came to Washington in March with a group of Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) members and Foreign Office staff that included Gladwyn Jebb , Earl Jellicoe , and Peter Dwyer of SIS and a Balkans specialist. They met with Robert Joyce of the US State Department’s Policy And Planning Staff (PPS) and Frank Wisner , who was the head of the Office Of Policy Co-ordination (OPC), which was administered by the CIA . Wisner had been an attorney who had represented in the past the financial interests of wealthy Albanian nationalist, the Balli Kombetar . There was no scarcity of anti-communist Albanians and the recruiters promptly found them the Displaced Persons camps in Greece and Italy . The conscription for Operation Valuable/Fiend consisted of 40% from the Balli Kombetar (BK) Front ], an organization formed during World War II on a nationalist program committed to creating a Greater Albania; 40% from the monarchist movement, known Legaliteti; and the rest from other Albanian factions. OPERATION VALUABLE/FIEND As a pilot project twelve were recruited and taken to Malta to train for the Operation Valuable/Fiend. The SIS trained these men in the use of weapons, codes and radio, the techniques of subversion and sabotage, and finally how to make a parachute jump. They were dropped into the mountains of Mati throughout 1947, but failed to impress the inhabitants of the region into a larger revolt. The operation dragged on until 1949. There were sabotage attempts on the Kucova Oilfields and the Copper mines in Rubik but no real success in raising a revolt. Then, the US government weighing up the political situation, decided to lend a hand. In September 1949, British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin went to Washington, D.C. to discuss Operation Valuable/Fiend with US government officials. The CIA released a report that concluded that “a purely internal Albanian uprising at this time is not indicated, and, if undertaken, would have little chance of success.” The CIA asserted that the Hoxha regime had a 65,000 man regular army and a security force of 15,000. There were intelligence reports that there were 1,500 Soviet “advisers” and 4,000 “technicians” in Albania helping to train the Albanian Army . NATO was concerned that the USSR was building a submarine base at Vlora . On September 6, 1949, when NATO met for the first time in Washington, Bevin proposed that “a counter-revolution” be launched in Albania. US Secretary of State Dean Acheson was in agreement. The US Joint Chiefs Of Staff wanted to use Vlora as a potential forward naval base for NATO to establish US control of the Mediterranean . NATO, established as a defensive military alliance of the North Atlantic region, was now committed to launching offensive covert operations against a sovereign nation in the Balkans . NATO member countries agreed to support the overthrow of the Hoxha regime in Albania and to eliminate Soviet influence in the Mediterranean region. Bevin wanted to place King Zog on the throne as the leader of Albania once Enver Hoxha was overthrown. This time a better class of Commando was needed so an approach was made to King Zog in exile in Cairo to recommend men for the job. Zog had no hesitation in offering his entire Royal Guard . Many accepted the opportunity including Captain Zenel Shehu , Captain Nalil Sufa and Hamit Majani, an agent who had been into Albania several times since 1946. Matjani, known as The Tiger , had a courage and ferocity which contemporaries describe as legendary. These three gathered a small army by setting up a Committee Of Free Albania in Italy , Egypt and Greece as a front for recruitment and training. On October 3, 1949, the first group of 20 Albanian commandos, known as the “pixies’ by SIS , were landed on the Albanian coastline south of Vlora, which was the former territory of the Balli Kombetar. This was the start of Operation Valuable/Fiend. The pixies had been brought across the Corfu channel on a British Vessel , Stormie Seas . British intelligence officials had trained the Albanians since July on Malta. Albanian government security forces interdicted the commandos, killing four and forcing the others to flee south to Greece . For two years after this landing, small groups left regularly from training camps in Cyprus , Malta and Germany . The whole operation was a series of disasters. Albanian security forces picked up the insurgents as ripe Plums falling from the tree. Occasionally, the Albanian authorities would report on “large but unsuccessful infiltrations of enemies of the people” in this or that region of the country. The last infiltration took place a few weeks before Easter 1952 . In a desperate effort to discover what was going on Captain Shehu himself parachuted with Captain Sufa and a radio operator in the Mati region. The Albanian Militia was waiting for them at their rendezvous point, a house owned by Shehu’s cousin, a known supporter of Zog. The militia forced Shehu’s operator to transmit an all clear signal to his base in Cyprus. The operator had been schooled do deal with such situations by using a fail-safe drill which involved broadcasting in a way that warned it was being sent under duress and therefore should be disregarded. But the militia seemed to know the drill. The all clear signal went out and twelve more top agents, including Matjani, parachuted into an ambush at Shen Gjergj ( Saint George ), near the town of Elbasan . The Albanian army was waiting in a big circle, guns cocked, and the Guerrillas landed in the middle of it. No one surrendered. They were all shot. AFTERMATH Shehu, Sufa and five others were put on a show trial and shot at Easter. The whole Albanian network was crushed and all the agents shot or gaoled. Many of the local inhabitants who were suspected of having helped the guerrillas, were forcibly located elsewhere in Albania. Those guerrillas who survived had no doubt they were betrayed: “Police were always waiting when a boat came ashore. How could they know where the boats would come unless a traitor would have told them? Also, people who had been our friends when we left Albania were often no longer our friends when we went back.” Up to 300 agents would be killed during the operation. , the CIA Director of the South-East Division, terminated Operation Fiend and by 1954 the Company 400 was disbanded and the training facilities in Heidelberg, Germany shut down, as well as the CIA base on the Greek island. The remaining Albanians were resettled in the US, UK, and the Commonwealth countries. ANALYSIS The Albanian episode illustrated how out of touch with the Albanian reality the Western politics were. First of all, Albania was a country divided amongst itself and the democratic principles for which these agents might claim to have fought and died for were totally alien to a semi-illiterate population. Secondly, these men represented the "Old Guard" of a bygone era, bent on the preservation of century-old privileges. Third, the communist forces were an organized, and ideologically indoctrinated force, competent and forged into countless of battles against the Italians and the Nazis. The communists also undertook economic measures to expand their power. In December 1944, the provisional government adopted laws allowing the state to regulate foreign and domestic trade, commercial enterprises, and the few industries the country possessed. The laws sanctioned confiscation of property belonging to political exiles and "enemies of the people." The state also expropriated all German- and Italian -owned property, nationalized transportation enterprises, and canceled all concessions granted by previous Albanian governments to foreign companies. In August 1945, the provisional government adopted the first sweeping agricultural reforms in Albania 's history. The country's 100 largest landowners, who controlled close to a third of Albania 's arable land, had frustrated all agricultural reform proposals before the war. The communists' reforms were aimed at squeezing large landowners out of business, winning peasant support, and increasing farm output to avert famine. The government annulled outstanding agricultural debts, granted peasants access to inexpensive water for irrigation, and nationalized forest and pastureland. Under the Agrarian Reform Law, which redistributed about half of Albania's arable land, the government confiscated property belonging to absentee landlords and people not dependent on agriculture for a living. The few peasants with agricultural machinery were permitted to keep up to forty hectares of land; the landholdings of religious institutions and peasants without agricultural machinery were limited to twenty hectares; and landless peasants and peasants with tiny landholdings were given up to five hectares, although they had to pay nominal compensation. Thus tiny farmsteads replaced large private estates across Albania. By mid-1946 Albanian peasants were cultivating more land and producing higher corn and wheat yields than ever before. As such the power base had gradually shifted from the old elite to the newer one. Also the communists had the support of some nationalists on account of thwarting Yugoslav plans for a Balkan Federation, which would have invalidated Albanian Independence and made the country a Yugoslav Republic . Even if Kim Philby would have not done what he did, it is highly doubtful that the Albanian subversion would have been concluded satisfactorily. SOURCES
|
|
|