Operation Valuable Fiend

by Albert Lulushi

  Zog took measures to improve the education and living conditions of the population. A network of roads built with Italian loans enhanced communications and trade among several parts of the country. The Vocational School in Tirana, founded in 1921 by the American Junior Red Cross, began to offer the first courses in agriculture. From 1931, the Albanian Government and the Near East Foundation of New York jointly ran the Albanian-American Agricultural School of Kavaja, in central Albania. Italian companies using local labor laid a pipeline to carry oil from wells in south central Albania to the port of Vlora. There was enough oil for the internal needs of Albania and for exportation to Italy.

  The government also showed a greater interest for the health of the people. After a preparatory study, the Albanian government and the Rockefeller Foundation concluded an agreement, whereby both parties would share in equal proportion the expenses for a campaign to eradicate malaria. The work started in 1929 and resulted in the opening of anti–malaria stations in Tirana, Durrësi, Shkodra, Berati, Elbasani, and Vlora. Beginning with 1932, the government established health centers in various towns for the protection of mothers and children.3

  * * *

  Zog was a bachelor when he came to the throne. His envoys prospected among European royal houses for a suitable queen—without success, given the reluctance of some of the most eligible and wealthy candidates to marry the self-proclaimed Muslim monarch of a somewhat backward kingdom. Then, in 1937, Zog met Geraldine Appony, twenty years his junior and daughter of Count Julius Nagy-Appony of Hungary and Gladys Virginia Stewart of New York. Despite her aristocratic pedigree, Geraldine had no fortune and at the time was selling postcards in a Budapest art museum.4 In a sort of Cinderella story, she agreed to marry Zog after a brief courtship and after receiving assurances that she would raise the future offspring of the marriage as Catholic.

  Zog’s marriage was celebrated in Tirana on April 26, 1938, a date chosen to coincide with the 487th marriage anniversary of Albania’s medieval hero, Gjergj Kastrioti Skënderbeg, whose descendant Zog claimed to be. The bride wore her wedding dress of ivory satin, which Zog’s sisters had chosen from Chanel in Paris, with a high crown of orange blossoms and a train five yards long heavily encrusted with flowers worked in diamonds and pearls. She wore several jewelry pieces designed specifically for the event by the Ostier Jewelers of New York, including a diamond diadem topped with a miniature version of Skënderbeg’s battle helmet surmounted by the head of a mountain goat. The king wore the heavily decorated uniform of a general.

  The ceremony was strictly civil and lasted only six and a half minutes—carefully avoiding religious symbols, given that the king was Muslim and the bride was Christian. One of the official witnesses who signed the marriage certificate was Count Galeazzo Ciano, Fascist Italy’s foreign minister and Mussolini’s son-in-law, who presented himself as a great friend of Albania and Zog. Ciano gave the newlyweds a silver table centerpiece on behalf of himself and his wife, Edda. Mussolini’s wedding gift was a yacht and four bronze vases. Hitler gave an enormous Mercedes Benz with a removable roof, Albert Lebrun, president of France, a Sèvres vase, Admiral Miklós Horthy, regent of Hungary, four Arab horses, and the king of Italy an antique figure of a dragon.5 The president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, sent a telegram of good wishes to the king that said, “May Albania continue to prosper under Your Majesty’s reign.”6

  In the afternoon of their wedding day, King Zog and the new queen, Geraldine of Albania, left Tirana under a shower of confetti dropped by Italian airplanes droning overhead. In the shiny red Mercedes from the Führer, they drove toward the coast to spend the honeymoon at the summer palace that the people of Durrësi had given Zog when he was president of the Albanian republic. The palace, known as Zog’s villa, still exists today on a promontory overlooking the city and bay of Durrësi.

  To mark the occasion of his marriage, Zog granted a wide amnesty to his political opponents jailed in Albania or in exile, including Bishop Fan Noli, who had emigrated to the United States and settled in Boston, Massachusetts. At the same time, the marriage was the final blow to his relations with Shefqet Vërlaci, Albania’s wealthiest landowner and a former supporter. In the mid-1920s, Zog had promised to marry Vërlaci’s daughter but broke the engagement when he became king in 1928 to the great humiliation of Vërlaci, who moved to Italy with his son Ismail, determined to do everything in his power to undermine Zog’s rule.

  Besides being an official witness to the wedding, Ciano was the highest-ranking foreign dignitary in attendance. He had overshadowed the wedding festivities with a triumphal arrival from Italy two days before. Clad in uniform and smiling broadly, Ciano stepped from a Savoia plane at the Tirana airfield to the rapturous reception of a throng of supporters wearing black shirts and carrying Italian flags. He inspected the Albanian honor guard before speeding in a car toward the royal palace, while Fascists chanted, “Duce, Duce!” Later, Count Ciano inaugurated the construction of a new highway from Tirana to Durrësi.7

  During his trip to Albania, Ciano finalized a plan he had been developing for months to bring an end to Zog’s rule and annex Albania to the Italian crown in pursuit of the Fascist dream of rebuilding the Roman Empire. Almost a year later, at the end of March 1939, Mussolini gave final approval to the execution of the plan. Italian troops began massing in the southern Italian ports of Brindisi and Bari, while the Italian minister in Tirana, Francesco Jacomoni, presented Zog with a draft agreement to turn Albania into an Italian protectorate. Although the whole country would stand behind the king if he chose to resist the invader, Zog decided that opposition would be futile and prepared to flee the country. Queen Geraldine was nine months pregnant and due to deliver any day. In order not to jeopardize the future heir’s claim to the throne, Zog remained in Albania until the baby was born, on April 5.

  Sounds of celebratory canon rounds announcing the birth of the heir, Prince Leka, mixed with the noise of Italian planes flying low over the skies of Tirana and reverberations from the shelling of the Albanian coast by the Italian navy. On April 7, Good Friday, Italian forces began landing in all of the major ports of Albania. Staying one step ahead of them, Zog crossed the Greek border into exile, followed by a large retinue that included his extended family and officers of the Royal Guard. Officially, the king was going abroad to defend the rights of the nation, a duty bestowed on him by the National Assembly. He took the gold reserves of the Albanian National Bank, estimated at three million gold coins,8 and the crown jewels, which were part of the national treasure, as well as personal and family treasures. After a harrowing journey through Greece, Turkey, Romania, Sweden, and France, Zog and his entourage eventually made their way to England. The British government did not recognize Zog as a deposed monarch in exile and allowed him to settle to England on condition that he not engage in political activities. Zog obliged and spent the war years “settled in bucolic exile at Henley-on-Thames,”9 far removed and disassociated from events in Albania.

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  The Italian Army occupied Albania with relative ease. Small groups of Albanian soldiers and gendarmes, such as those in Durrësi, led by the commandant of Gendarmerie Abas Kupi, fought on their own initiative but were not able to impede the landing and advance of the Italians for more than a few hours. On the morning of April 8, Italian forces entered Tirana and occupied all the government buildings. Within a few days, they had extended their reach throughout the country. On April 12, the Albanian National Assembly directed Shefqet Vërlaci, Zog’s archrival who had returned to Albania with the Italian troops, to form a new government. At the same time, the assembly abolished the constitution of 1928 and offered the crown to the Italian monarch, Victor Emmanuel III. In return for acquiescing to the Italian annexation, a handful of Albanian leading figures received positions in various Italian institutions, including Shefqet Vërlaci who became a member of the Italian senate.10

  For the next couple of years, the Italians ruled the country with relative ease.
Italy used Albania to launch an attack against Greece on October 28, 1940. It was an adventure that quickly turned into a disaster. The Greek army under the command of General Alexandros Papagos repulsed the initial assault and then launched a counteroffensive, pushing the Italian armies out of Greece and occupying the major cities in southern Albania. To rescue an embarrassed Mussolini, Hitler sent his armies into Greece and Yugoslavia in April 1941 and effectively brought all the countries in the Balkans under the Axis domination.

  In May 1941, after the German occupation of Greece and Yugoslavia was complete, the Italians took over most of the Albanian-populated regions of Yugoslavia, including Kosovo, parts of Macedonia, and pockets of Montenegro, and placed them under the control of the Albanian quisling government. The Germans placed the Albanian populated region of Çamëria in Greece under the command of an Albanian high commissioner, although it remained under the jurisdiction of the German military command in Athens. This arrangement lasted throughout the Italian and German occupation and offered Albanians for the first and only time in their history the political reality of a greater, or ethnic Albania. It went a long way toward achieving its intended purpose: creating goodwill for the Axis powers among members of the Albanian ruling class and keeping them from organizing the population into active resistance against the occupying armies.

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  The British government, in line with its prewar policy of appeasement, accepted the annexation of Albania to the Crown of Italy after the invasion of April 7, 1939. The United States, on the other hand, following the Wilsonian principles of respect for democracy, sovereignty, liberty, and self-determination, considered Albania a victim of Axis aggression and withdrew its mission to Tirana. When World War II started in earnest, the US and its British allies encouraged and supported the resistance of the Albanian people against Fascist and Nazi forces of occupation. Beginning in 1943, missions from the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) began to infiltrate in Albania and to provide active support in the fight against the Axis forces and their collaborators.

  To avoid chain-of-command issues and operational overlaps between the British and American missions, the two sides agreed upon a division of labor from the beginning. The SOE provided money, arms, and ammunition, most of it American in origin, as well as training to resistance fighters. They also engaged in active fighting, blowing up bridges, calling in Allied air strikes, and setting up ambushes. The OSS had the job of gathering intelligence about the enemy and rescuing Allied airmen shot down during their bombing runs to Romanian oil fields and elsewhere in the vicinity. OSS teams in Albania reported to their headquarters in Bari, where the Albanian Section was headed by Harry T. Fultz, who in civilian life had lived in Albania for many years before the war as director of the American Red Cross Vocational School and who had a solid understanding of the country.11

  One grouping that fought effectively against the Axis forces and received ample support from the Anglo-American missions was the National Liberation Movement, or Lëvizja Nacional Çlirimtare (LNÇ). Created in September 1942, it was initially a coalition between the Communist Party, led by Enver Hoxha, and other nationalist elements, including Zog supporters such as Abas Kupi. From the beginning, however, the Communists dominated the LNÇ, under the guidance and close supervision of Tito’s envoys from the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.

  A consummate politician, Hoxha “successfully used his combative instincts and skills to win the internal battles for leadership of the Communist Party of Albania. He could be ruthless and he could be charming, depending on whether a competitor needed to be destroyed or won over.”12 Hoxha also understood the suggestive power of image for the masses. From the early days, and for the rest of his life, he cultivated his natural good looks and tall stature into an appearance that was always impeccable, clean cut, and well groomed. Whether dressed in military uniforms supplied by the Allies during the war or in custom-tailored suits imported from France afterward, Hoxha always projected confidence and leadership to the poor and uneducated majority of his followers. Here is how OSS personnel assigned to Hoxha’s headquarters portrayed him in a 1945 biographic profile:

  6’3”, 235 lbs. Churchillesque in sleeping and working habits. Impatient, vain, egotistic; despite mountain experience, his habits are sedentary; likes luxury; great personal ambition—politically, a “climber;” good sense of humor, not necessarily always serious. Tends to subordinate interest in femininity to hard work. Well-modulated, appealing voice in public appearances and speeches. Is at ease in company but is not socially inclined; however, is effusively concerned with observing the rules of etiquette he knows. Moderate drinker, heavy eater. Attitude toward US—Anti, though expresses himself as pro.13

  In reaction to the LNÇ, in November 1942 Albanian anti- Communist elements announced the formation of the National Front, or Balli Kombëtar (BK), an organization dedicated to preserving Greater Albania, preventing a Communist takeover of the country, and barring King Zog from returning to the throne. The leadership of BK included a mix of large landowners, such as Ali Klissura, and intellectuals, such as Mithat Frashëri and Hasan Dosti. Born in 1880, Frashëri descended from the family of the leading organizers of the Albanian National Renaissance, a nationalistic movement in the late nineteenth century, and had been a member of Albania’s first cabinet after its independence in 1912. Later, he became minister to Greece, represented Albania at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and then became minister to France and Albania’s representative in the League of Nations. In 1926, he resigned following disagreements with Zog’s government.14 A fervent republican in his convictions, Frashëri withdrew from public life under Zog’s monarchy and eked out his living from the proceeds of a bookstore in Tirana, which the Communists confiscated after he went into exile in 1944.15

  Hasan Dosti was born in 1895 and was a preeminent intellectual and scholar, having earned degrees in law and political science from the University of Paris, Sorbonne. He returned to Albania in the late 1920s to practice law but ran afoul of Zog’s administration who imprisoned him several times for his opposition.16 Under the Italian occupation, he served as minister of justice in 1942, with the knowledge and agreement of Mithat Frashëri, who favored arrangements under which elements of BK served from inside the quisling governments as a “constitutional opposition to the Italians.”17

  Initially, LNÇ and BK tried to collaborate in the fight for liberation. Delegates from both organizations reached an agreement in Mukaj, outside Tirana, in August 1943 to join forces against the Italians, only to see it repudiated days later by Enver Hoxha at the instance of the Yugoslav envoys, who saw the agreement as an acceptance by LNÇ of BK’s vision of Greater Albania. Abas Kupi, who had been part of the negotiations and instrumental in forging the agreement, pulled his supporters out of the LNÇ and created a new political grouping called Legaliteti, or Legitimacy, whose aim was the restoration of the monarchy.

  The collapse of the Italian administration in September 1943 and the immediate occupation of Albania by the German Wehrmacht sharpened the differences between the Communist-dominated LNÇ partisans and the nationalist groupings in the country. Pressing the social revolution side of the Communist agenda, in October 1943 Hoxha ordered LNÇ partisan units to “attack and destroy the forces of the Balli Kombëtar wherever they might find them, even if it should mean suspending operations against the Germans.”18 Mithat Frashëri gave similar instructions to his followers. Citing the “urgent need of the country for order and discipline,” he ordered all BK formations to suspend military operations against the Germans for the time being and to respond in kind to all attacks from the Communists.19 In the ensuing civil war, the superior discipline and better equipment of the LNÇ prevailed. The partisans drove the BK forces into areas controlled by the Germans, which put them temporarily out of the reach of the partisans but opened them up to accusations by Communists of collaboration.

  The LNÇ continued fight
ing against the Germans, although they did so initially on a small scale, with token actions aimed at convincing the Allies to provide them with arms and subsidies, a goal they achieved. Bolstered by assistance from the British and the Americans, LNÇ increased in strength and numbers and began engaging the Germans directly, especially as the Wehrmacht began withdrawing its units from the Balkans. At the same time, the civil war raged and, as a British officer later observed, “out of every one hundred rounds which we [Allies] sent them, ninety would be fired against Albanians.”20

  Until September 1944, BK was not able by and large to find a way to resist the LNÇ attacks and fight the Germans at the same time. For their part, the Germans succeeded in drawing segments of the BK into fighting their common enemy, either openly in direct support of Wehrmacht units or indirectly as part of the administration governing the Albanian state. During joint German-BK mop-up operations in January 1944, BK forces surrounded the British staff in Albania. They captured and turned over to the Germans the highest-ranking British officer in Albania, Brigadier Edmund F. Davies, chief of the SOE military mission to the Albanian partisans.21 His chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Nichols, was wounded but managed to evade capture, only to die later of his wounds and frostbite.