On June 22, 1949, the OPC formally approved the Albanian operation and assigned it the code name BGFIEND. For simplicity, the operation will be referred to as Project Fiend or simply Fiend from now on. Fiend’s ultimate objective was to overthrow the Hoxha regime in Albania and replace it with a government responsive to and supported by the Albanian people, oriented toward the Western powers and friendly to the United States. The CIA Office of Confidential Funds approved at least $900,000 (approximately $9 million in today’s dollars) for the project through the end of June 1950. Of this amount, $130,000 was for personnel expenses, $100,000 for supplies, and $500,000 for equipment in the field. Five thousand gold sovereigns and five thousand gold napoleons were transferred to Rome in care of the OSO Custodian of Funds, to finance aspects of the operation where gold was the only medium of exchange, in particular for agents that would be infiltrated in hostile territory.16
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On May 4, 1949, Wisner, Lindsey, McCargar, and Offie discussed and agreed upon the selection of Robert Low as operational chief for the Albanian plan. Low was a journalist by training and had been a Time reporter before World War II. When the war broke out, he joined the Office of Strategic Services and was stationed in Cairo. After the Normandy invasion, he was transferred to the First Army headquarters as an intelligence officer with the rank of captain. At the beginning of December 1944, Low was one of the few intelligence officers to have detected and reported the growing concentration of the Sixth Panzer Army commanded by the SS General Sepp Dietrich in the densely forested hills of the Ardennes. His warnings about a German counteroffensive fell on deaf ears, and the Battle of the Bulge, the bloodiest engagement of the American forces in Western Europe during World War II, ensued.17 After the war, Low left the Army with the rank of colonel and returned to his journalistic life. He moved to Prague to become the East European correspondent for Time-Life.18 Wisner had known Low since his Cairo days and took it upon himself to convince him to join the operation. To ensure there were no issues with Low’s employer, Wisner went directly to Henry Luce, the magazine’s publisher and editor-in-chief, and asked him “to obtain the services of Low on a basis of a loan for an indeterminate but limited period for a special assignment.”19
Low received his clearance briefing on June 10, 1949, and immediately departed for Europe to begin his OPC assignment. He told his editor at Time-Life that he was on leave to write a book; while performing his duties as part of the Albanian project, Low maintained cover by regularly visiting Time-Life offices in Europe and occasionally furnishing special articles for the magazine.20
Low’s first task was to travel to London, together with McCargar, to discuss joint efforts with British counterparts in arranging operational plans for Fiend. They soon discovered that the British had developed their own plan for an operation in Albania, code name Valuable. Their intention was to recruit a small contingent of agents among Balli Kombëtar members living at that time in refugee camps in Greece and Italy, organize them into four to six infiltration parties and send them during September and October of 1949 to areas in southern Albania where they would make contact with local BK sympathizers and convey them the following message: “We have been dispatched as emissaries of the British, who are willing to supply local bands of guerillas with money and arms if in return those guerillas will carry out attacks on the facilities and communications which the Communist Greeks enjoy in southern Albania.”21
As evidence of the British good faith and intentions, the agents would bring gold to support their sympathizers in the initial stages and a token supply of arms, which they would carry with them or hide near their landing site. These agents and their sympathizers would engage in preliminary operations of a very limited scale. They would transmit immediately through the wireless transmitters (W/T) all available intelligence regarding Greek Communist activities and the support they received on Albanian territory. After two months, they would exfiltrate in order to report details to the British and receive further instructions and assignments.
The plan’s assumption was that the anti-Greek nature of the initial assignment, as well as the supply of gold and arms the agents would convey, would be sufficient incentives for the local BK sympathizers to take action. BK leaders and sympathizers in Albania would ask inevitably about the British intentions concerning Albania. The plan suggested that “this bridge shall be crossed when it is reached,”22 that is, after the activities in the initial stage had been completed successfully and the BK had grown in strength.
These activities were the fighting reconnaissance stage of the Valuable plan. From the six infiltrated parties, the British expected at best three or four to return, having accomplished some part of their mission. Using the knowledge gathered from these teams, the British would formulate plans for stage two, which consisted of increased infiltration of supplies and sabotage equipment and the direction of guerilla attacks against targets identified from intelligence gathered in stage one. These activities would be expanded gradually in scale and scope to a point where they would effectively supplement the actions of the Greek army against the Communist guerrillas and limit, if not deny, the refuge and facilities that the Greek Communists had enjoyed on Albanian soil up to that point.23
Upon his return from London, McCargar briefed Wisner on the British plan. Wisner felt the British had produced the plan in haste and had focused it narrowly on protecting their influence, positions, and ambitions in Greece. However, he saw advantages in coordinating the activities envisioned by their respective plans, especially in light of the fact that the British had thought out more details and had operational assets in Europe available to execute the plan. In conversations between the Office of Policy Coordination, Department of State, British Foreign Office, and Secret Intelligence Services representatives held in Washington on May 20 through 26, 1949, the OPC shared the details of the American plan. The consensus of the meeting was that Fiend was on a larger scale than the British Valuable and subject to wider external political influences and developments that were hard to foresee.24
But both parties saw the value of a joint operation, employing the British plan as part of Fiend’s initial activities. On the American side, the decision to enter into the joint arrangement with the British was prompted both by policy considerations and by actual circumstances that developed as the OPC began to enter into the active phases of the operation. From the policy perspective, the overall guidance from the Department of State was: “The British Government should be approached, informally at first, with a view to ascertain British thinking in regard to Albania and reaching an early agreement on overall policy and program. Provisions should be made for close cooperation with respect to subsequent action.”25
Members of the military establishment briefed on Project Fiend also encouraged cooperation with the British out of concern that the British might leverage the current situation in Albania in order to aggrandize British influence in the Balkans, Italy, and Eastern Mediterranean to the detriment of US interests and the general cause of halting Soviet expansion.
In addition to these policy considerations, there were numerous operational reasons in favor of a joint operation. It became clear from information coming in from the field that the British were prepared to proceed with their operation, with or without American consent. Separate British and American operations in Albania would create confusion among the Albanian exiles and would ultimately compromise security. A contest between American and British for control of Albanian personnel and geographical areas in Albania would jeopardize the success of the entire operation, since Albania was not large enough to accommodate the struggles of two major powers for control of its people and territory. Furthermore, the British were not concerned with hiding their support of Albanian resistance and were happy to take full credit for it. Thus, a joint effort would eliminate the strictly British influence and ensure that the British did not reap undeserved benefits from the operation.
There would still be an inev
itable amount of jockeying for position between the British and Americans vis-à-vis Albania. To ensure that they could gradually assert American interests, the OPC pushed for the creation of a combined policy office in Washington to handle the broad coordination and control of the joint operation. A combined US-British team posted in Europe would manage the day-to-day activities, under the command of an American officer.26
The combined policy office included representatives from the OPC, SIS, Department of State, and Foreign Office. On the American side, Robert Joyce represented the Department of State and James McCargar the OPC. George Jellicoe from the British embassy in Washington represented the Foreign Office. Peter Dwyer, the SIS liaison in Washington, acted as the SIS representative until they found a person with more operational experience.
CHAPTER 4
The National Committee for Free Albania
After the official approval of Project Fiend, the OPC moved swiftly to implement the first phase of the operation, which consisted of forming a national committee or council that would include representatives of major Albanian groups in exile who were relatively untainted by collaboration with the Axis forces during the war. The committee’s purpose was to provide cover for the covert activities that the US and UK would conduct jointly in the latter phases of the Albanian operation.
The committee would operate in the United States under the umbrella of the National Committee for Free Europe (NCFE), a private organization launched in New York on June 1, 1949, by a group of American businessmen, lawyers, and philanthropists, including Allen Dulles, who at the time was still in the private sector.1 The NCFE’s publicly announced goal was that of “assisting political and intellectual leaders who fled Communist tyranny in Eastern Europe.” In reality, the NCFE was the OPC’s cover for conducting coordinated psychological and political warfare against the Soviet bloc with plausible deniability for the United States government in the event that operations created embarrassing fallout.2
In July 1949, Low moved to Rome and conducted detailed and complicated negotiations “seated Turkish style in the Borghese Gardens, urging a number of Albanian elders toward agreement.”3 His efforts to announce the creation of the committee in July hit several obstacles and he had to postpone the original schedule.
While everyone accepted without any arguments Frashëri’s position as president of the committee, an agreement for the handling of armed actions on behalf of the committee required considerable discussions. Abas Kupi, the leader of the monarchist Legaliteti party, felt that his qualifications and experience positioned him best to be in charge of military actions. Frashëri and Abas Ermenji, one of his most vocal lieutenants, advocated for the president of the committee to oversee all military questions.
As a compromise, all parties agreed to create a three-man military junta that would report to the executive committee and would be composed of Kupi, representing Legaliteti’s Zog followers; Ermenji, representing Balli Kombëtar; and Said Kryeziu, representing nationalist leaders from northern Albania who were not affiliated with any of the three main Albanian political groups. They divided the country in three areas of responsibility, with a member of the junta assigned the lead for actions in each region. Ermenji and the BK were responsible for the south; Kupi and Legaliteti were responsible for the central part; Kryeziu and his followers were responsible for the northern part of the country.4
Another sticky issue became the involvement of Ismail Vërlaci and Gjon Markagjoni in the committee. The State Department had decided that their party, Blloku Kombëtar Indipendent, would not be included in the committee, given its leaders’ history as collaborators during the war. However, they left open the possibility of including figureheads like Vërlaci and Markagjoni as individuals and not as representatives of their party. When Low broached the subject with other Albanian leaders, he encountered strong resistance from the BK. Abas Ermenji flatly refused to join the committee if the BKI, Vërlaci, or Markagjoni were included because they were “too tainted as traitors and collaborators to put in the Committee.”5 In the end, Low decided to leave them out.
Low developed particularly close ties with Abas Kupi, whom he sought to use as an intermediary to attract other Albanians in the committee. Recognizing the value that the chieftain placed on weapons, Low asked McCargar to procure and mail via diplomatic pouch a silver-handled Colt pistol, which he gave to Kupi as a sign of friendship. Low believed that developing the relationship with Kupi and promoting him in a position of importance in the committee would put pressure on Zog, who at the last meeting with Berry and Miner in Alexandria in mid-June 1949 had placed conditions for openly supporting the committee aiming to put him in control of the movement.
When Zog heard that Kupi was working with the Americans, he called him to Cairo and berated him for not putting Zog’s interest in the forefront of the committee. Kupi stormed out, returned to Rome, and gave Low indications that he was prepared to sever his ties with Zog if the Americans would back him.6 Low raised the issue with the headquarters and asked for advice. Offie provided guidance in a cable sent on July 6, 1949:
We cannot expect to get very far by basing our action on a double-cross; Albanians are much more skilled at that than we are and they will certainly double-cross us first of all and most of all. It is of course possible that Abas Kupi is fooling us just as much as he fools Zog. He may be phoning Zog about our efforts to win him away, as Italian sleuths listen. The point here is that we should not base our action on a double-cross.7
Thus, Low worked to keep Kupi engaged as a representative of Legaliteti in the committee even though Zog himself did not come out to support it openly. To Low’s aid in this task came Bill MacLean and Julian Amery, who had spent more than a year in Albania during the war as British liaison officers to Kupi’s staff. After the war, MacLean had moved into politics—he ran as a Conservative candidate for the parliament and lost in the 1948 elections. Amery was an active-duty officer in the British army. In 1948 he published Sons of the Eagle, the account of his experience in Albania during the war, which became one of the rare sources of information on Albania and the émigré leaders for anyone interested in Albanian affairs at the time. At the request of the SIS, MacLean and Amery had played in the first half of 1949 the same role that Berry and Miner had played for OPC, traveling throughout Greece, Italy, and Egypt and meeting with Albanian leaders in exile on behalf of the British intelligence service.8
On July 14, Low, Amery, and MacLean met with Zog in Alexandria, with Geraldine serving as his interpreter. They informed him on the pending announcement of the committee under the leadership of Mithat Frashëri; Abas Kupi would serve as the leader of the military junta within the committee. Zog became very agitated and put up a show of indignation that the committee was taking the shape of a government in exile. Angrily, he said: “I left the country with the authority of the National Assembly and it is my duty to defend Albania. I cannot transfer this responsibility to anyone else other than my heir.”9
To calm Zog’s mood, Amery suggested they break for lunch. When the conversation resumed afterward, Amery explained patiently what Zog and Berry had agreed to in earlier meetings, namely that the committee was not a government in exile and supporting it did not mean that Zog was giving up his royal prerogatives. Amery also reiterated the joint British and American position that a plebiscite would decide the form of government in Albania after the liberation of the country. Low would later say about Amery: “He was like Talleyrand. I’ve never seen such diplomacy in my life.”10 Zog ended the meeting by promising not to work against the committee even though he could not openly support it at the moment. In a telephone conference with Washington ten days later, Low expressed his fear that Zog would walk away from his agreements with Berry, thus leaving the committee composed only of BK elements and a few independent members, with Zogist and BKI groups in opposition.11
Zog reiterated his wait-and-see approach in a letter handed to Colonel Fiske, the American military attaché in Cairo
, on July 26. Zog wrote that the concept of the committee as presented to him by Low, Amery, and MacLean was in complete contradiction in form and in substance with the agreement that Zog and Berry had reached in May. Instead of representing national unity through the participation of all political parties outside the country, the proposed committee excluded significant émigré political groups and personalities.
Zog left out the fact that the excluded parties and individuals were former collaborators and chose to emphasize that the solidarity of all Albanians in exile was the most important factor to winning the struggle for liberation. Therefore, Zog wrote, he didn’t consider it advisable to declare himself publicly in favor of the committee for the moment, but this shouldn’t be taken as a sign of disapproval or opposition. He would continue to support any US action in favor of Albania and was ready to offer the moral and material support he had promised in his signed declarations to Berry.12
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In early 1949, the Greek government was poised to end decisively the conflict with the Greek Communist guerrillas that had raged since 1946. General Papagos assumed command of the Greek National Army (GNA) and, with the support of American and British military missions in Greece, built up its strength to almost two hundred thousand men against the guerrillas, who counted slightly over thirty thousand fighters in their ranks. Within the first three months of taking command, Papagos conducted successful campaigns against the insurgents in Florina and Peloponnese, forcing them to rely on hit-and-run actions and retreat in the mountainous areas along the Albanian and Yugoslav borders.13
As the OPC was working to launch the Albanian committee, it began receiving reports about a rapidly mounting feeling in the Greek general staff, fueled by the fiercely nationalist Greek media, that when the GNA successfully advanced to the Albanian border, it should continue its pursuit of the guerrillas across the frontier in order to capture and annihilate them. On July 21, Wisner raised the alarm about potential dangers of a GNA incursion across the Albanian border. He sent a memo to Robert Joyce at the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff stating that such actions would be very unfortunate from the point of view of the OPC’s Albanian plan.
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