On November 16, Hasan Dosti proposed to Kupi that the executive committee should have two presidents, one for political affairs and one for military affairs. When the committee discussed political affairs, Dosti would be the president, and when it discussed military affairs, it would be under the presidency of Kupi. On November 17, the full executive committee met with Dosti present. Kupi put forward Dosti’s suggestion but without specifically naming himself as military president. Pali, the BK representative, didn’t turn down the proposal but requested a postponement of the meeting in order to discuss the proposal with the leadership of the BK party.
At that meeting, Ermenji strongly opposed the proposal because it gave Kupi too great a control on upcoming operations in Albania. When the meeting reconvened the next day, Pali announced to Kupi that BK had formally abandoned the principle that their party should hold the executive committee presidency. He put forward Dosti as the BK member on the committee in Frashëri’s slot and requested that the committee proceed at that point to elect its own president. This concession surprised Kupi but at once he announced that he was willing to vote for Dosti provided BK agreed to his appointment as chief of staff for military affairs. Pali maintained that the committee’s first job was to elect the president, and that they were not willing to discuss military affairs until they had resolved that issue. The committee adjourned and reconvened again on November 19. The announcement of Dosti as president of the executive committee of the NCFA came on Sunday, November 20, 1949.35
Ultimately, the driving force behind Dosti’s selection seems to have been Carmel Offie. Although he represented to the British that the Albanians should decide on the next chairman of the NCFA, Offie pushed strongly in favor of Dosti. McCargar recalled in 1985 that Offie was absolutely insistent that Dosti be Frashëri’s successor. McCargar’s objections that Dosti had been minister of justice under the Italian occupation were brushed aside. “Over my dead body they made Hasan Dosti president of the Committee,” McCargar said. “I didn’t get anywhere. I lost the battle.”36
The records available today do not show McCargar voicing any opposition to Dosti’s selection at the time. His comments in 1985 may be an effort to distance himself from reports that had begun circulating in the press that the CIA in its early days had not shown any qualms about drafting former Axis collaborators in its operations against the Iron Curtain.37 They had cited Hasan Dosti’s choice as head of the NCFA as an example of such unscrupulous attitude.
Whatever the larger truth may be, using Dosti to support this claim shows a shallow understanding of facts and, worse, perpetuates character assassination campaigns that the Albanian Communists waged relentlessly against their exiled opponents over the years. Although Dosti held judicial posts under the Italian and German occupation, including serving for three months as minister of justice in 1942, he did so as part of Balli Kombëtar’s strategy to infiltrate the government structures and organize the resistance from within.
After September 1944, when BK broke off all ties and moved to open action against the Germans, Dosti suffered the Wehrmacht wrath as much as anyone else did. German troops raided and set on fire the house where his family was staying. His brother and his wife were summarily shot, and his five children, between eight and sixteen years old, remained orphans and had to fend for themselves. The youngest of the children, an eight-year-old girl, was wounded by the same bullet that killed her mother, when it penetrated the wall behind which she was hiding.
Over the years, Dosti had established himself as a bridge builder among the different factions within the Albanian groups, which is what the NCFA badly needed at the time. Indeed, he had been instrumental in forging the short-lived Mukaj agreement of 1943 between the Communist-led LNÇ and the nationalist Balli Kombëtar. During the years of his exile in Italy, he had worked steadily to mitigate the traditional anti-Italian sentiment of the Balli Kombëtar. Dosti had gone to New York at the beginning of 1949 as a representative of Balli Kombëtar, charged, as one of his fellow émigrés put it, with the thankless task of “proselytizing among the notoriously pro-Communist Albanian colony in the United States.”38 Thus, the American backing of Dosti as the new head of the NCFA made a lot of sense given his education, background, and leadership style.
CHAPTER 5
Philby in Washington
As representatives of the Office of Policy Coordination and the Secret Intelligence Services on the Policy Coordination Group, James McCargar and Peter Dwyer met frequently during the summer of 1949 in order to harmonize activities between Fiend and Valuable. Frank Wisner became concerned that Dwyer’s frequent movements in and out of the Lincoln Building near the Washington Reflecting Pool, where the OPC was located, exposed not only OPC but also OSO personnel to the British Secret Service and left them vulnerable to penetration efforts on its part. On September 21, he asked that trips of the British liaison officer to the OPC’s offices be restricted to the absolute minimum. He requested his staff to meet with him outside the building until they could find separate quarters for the Policy Coordination Group that would supervise the Fiend-Valuable operation.1
The OPC found suitable quarters for conferences with the British in the Pentagon, room 2 C 869, in the area of the Munitions Board, near the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The cover for the room was “Liaison Section A” for State Department. At least one secretary remained on the premises during regular business hours, with instructions to direct any queries regarding the occupants or nature of their work there to Robert Joyce, the State Department representative in the Policy Coordination Group.2
The premises were set up in time to receive the new SIS liaison officer, Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby, who arrived in Washington on October 10 to take over the post of first secretary at the British embassy. Philby’s SIS assignment was to be the liaison with all the US intelligence agencies. London’s guidance had been to move the focus of the US-British intelligence relations away from the FBI and toward the CIA. Within the CIA, Philby was most actively involved with the the OPC, whereas with regards to the OSO he focused primarily on “finding out what they were up to.”3
Philby was very successful in establishing warm relations with everyone who mattered in the intelligence establishment. He found fertile ground for friendships among CIA officers, most of them OSS veterans who had worked closely with their British intelligence counterparts during the war, and had high regard for their skills and capabilities. Philby personally enjoyed very high repute for “having been the ringleader of a sort of revolt of younger officers in MI-6, who then showed his mettle by consigning to oblivion the man who had given him his chance in that organization.”4 Leveraging the superior British worldwide communication network, Philby was often able to provide information to his American counterparts well in advance of that information being available through their “often sparse, slow, and erratic”5 communication channels.
Philby opened doors in Washington with his “undeniable charm” and the approachable down-to-earth character he portrayed. McCargar remembered him as follows: “Kim, when I knew him, was devoid of pretension. He was witty, courteous, and not lacking in engaging warmth. His smile, suggestive of complicity in a private joke, conveyed an unspoken understanding of the underlying ironies of our work. He was capable. Behind the modest, slightly rumpled exterior, there was no mistaking a quick mind and tenacious will.”6
Philby also won friends over by welcoming them in his Washington, DC, house on 5228 Nebraska Avenue, where he and his wife, Aileen, threw parties that “. . . were very wet indeed; in their farther reaches, they were sometimes even uproarious. Luxury, chez Philby, was a full martini pitcher and several bottles of whiskey. It mattered not a whit who served them, or from what one drank.”7
Philby would later reveal that the true reason behind the atmosphere of trust, warmth, and friendliness he created around him was so he could get his fingers into as many intelligence officers as possible. “That, after all, was my aim in life,”8 he wrote. Und
er the appearance of the brilliant SIS officer, who many expected would rise in the ranks of MI-6 to lead the service one day, hid a mole who had been an officer of the Soviet intelligence services for fifteen years by the time he arrived in Washington.
Born in India in 1912, Philby was the son of a high-ranking British official, who nicknamed him Kim after a spy character in a Rudyard Kipling story.9 During his studies at the University of Cambridge in 1929 to 1933, he attracted the attention of Soviet intelligence spotters because of his socialist-leaning ideas and sympathy for the Soviet Union. In 1934, the Soviet intelligence recruited him and at least four other fellow students—Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross—in what the public would later know as the Cambridge Five spy ring. The Soviets assigned the following codenames for their agents: Stanley to Philby, Hicks to Burgess, Homer or Gomer to MacLean, Johnson to Blunt, and Liszt to Cairncross.10
On orders from his Soviet handlers, Philby went to Spain to cover the Civil War as a reporter for the London Times embedded with General Franco’s forces. Posing as a Fascist and receiving the Red Cross for Military Merit from Franco himself, Philby was able to build up solid rightwing credentials and disguise his affiliation with socialist activities during the college years. At the same time, he used the access granted to him by Franco to collect information about German and Italian weapons in Spain and pass it on to the Soviets.11
Upon returning to England, Philby joined the Secret Intelligence Service in the summer of 1940, without any inquiry into his past other than a routine check against MI-5 records that “came back with the laconic statement: Nothing Recorded Against.”12 His first direct supervisor at the SIS was Guy Burgess, his coconspirator. During the war, Philby’s SIS responsibilities grew steadily to include running British intelligence in Spain, Portugal, North Africa, and Italy. Throughout the war, he provided important information to his Soviet contacts, which contributed to important strategic decisions Red Army generals made in key battles against the Germans. Philby’s contributions to the Soviet war effort against the Germans remain the most significant achievements of his spying career.
In 1944, Philby assumed charge of a newly created section at the SIS headquarters in London designed to combat against Communism and the Soviet Union. In this capacity, he had access to all the plans of British intelligence against the Soviet Union, which he passed on to the Soviets. In 1946, he took a field assignment and became the SIS chief of station in Turkey under the cover of first secretary at the British embassy there.13
He held this post until August 1949, when he was offered the position of SIS liaison with all the US intelligence agencies in Washington. Realizing that this was an excellent opportunity for his spying career, Philby accepted the position immediately, without even consulting his Soviet intelligence handlers. He traveled to London for four weeks of briefings and then booked passage to New York on board of S.S. Caronia.
CHAPTER 6
First Infiltrations of 1949
The successful launch of the National Committee for Free Albania marked the completion of phase one of the Valuable Fiend operation. Next, the attention shifted to the execution of phase two activities, consisting initially of running sorties inside the country for reconnaissance purposes and to establish contacts with resistance leaders there. While the Americans had taken the lead on the execution of phase one, the British were in a better position to carry out the initial infiltrations, mostly because they had been planning for them since the spring of 1949 as part of their Valuable plan.
Another reason was that the British could count on the World War II experience of their SOE operators, who had actively roamed the country and engaged in warfare, whereas the OSS experience in Albania had been intelligence collection and reporting. According to McCargar, “The expertise was 99 percent British. They had so many people who had been there during the war, most of them young and intelligent. We only had American citizens of Albanian origin, none of them specialists in what we were trying to achieve.”1
Finally, a more practical reason for the British taking the lead initially was that the Americans did not control any territory in the Mediterranean suitable as the base of operations, whereas the British had facilities available in Malta and Cyprus. As Wisner confided to Philby at the time, the British could always be counted on to have an island within easy reach of any place Americans wanted to subvert.2
The British put in charge of the operation David Smiley, a veteran of SOE operations in Albania who would be responsible for training the agents and the day-to-day conduct of the operations. In June 1949 Abas Ermenji and Vasil Andoni went to the International Relief Organization (IRO) camp in Bari, Italy, where they selected thirty Albanians to participate in the training program. In order to disguise the itinerary of the trainees, the British chartered a flight from Italy headed to Cyprus. The Albanians were offloaded at Malta clandestinely while the plane continued to Cyprus. The passenger manifest was written to indicate that the Albanians had actually arrived and been discharged in Cyprus. If any of the agents were picked up and interrogated in Albania, the British government could say that they had been taken to Cyprus for training for jobs in Mauritius but had been found unsatisfactory and discharged, and that it did not know what had become of them after that.3
The island of Malta, under British control at the time, was chosen to host the main base for the operation because it was the closest location to southern Albania, the intended target of the infiltrations. Other alternatives, including the US-controlled North African coast of Benghazi and the island of Cyprus, also under the British, were discarded due to their distance or security concerns.4 The main operational base was located at Fort Bingemma in the northwest corner of Malta, about ten miles west of the capital, Valletta. A forward operating base and communication center was set up in Corfu, at Villa Boboli, with a staff of Albanian telephonists to exchange communications with the agents in the field, British wireless transmitter operators to exchange communications with the Malta center, and British officers to provide tactical guidance direct to the field and stay fully informed on the developments.5
For about a month a crew of six British SOE veterans led by Smiley instructed the Albanian recruits, whom they called affectionately “Pixies,” probably because of their relatively small stature. Training covered the use of weapons, including rifles, Sten 9 mm submachine guns, pistols, grenades, and Bren light machine guns; handling explosives and setting up charges, mines, and booby traps; and other guerilla tactics that ranged from map reading and compass use to introductory and advanced demonstrations of silent killing, followed by practice.
Smiley didn’t deem more extensive training necessary, on the assumption that the Albanians had a greater knowledge of guerilla warfare in their country than the British themselves. Two Albanians, Abdyl Sino and Jani Dilo, were put in charge of the trainees, although they weren’t going to be part of the infiltration teams. They brought their knowledge of the Albanian terrain to the assignment and, in addition, served as interpreters between the trainees and the British instructors.6
In order to enhance their authority with the Albanians, Smiley gave Sino and Dilo the uniforms of British officers. Dilo, who spoke French and Italian but no English, passed for a French-Canadian officer from Quebec. At a polo match in November of that year, Smiley introduced him as such to a young woman, who went on to explain to Dilo the rules of the game in good French. She was Princess Elizabeth,7 in Malta at the time visiting her husband, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, posted to the first destroyer flotilla of the Mediterranean fleet in the autumn of 1949.8
Smiley’s wife, Moy, who had spent the war years as a cipher clerk in Kenya, provided training in cryptography and handled the encryption of messages to and from London. Bill Collins, Smiley’s radio operator during the SOE missions in Albania,9 trained several recruits in operating the W/T equipment, which consisted of B.3 radio telephonic sets, new at the time and still undergoing user testing. The British hire
d a private boat, Stormy Seas, and a crew of former marines to transport the agents from Malta to the Albanian coast and land them at designated beaches and coves.
The radiophone sets allowed direct wireless telephonic speech between parties, a feature that shortened the mission preparation time by eliminating the need to train the Albanian radio operators in Morse code. Provided the agents could find a suitable location, these sets were supposed to allow communication over a range from ten to seventy miles, which was considered sufficient given that Corfu was only three miles away from the Albanian coast and most of the missions were expected to operate within range. For parties that would venture further inland, the plan was for them to communicate with other field teams closer to the coast, who would then relay their information to base. The British considered the sets “moderately handy sets with their own pedal generating plant which can be carried for short distances as a pack and for longer distances by ass or mule.”10
After the training was completed, Dilo organized the recruits into operational groups and let them work out among themselves the details of the infiltration. Abas Ermenji went to Malta in August to assist with the planning and to provide a morale boost to the recruits. On the night of August 25–26, Smiley organized a dry run of the entire operation, codename RAKI, a name the Albanians had suggested after the national alcoholic drink they all enjoyed, whether Christian or Muslim. The purpose was to test the readiness of the captain and crew for embarkation and landing procedures, as well as to give them practice in landing at an unreconnoitered point, setting up and using the communications equipment, and performing in field conditions.11
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