Operation Valuable Fiend

by Albert Lulushi

  The monarchist Legaliteti took a wait-and-see attitude, never deciding until the end whether to fight the Communists or the Germans. Throughout 1944, Abas Kupi pressed Colonel William MacLean and Major Julian Amery—the British SOE representatives sent to his movement—for arms to fight both the Germans and the Communists; the British in turn insisted he take action against the Germans first before receiving assistance.

  A pocket of resistance against the Italians and Germans that was decidedly anti-Communist existed in Kosovo, under the leadership of three brothers, Gani, Hasan, and Said Kryeziu, and supported by a British SOE mission under the command of Major Tony Simcox. By the end of summer 1944, they found themselves actively fighting against the Germans while at the same time fending off approaches by Yugoslav and Hoxha’s partisans to co-opt them into their movements. Once the Germans retreated, the Kryeziu brothers faced the wrath of the Communists on both sides of the border. Albanian partisans arrested Gani Kryeziu and handed him over to the Yugoslavs, who put him on trial as antirevolutionary and sentenced him to five years of hard labor “for exposing the people to German reprisals.”22 Albanian partisans also captured Said Kryeziu, but he managed to escape and flee to Italy in October 1944.23 Yugoslav partisans lured Hasan Kryeziu into their headquarters where he disappeared without a trace. The Albanian partisans took Major Simcox in “protective custody,” escorted him south in handcuffs, and unceremoniously asked the British mission to return him to Bari, Italy.24

  In September 1944, the war was coming to a close in Albania. Germans abandoned all but the main cities and the principal roads necessary to evacuate their troops from Greece. The LNÇ, having already established firm command of the southern part of the country, pushed into nationalist-held territory in central and northern Albania. They branded all anti-Communist elements not affiliated with LNÇ as Nazi collaborators and eliminated all nationalist leaders the partisan formations could capture.

  By the end of September, the Allied governments had given up hope that any other group outside the LNÇ would engage the Germans head-on in fighting actions in Albania. Belated actions by BK and Legaliteti elements against the Germans at the time were not sufficient to change that opinion. The British headquarters ordered MacLean and Amery to abandon the Legaliteti and to evacuate to Bari, Italy, at the end of October 1944. They sent explicit orders not to bring Kupi or any of his followers out of Albania for fear of angering Hoxha. A few days later, Kupi, his two sons, and three companions landed in Brindisi, Italy, on their own boat after being lost at sea for seven nights and six days with only rainwater to drink and one night’s worth of food supplies for subsistence.25

  Other nationalist elements also found the means to escape to Italy, including Mithat Frashëri, Ali Klissura, Hasan Dosti, and about one hundred leading members of the BK.26 Elements who were compromised by their collaboration with the Axis embedded in and evacuated with the German army as it began its retreat from Albania. The largest group of nationalists, made up primarily of rank-and-file elements, remained behind and tried their best to disappear into the countryside and make their way back home. A handful of them, especially in the northern and central areas of the country, took to the mountains to continue fighting the Communists.

  * * *

  Enver Hoxha entered Tirana on November 28, 1944, at the head of the provisional government and a day later declared Albania liberated from the Germans. The Communists began a campaign of terror aimed at the physical elimination of all real or potential opponents of the future regime. The 70,000-man-strong partisan army that came out of the war was unleashed against the countryside in pursuit of anti–Communist elements and their supporters. Mehmet Shehu, the most successful and feared partisan commander, coordinated the mop-up operations.

  Shehu had honed his fighting skills in the Spanish Civil War, where he had fought on the Republican side. He returned to Albania in 1942 and applied his military knowledge in successful engagements against Italians, Germans, and nationalist elements. During the war he earned a reputation for being ruthless, not just during combat operations but especially in the treatment of prisoners and civilians afterward. After the battle for the liberation of Tirana, which Shehu led personally, OSS operatives noticed there were very few wounded among the German prisoners and reported to their base in Bari that partisan policy was to “have no wounded German prisoners.” They simply killed the wounded outright, without showing any mercy.27

  In 1945, Shehu went to Moscow for high-level staff training at the Voroshilov Military Academy. During his stay in the Soviet Union, he met with Stalin, who seemed to take a liking to him.28 Upon his return to Albania, Shehu became chief of staff of the army and zealously pursued anti-Communist elements by enthusiastically applying Soviet methods from the ruthless Stalinist terror of the 1930s, such as summary judgments by mobile three-man courts, extrajudicial sentencing of opponents, and internment of their family members and relatives.

  While Shehu led the military in its operations against anti- Communist resistance still active in the countryside, Koçi Xoxe, the minister of interior, directed the terror against the large populated centers of the country. Deeply frustrated with his humble origins and lack of education—he had been a tinsmith by profession—Xoxe was particularly harsh against intellectuals, whom he despised and pursued relentlessly. One example that speaks for all is the persecution of the Kokalari family. Two brothers, Mumtaz and Veisim, who had been neutral and unaffiliated with any political party throughout the war, were executed extrajudicially in November 1944 when Shehu’s forces entered Tirana. Their only fault was that they owned one of the few Albanian publishing houses of the time, which had printed a pamphlet promoting the idea of Kosovo being the cradle of Albanian nationalism.

  Their sister, Musine Kokalari, was the first Albanian woman writer in history. She was one of the founders of the Albanian Social Democratic Party in 1944, which existed for only a few months and counted only a handful of members in its ranks. In November 1945, she cosigned a memorandum addressed to the American and British Missions in Tirana, requesting their intervention to postpone the upcoming elections in which the choice for candidates was limited to the Communist-led Democratic Front members only. For this, the Communists arrested her in January 1946 and put her in a public show trial in June, together with thirty-six other defendants—a number of whom were members of the parliament elected on the Democratic Front ticket who had decided to form an opposition group to the Communist-led majority.

  In a telegram reporting on the atmosphere of the trial, Joseph E. Jacobs, the head of the American mission in Albania, wrote: “Yesterday after trial crowd attacked prison van and beat up defendants badly. Kokalari, one of two female accused, had most of her hair torn from her head. Guards stood idly by.”29 Musine Kokalari’s sentence was twenty years in prison, which she served in the notorious prison of Burreli, in the Mati region. After her release, she spent nineteen years in internment, isolated from her family until she died in 1983.

  Another group that Xoxe singled out for particularly harsh treatment was the Roman Catholic clergy, who from the beginning had been an unapologetic opponent of the Communists and their Yugoslav backers. Out of seven bishops and archbishops that Albania had in 1944, only one remained alive in a concentration camp in 1949: the Communists had killed three outright and expelled one as a foreigner; two more died in detention. Only a handful of priests survived in hiding by 1950, after the Communists killed twenty-three, put in prison thirty-five, and expelled thirty-one. They also imprisoned or sent to hard labor camps forty-three nuns, expelled eighty-five, and forced the remaining eighty to abandon the habit and return to civilian life.30

  * * *

  Neither the United States nor the United Kingdom recognized the Hoxha government that came out of the war right away. On May 8, 1945, VE Day, an informal American Mission arrived in Albania tasked to survey the situation in the country before accepting Hoxha’s request for recognition of his government. The US placed two
conditions before granting recognition: the holding of free elections and affirmation of the validity of treaties and agreements in force between the United States and Albania on April 7, 1939.

  The State Department considered the first condition satisfied after the elections in December 1945, despite the fact that only Democratic Front candidates were on the ballot. With regards to the second condition, the Albanian authorities were willing to accept multilateral treaties but declined to honor bilateral agreements between the two countries that King Zog’s governments had negotiated. Finding no way to overcome the impasse and in face of the hostile treatment of the mission members and their employees, the United States withdrew its mission from Albania on November 14, 1946.

  The US Navy sent two vessels, the light cruiser Huntington and accompanying destroyer Noah, to pick up the State Department personnel from the port of Durrësi, but they stopped just outside the three-mile limit of the territorial waters because the Albanian government had not allowed them to dock at the port. A tugboat evacuating the personnel almost capsized in rough seas but managed to bring everyone safe aboard the destroyers.31 Shortly after the withdrawal of the US mission, the Albanian authorities staged in Tirana a public show trial of several engineers and technicians accused of sabotaging drainage works. Throughout the trial, they accused Harry T. Fultz, attaché of the mission, of recruiting the defendants as spies on behalf of the American intelligence.

  The relations of the British with the new Albanian government were even more contentious. Hoxha had come out of the war with a deep hatred for the British SOE emissaries, who, he felt, had not supported him wholeheartedly and had double-crossed him by continuing to back Abas Kupi and Legaliteti until the moment they fled Albania. Postwar trials in Tirana mentioned regularly members of the British Military Mission as supporting anti-Communist elements in the mountains. Faced with continued attacks in the press for inciting sabotage and terrorist actions, the British withdrew their mission from Tirana on April 6, 1946.

  A month later, Albanian shore batteries fired upon but did not hit two British cruisers navigating between the Albanian and Greek coasts in the three-mile-wide Corfu channel.32 Over the next few months, the Albanian and British governments exchanged diplomatic notes, with the British demanding an apology and the Albanians claiming that British ships should not be in their territorial waters. The situation escalated when two British destroyers, the Saumarez and the Volage, struck mines on October 22, 1946, as they were passing through the Corfu Channel. Both destroyers were heavily damaged, one beyond repair; forty-four sailors were killed, and forty-two more were injured by the explosions.

  The last note of the US mission in Albania to the Foreign Ministry, requesting exit visas for its staff and permission—which was not granted—for two US Navy vessels to enter Albania’s territorial waters to assist with the evacuation

  In November 1946, the British navy conducted minesweeping operations in the area and found irrefutable evidence that the mines were recent and not left over from World War II. Albania had no navy to speak of and no technical capabilities to have planted the mines, so the suspicions fell on its Communist big brother, Yugoslavia. Karel Kovaćić, a lieutenant commander with the Yugoslav navy who defected to Italy in July 1947, testified that he had seen two Yugoslav minesweepers fully loaded with mines leave their base toward Albanian waters shortly before the October 22 explosions and return empty just afterward.

  The British government took the position that the Albanian authorities should have known what was happening in such proximity of their shores. A meeting of the UN Security Council discussed a resolution blaming Albania for the British loss of life, which the Soviet ambassador to the UN Andrei Gromyko promptly vetoed. The United Kingdom took the case to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which on April 9, 1949, found that “Albania was responsible for the explosions and for the resulting damage and loss of human life suffered by the United Kingdom.” The court also found that the minesweeping operation by the British navy conducted in the aftermath of the explosions had violated Albanian sovereignty.

  The court awarded £843,947 (slightly over $2 million at the time, about $20 million today) to the United Kingdom in damages.33 The Albanian government rejected the verdict and refused to pay. For a long time, it would be the only instance when a party to a case adjudicated by the International Court of Justice had failed to carry out a decision of the court.34 In retaliation, the British sequestered 1,574 kilograms (almost 3,500 pounds) of gold the Germans had taken with them when they retreated from Albania. The Allies had captured the gold at the end of the war and had deposited it in the Bank of England in the trusteeship of a US-British-French commission pending transfer to the Albanian government. The deadlock between the British demanding liquidation of damages and Albania claiming the return of its gold lasted until the mid-1990s, when the post-Communist Albanian government normalized its relations with the West.35

  * * *

  The newly established Communist regime in Albania considered Greece as a major threat from the very beginning, and not just for ideological reasons. The Greek government maintained that Albania had been a party to the 1940 attack against Greece by the Italians and considered Greece and Albania to be in a state of war. It publicly advertised its aim of detaching from Albania and attaching to Greece a band of land comprising roughly a fifth of the total Albanian territory, which Greeks called Northern Epirus and had historically claimed as theirs. The Hoxha government forcefully rejected any such claims. In his first speech as head of the provisional government in Tirana on November 28, 1944, Hoxha promised defiantly that, “Albania is ready to fight to preserve southern boundaries fronting Greece.”36

  The renewal of hostilities in the Greek Civil War in 1946 exacerbated the tensions. Albania, together with Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, supported the Communist Greek guerrillas by opening up their territories for safe haven and resupply purposes. Regular skirmishes occurred along the border between armed groups from each side as they made incursions on the opposite side against military targets and quite often against the civilian population.

  This support helped prolong the conflict to the point where Stalin had to step in. In a meeting with Bulgarian and Yugoslav leaders in Moscow on February 10, 1948, Stalin ordered: “The uprising in Greece has to fold up. . . . They have no prospect of success at all. What do you think, that Great Britain and the United States—the United States, the most powerful country in the world—will permit you to break their lines of communication in the Mediterranean Sea! Nonsense. And we have no navy. The uprising in Greece must be stopped, and as quickly as possible.”37

  For all intents and purposes, the Greek government did not distinguish between the Albanian government and the Albanians. It treated Albanians in Greece, including those who had fled the Communist regime, with a tolerance little above that accorded to enemy aliens during hostilities. Consequently, many Albanians living there felt, with reason, that the Greek government was not so much against the Communist Albanian government as anti-Albanian.38 US diplomats tried persistently to steer the Greek administration instead to a policy that was unequivocally anti-Communist alone.

  The United States had informed the Greeks that it did not support their territorial claims against Albania, which it considered as having “no ethnic, little strategic and less historical basis.”39 The State Department directed its ambassador to Athens and the rest of the diplomatic personnel assigned to Greece to “bring up in informal talks with Greek Foreign Office officials the subject of the Greek official attitude toward Albania, and to reiterate the US position with regard to the Greek pretensions.”40

  * * *

  Yugoslavia was the country with which Albania had the best relations in the years after the war. Building on their wartime influence over key Albanian Communist leaders, the Yugoslavs established a firm grip on the postwar Albanian state. In 1946, during a state visit in Moscow, Tito received the green light from Stalin to control the country
on behalf of the Communist bloc.41 Next year, the Soviet Union sent another signal that it saw Albania as a mere Yugoslav dependency. Albania was the only Communist-controlled country that Stalin did not invite into the Communist Information Bureau, or Cominform, an organization he created in 1947 to coordinate policies of the Soviet Union, the emerging East and Central European Communist nations, and the leading West European Communist parties. Yugoslavia represented Albania at Cominform meetings.

  A considerable number of Yugoslav advisers and technicians went to Albania under the guise of helping to administer the aid provided by their government, but their role was effectively to build and direct the Albanian state, military, and security apparatus at all levels. At the same time, the Albanian leaders lost no opportunity to extoll the virtues of their Yugoslav friends and allies. Between 1946 and 1947 a series of political, social, economic, and military agreements concluded between the two countries in effect turned Albania into a complete dependency of Yugoslavia. There was a brief power struggle in the ranks of the Communist leaders between the pro-Yugoslav faction, led by Koçi Xoxe, minister of interior, and the pro-Soviet faction led by Nako Spiru, in charge of economic planning. It was resolved in favor of the Yugoslavs when Spiru committed suicide in November 1947, after finding himself isolated and abandoned by Hoxha.

  Fully aware of what was happening in Albania, Stalin requested that a Yugoslav delegation go to Moscow to bring into harmony the policies of Yugoslavia and Soviet Union regarding Albania. Milovan Djilas, one of Tito’s top lieutenants at the time, traveled to Moscow in January 1948 and met with Stalin and Molotov to discuss the issue. Recounting the meeting in his memoirs, Djilas wrote: “Stalin said: ‘We have no special interest in Albania. We agree with Yugoslavia swallowing Albania!’ At this, he gathered together the fingers of his right hand and, bringing them to his mouth, he made a motion as if to swallow them. . . . ‘Yes, yes. Swallowing! You ought to swallow Albania—the sooner the better.’”42