Operation Valuable Fiend

by Albert Lulushi

  The engine behind the creation of the OPC and the man assigned to lead it was Frank Gardiner Wisner, a forty-year-old lawyer who came over from the State Department with the title of assistant director for policy coordination. The higher echelons of the CIA and the State Department at the time were full with ambitious and bright northeasterners educated at Ivy League schools. While equally ambitious and brilliant, Wisner came from the south and his alma mater was the University of Virginia. He was born and raised in Laurel, Mississippi, into a family that had moved there from Iowa after the Civil War to start a successful lumber business and therefore did not owe its prosperity to the slave-owning plantation economy of the antebellum South. Although he grew up in one of the most segregated states of the union, Wisner was proud of the enlightened role his family and especially his sister, Elizabeth Chisholm, had played in discovering the talents and supporting the musical education and career of Leontyne Price, the world-renowned African American soprano.9

  After attending public high school in his hometown, Wisner enrolled in the all-boys Woodberry Forest School in Orange, Virginia, and then went on to complete undergraduate studies and law school at the University of Virginia. After graduating, Wisner worked on Wall Street and then enlisted in the US Navy six months before Pearl Harbor. Things got interesting for him when he transferred to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in July 1943. His first assignment was in Cairo, Egypt, and then from there to Istanbul, Turkey.

  In August 1944 Wisner was transferred to Romania on the heels of the retreating German army in order to coordinate the safe evacuation of hundreds of Allied airmen held there as prisoners of war. In Romania, Wisner witnessed from up close the focused efforts of the Soviet Union to establish a Communist regime. The plight of King Michael and the privileged, fervently anti-Communist Romanian elite convinced Wisner that the Soviet Union was gearing up to exploit its power and undermine US interests in Europe and beyond.10 Wisner was among the few officials at the time to raise concerns about the dangerous enemy that the Soviet Union was becoming, concerns that George F. Kennan, the US deputy chief of mission in Moscow, had articulated most vocally. In his famous “long telegram” from Moscow in February 1946, Kennan had advocated strongly for a new attitude in US policy toward America’s wartime ally.

  After the war, Wisner went back briefly to his legal career in New York City before joining the State Department in 1947, where he and Kennan, then the head of the Policy Planning Staff, agitated for new ways to counter the Soviet threat, which eventually lead to the creation of the OPC.

  Wisner envisioned the OPC as a focal point within the government able to render services to the entire government through its ability to consider problems and get things done where more overt agencies were unable to act. Wisner understood that achieving this vision would result in an unprecedented power in the hands of his organization, which in turn demanded the highest quality of personnel to wield that power responsibly and intelligently.11 In the weeks and months immediately following the creation of the OPC, Wisner focused his efforts on building an organizational structure and finding the best and the brightest people that would enable him to accomplish his vision.

  In its initial days, the OPC comprised about fifteen people, most of them inherited from a previous organization known as Special Projects Group, whose primary function was the conduct of propaganda activities. The OPC’s first organizational structure had two main divisions, Operations and Plans & Projects, with foreign branches under each division. The Operations division included branches covering broad geographical areas under the overall direction of the chief of operations. In the early days, there were so few people working for the OPC that only the branches handling Germany, Austria, and the Balkans were actually operating. The branch covering the Balkans and Southeast Europe, Foreign Branch B Section I, or FB-I, was responsible for Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Malta, Romania, and Yugoslavia. It also covered the Free Territory of Trieste, an area on the northern shores of the Adriatic disputed between Italy and Yugoslavia, which, like Berlin, had been one of the fault lines between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union in the early days of the Cold War. The allies partitioned the territory into two zones in 1947. Zone A included the port city of Trieste and a narrow strip of coastline surrounding it; it remained under the administration of the US and Great Britain until 1954, when it became part of Italy. Zone B included parts of the Istria peninsula under the control of Yugoslavia, which went on to incorporate it into its own borders in 1954.

  The first chief of FB-I was James McCargar, a Foreign Service officer with deep knowledge of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who had taken a temporary assignment with the CIA in 1948 as a case officer in Genoa, Italy, before moving over to the OPC in February 1949.12 A graduate of Stanford University, McCargar had worked briefly as a reporter for the San Francisco Call-Bulletin before joining the Foreign Service in 1942. His first assignment was in Vladivostok in the Russian Far East, where he served as vice consul. In 1943, he moved to Moscow as secretary of embassy. In 1944, McCargar received a commission in the Naval Reserve and served in Alaska through the end of the war as a liaison between the Soviet Navy and the US Merchant Marine. After the war, McCargar returned to the Foreign Service and went to Budapest, Hungary, first as secretary of legation, and then as chief of the political section. In 1946, McCargar established and ran an escape network through Soviet-occupied territory that saved over sixty Hungarian and Romanian pro-Western political personalities and their families from the arrests, imprisonments, and executions that ravaged Eastern Europe at the time.13

  Soon Franklin Lindsay joined the OPC as McCargar’s boss overseeing all the OPC East European projects. Lindsay had been second in command in the OSS mission attached to Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia during World War II. He brought to the job firsthand experience in guerrilla actions and understanding of the Balkans and partisan warfare principles.14

  In those early days, Wisner surrounded himself with like-minded former OSS operatives, most of whom he personally recruited with a direct and passionate pitch that went along these lines: “I’m setting up a new organization inside the CIA called the Office of Policy Coordination, and it’ll be something different, maybe something up your alley. OPC won’t just gather intelligence. We’ll be what America needs in this Cold War, an action arm. You’re a man of action, aren’t you . . . ?”15

  Once the new recruits were on board, Wisner pushed them to compete and produce actionable projects. He managed the OPC like a law firm: the more clients, the more cases, the more rewards.16 He judged the performance of individuals by the importance and number of projects they initiated or managed. No idea was too far-fetched as long as it was useful in subverting the Soviet influence anywhere in the world.

  For example, a new staff office created in late 1949 to conduct propaganda and psychological warfare activities included an eclectic mix of writers, financiers, Hollywood producers, and movie agents, who in 1950 acquired the movie rights to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and financed the production and release of the film in 1954. They chose to create an animated movie that parents and children alike could watch and designed the script carefully to convey a clear anti-Communist message. Attention to all the necessary details, including a full complement of jokes and a happy Disney-like ending that was a departure from Orwell’s original book made the film a success at the box office. Similarly, they produced another antitotalitarian movie based on Orwell’s 1984, which they released in 1956. No one outside the agency had any idea that the CIA financed the movies.17

  Wisner’s energy and focus caused the Office of Policy Coordination to grow rapidly within the CIA, often at the expense of the older and more established Office of Special Operations, whose espionage and counterintelligence activities were important but not as exciting to the CIA customers in the White House, State Department, and the Pentagon. Whereas the OSO was generally content to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence, Wisner was eager
to put intelligence to work. During the course of 1949, the OPC gradually built up its budget to $4.7 million and its staff increased to 302 people assigned to seven overseas stations, in London, Frankfurt, Vienna, Rome, Athens, Istanbul, and Cairo, who covered countries in Europe and the Near East.

  The rest of the world began to receive coverage as the organization began sucking in additional staff and budget. Foreign Branch A covered Western Europe; B was extended to cover the Soviet Union and all its satellites and was later renamed the Eastern Europe division; C covered the Middle East and Africa; D covered China, Japan, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim; and E covered the South America, Central America Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada. Curiously, there was a Foreign Branch F initially, which covered the United States—a reorganization that took place in May 1950 put an end to it, although the CIA would continue to conduct operations in the United States until the Congress explicitly forbade it in the mid-1970s.

  The OPC established stations under cover at overseas embassies and consulates. These stations operated side by side with existing OSO stations, which often became a source of friction among compartmentalized personnel who kept each other at arm’s length, although nominally they all belonged to the same agency. By the beginning of 1952, the OPC had 2,812 employees and 3,142 contract personnel working in forty-seven stations around the world and a budget of $82 million, which quickly climbed to $200 million a year.18

  From the inception of the OPC in September 1948 until October 1950, when General Walter B. Smith, US Army, became director of Central Intelligence, Wisner enjoyed a great degree of autonomy. Direction from the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff was broad and vague, which allowed him considerable flexibility to develop and pursue projects. In late 1948 and early 1949, as Wisner, Lindsay, McCargar, and others in the OPC worked eagerly to take their organization off the ground, they were looking for an opportunity to engage the Soviet adversary quickly and decisively. Yet they realized that, logistically and organizationally, the OPC was not prepared to implement large-scale operations. The consensus was that only a narrowly defined and focused operation would provide the impetus required to expedite the development of the OPC structures, processes, and procedures necessary to run larger efforts. They needed a pilot project that would serve as a pioneer for the OPC and would provide invaluable lessons for future operations.19

  They found the target for such a project in Albania, a small country in the Balkans, nestled between Yugoslavia and Greece, only fifty miles from Italy across the Adriatic Sea but “nonetheless as remote as any corner of Europe.”20

  CHAPTER 2

  Albania between 1912 and 1949

  Historically, the strategic significance of Albania derives from its position on the eastern shore of the Straits of Otranto, at the entrance to the Adriatic and astride the land route between the Adriatic and the Aegean. It is one part of the parcel of earth where Europe meets Asia Minor. In this position, Albania had long been a focal point of conflicting interests and the battlefield where those interests often squared off. In the middle ages, under the leadership of Gjergj Kastrioti Skënderbeg, Albanians shielded Christian Europe from the Ottoman Muslim juggernaut led by two of their most powerful sultans, Murad II and Mehmed II, the Conqueror. Forced into submission, they sought to avoid complete annihilation by embracing in large numbers the religion of the invader, which made them a target of their Christian neighbors, whose national identities flourished in the nineteenth century, including Greece, Italy, and the Slavic nations of the Balkans.

  As an independent national state, Albania was more a creation of Great Powers politics than it was an expression of national will and power of its people, who declared its independence on November 28, 1912, when the Ottoman Empire was in its last throes. Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Italy drew Albania’s boundaries in 1913 to balance out conflicting claims of the neighboring countries rather than based on the ethnicity or national affiliation of the population living the area. As a result, almost half of Albanians remained outside the borders of Albania proper and lived in its neighboring countries.

  The Great Powers established the independent Albania as a monarchy under their protectorate. They offered the throne to Prince William of Wied, a German aristocrat, who was crowned as prince of Albania on March 7, 1914, in the port town of Durrësi in central Albania. Wied’s rule came under fire immediately from all directions. The Greek army occupied most of southern Albania, which Greece had claimed historically as part of its territory under the name of Northern Epirus. A peasant insurrection broke out, led by Muslim fundamentalists who wanted to overthrow the Christian monarch and return Albania to the dominion of the Ottoman Empire. His prime minister, Essad Pasha Toptani, attempted a coup at the instigation of Italy. In the meantime, World War I broke out. On September 3, 1914, after only six months on the throne, Wied left Albania, which quickly became the crossroads for opposing armies in the great conflict.

  The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 ensured the independent existence of the country at the time, thanks in no small part to President Woodrow Wilson’s refusal to allow Greece, Yugoslavia, and Italy to partition Albania between them. Although nominally still the monarch of Albania, Wied, who had been on the losing side of the conflict, found no support among the participants at the Peace Conference in his efforts to return to the Albanian throne. Essad Pasha Toptani, his former prime minister, was equally unsuccessful in his efforts to establish himself as the ruler of Albania. He cut a deal with the Italians, promising them the port of Vlora and the island of Sazani in return for their support to his claim to power. The Albanian public was dismayed when they learned about this deal. A young schoolteacher by the name of Avni Rustemi traveled to Paris from Libohova, a small town in southern Albania, and in June 1920 shot and killed Essad Pasha in front of Hotel Continental, today the Westin Paris-Vendôme, in rue de Castiglione. The French police arrested him on the spot and he stood trial accused of pre-meditated murder, but a French court acquitted him in December 1920 after his lawyer passionately described Rustemi’s act as the spontaneous action of a patriot incensed by the machinations of an oriental pasha against his country. Rustemi returned to a hero’s welcome in Albania, where a jubilant electorate sent him to the newly formed Albanian parliament.

  Throughout the early 1920s, the national politics of the Albanian state were dominated by a tiny upper class, mostly landowners and tribal chieftains, as well as elements from a small middle class who could afford an education abroad. Political parties in the Western sense did not exist, and people rallied around personalities driven by family relations, tribal affiliations, or economic bonds. The best known among such personalities was Ahmet Zog. He was born in 1895 to a landowning family with feudal authority granted by the Ottoman Empire over the region of Mati, in central Albania. He spent his boyhood years in Istanbul, where he received his early education at a military academy.1 On November 28, 1912, he represented his district as one of the youngest delegates in the assembly that declared Albania’s independence in Vlora. During World War I, he volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army but fell out of favor with the authorities who confined him in Vienna for the last two years of the war.

  Between 1921 and 1924, Zog was a member of the Albanian parliament, leading the caucus of conservative landowners who elected him, and served in a succession of higher posts: minister of interior, head of Albanian armed forces, and prime minister. Zog used his increasing powers with a heavy hand not only to suppress opposition to his rule but also to settle old personal scores and family feuds. In April 1924, his agents assassinated Avni Rustemi, the liberal member of the parliament with whom Zog was në gjak, in blood debt. Essad Pasha was Zog’s uncle on his mother’s side, and it was Zog’s tribal duty to avenge his death.

  Rustemi’s murder caused an outcry in the country. Theofan S. Noli, the highest bishop of the Albanian Orthodox Church and a political ally of Rustemi, delivered a heartfelt eulogy at Rustemi’
s funeral held in Vlora. A Harvard graduate and master of the written and spoken word, Noli used his speech to stir the passions of the population against Zog, forcing him to flee in Yugoslavia for his safety. Noli became prime minister of a democratic liberal government in June 1924. However, his political and governing skills were far weaker than his rhetoric skills. A series of missteps in the next few months caused Noli to lose support of the liberal base that had brought him to power. His move to recognize the Soviet Union and exchange ambassadors with Moscow ensured that he would get no support from the outside either.

  Zog used Noli’s errors to his advantage. With the support of the Yugoslav and British governments,2 Zog financed and organized a shock force of several hundred supporters complemented by White Russian mercenaries. In December 1924, Zog returned from exile, forced Noli to flee, and thoroughly cleaned the country of any remaining opponents, murdering some and forcing the rest into exile. On February 1, 1925, the Albanian parliament elected Zog president of the newly established republic. On September 1, 1928, that same legislative body proclaimed him Zog I, king of the Albanians.

  While generally ruling as a constitutional monarch, Zog maintained control of nearly all aspects of Albania’s government and political life, physically eliminating, imprisoning, or forcing into exile a number of opponents and making many enemies in the process. It is said that he survived fifty-five assassination attempts, one in front of the Vienna State Opera, where he drew a pistol he always carried with him and shot back at the would-be assassin—the only known case in history of a head of state fighting back during an assassination attempt.

  Zog’s rule had all the characteristics of a personal dictatorship, but during this period Albania progressed considerably. The unification of the country under a strong central government, the gradually increasing impact of Western influences, and the vitality and patriotism of the Albanian people brought about improvements in many fields. Modern methods slowly replaced the old Turkish administrative system that had survived since the time when Albania was under Ottoman rule. Zog outlawed hakmarrja—the particularly bloody Albanian vendetta—and the tradition of carrying arms, prevalent especially in the highlands, even though he risked alienating some of his strongest supporters, including his own tribesmen. The government began collecting taxes and recruiting young men for the army—measures traditionally disobeyed by the Albanian population even at the height of the Ottoman period. The parliament approved a penal code based on the Italian model in 1928. A new civil code, patterned on Napoleonic law, went into effect in 1929; it eliminated the dualism of religious (Sharia) and civil courts inherited from the Ottoman Empire. From then on, only state courts judged civil questions. The new code abolished polygamy among Muslims, which resulted in the improvement of the legal position of women.