Operation Valuable Fiend

by Albert Lulushi

  The cost estimates for the initial six months of the operation were £70,000, about $200,000 at the time or $2 million today. One-third of the costs covered accommodation, equipment, salaries, W/T supplies, and transport at the advance base in Corfu; another third covered salaries, weapons for Albanians, training expenses, accommodations, etc. in Malta; and the final third covered gold for infiltration parties, payment for initial operational provisions, and costs for boat transport.12

  * * *

  The thirty agents, split in six groups, infiltrated in southern Albania within a span of six weeks starting in the first half of September 1949. All the agents wore British uniforms and carried Sten submachine guns, three hundred rounds of ammunition, and Parabellum pistols. Each man had an Albanian identity card and fifty gold sovereigns on him. Each team had a W/T set, power generator, and two pairs of binoculars assigned to it.

  The first to go were a party of ten set ashore at the mouth of the Semani River, in the Lushnja-Fieri region of central Albania, in early September. One five-man team, led by Mustafa Kusa, had to travel east across the mid-section of the country for about seventy miles until they reached their operational area in near the city of Korça. The second five-man team, led by Ali Trebova, headed inland along the same route as the first team but stopped halfway in the Berati region in central Albania. After completing its work in the Berati area, the Trebova group joined the Korça group, and together they entered Greece in mid-October in the Radovicka area. Both groups were able to make radio contact with the base at Corfu.13

  A second party of nine Albanians attempted an initial infiltration in the Karaburun peninsula on the Ionian coast on September 9 but wasn’t able to land due to poor weather. The second attempt, on September 16, was successful. The landing site, known as Seaview, was the same spot that the OSS and SOE had used during the war to infiltrate people and supplies for their missions in Albania and to evacuate wounded or sick personnel to Italy.

  After landing onshore, the Albanians marched together in a northeasterly direction for about five miles over very rugged terrain until they reached the village of Dukati, where they split. A team of four led by Sami Lepenica and including his cousin Hysen Lepenica, Zogoll Sheno, and Safet Dani, headed north toward Vlora. Not far from Dukati, an Albanian pursuit detachment ambushed them; all four were killed after the firefight and pursuit ended on September 23.

  The other five proceeded toward Kurveleshi and Gjirokastra about forty miles south-by-southeast; they were Ramiz Hataj, Turhan Aliko, Ahmet Kuka, Bido Kuka, and Hysen Isufi. They were able to send a radio message on the difficulties caused by the presence of pursuit detachments in the Dukati area, before hiding the wireless set and fleeing south to the Himara region on the Ionian coast. On October 4, this group fell into an ambush at Nivica, about halfway to their destination, and lost their leader, Ramiz Hataj. The remaining four headed separately toward Greece to confound their pursuers and increase their chances of escape. Hysen Isufi and Bido Kuka entered Greece on October 16. Upon questioning by Greek officials in Yanina, they claimed to be members of a resistance band from Vlore; the Greek regarded their story with suspicion and put them in prison.

  On October 21, Turhan Aliko and Ahmet Kuka gave themselves up to the Greek gendarmerie post in Filates, where a representative of the Greek army intelligence questioned them thoroughly. They told the entire story of their recruitment and training by the British and infiltration into Albania. They also revealed the names of twenty-two other Albanians who had trained with them in Malta. The two men turned over their submachine guns, 174 sovereigns, and other personal items. On October 24, the Greek took all four men to Athens.14

  The last sortie of eleven Albanians left Malta on September 15, 1949, for the Seaview cove where the Hataj and Lepenica groups had landed earlier. En route, they received the only W/T transmission the Hataj group had been able to send, which reported the heavy presence of government forces in the area. They turned back and tried again three weeks later, on the night of October 6, 1949, in an area north of Vlora near the mouth of the Viosa River.

  The first team, under Xhemal Asllani, included Arif Xhaferri, Belul Senaj, Haki Gaba, Ago Dauti, and Bardhyl Gerveshi, all from villages in the Tepelena-Gjirokastra area, about sixty-five miles south-southeast, where they headed right after landing. They were able to reach their destination, but large-scale search operations there forced them to hide for five days. Fearing reprisals on local villagers who might help them, the team decided not to approach anyone for assistance but instead to make a run for Greece. On October 27, 1949, they surrendered to soldiers in the Greek army post in the Pogoni area, who sent them to the Yanina Aliens’ Center.

  The second team, under Sefer Luarasi, included Përparim Aliu, Petrit Butka, Sami Bardho, and Zihni Mançe. They headed toward Kolonja, one hundred miles southeast of their landing site, but by the time they reached the area heavy snowfalls began as an early winter set in. They had to move down from the mountains in the low-lying areas, which left them exposed and more vulnerable to pursuit. The team was able to contact the British by radio and report their precarious position. At the end of October, Dilo replied from Corfu with Smiley’s permission for the team to cross into Greece.

  By October 31, the Greek military authorities had transferred all the surviving members of the Albanian infiltration parties to Athens and handed them over to Smiley, who arranged to fly all the men to Italy on November 2, 1949.15

  * * *

  While the initial Valuable infiltrations were not a resounding success, the British and American planners didn’t see them as a failure either. The loss of five out of thirty men was the cost of doing business. After all, “twenty percent loss rate was deemed normal for these type of operations.”16 Even though the teams had been more or less on the run during their entire stay in Albania, they had brought back some useful snippets of first-hand intelligence for the SIS and OPC, considered valuable because both services up to that point relied mostly on second-source intelligence from other secret services, primarily Greek and Italian.

  Itineraries of the 1949 infiltration teams in southern Albania

  The operation had also provided a number of lessons regarding the suitability of equipment and material for operations in Albanian terrain. The heavy radiophone communication equipment proved too cumbersome and was abandoned by most of the teams; it didn’t work as advertised and didn’t allow teams operating in the Albanian mountain ranges to communicate with the Corfu base.

  The British weapons and uniforms, while intended to impress the sympathizers in the field, ended up providing fodder for the Communist propaganda already trumpeting a coordinated assault against the Albanian government by the British, American, Greek, Italian, and Yugoslav intelligence services.

  The propaganda claims were true but only to a certain extent. Each of the services was running operations in Albania, often with agents shared or jointly managed with another service. Yet the operations were not synchronized or coordinated, leading to redundant and overlapping missions, which often ended up exposing and compromising the agents. For example, within a period of three weeks in September 1949, the Italian, Greek, and British services attempted landings at the Seaview cove on the Karaburun peninsula. It seems likely that previous landings alerted the Albanian forces, which could explain why the British teams found themselves pursued almost immediately and suffered the heaviest losses.17

  The most likely reason for the difficulties the teams encountered was the unexpected intensity with which the Tirana government pursued them. All the groups reported that the Communists were recruiting and arming local villagers as a force to operate against guerillas. Furthermore, the Communists were sending groups of provocateurs in British uniform into the mountains in order to mislead villagers and identify those among them who were against the government.18

  There was certainly the possibility that a leak had compromised the operation from the outset. Nicholas Bethell, in his 1984 book Betrayed, wrote t
hat the British “had no idea, of course, that Philby had told what he knew about the forthcoming landings to his Soviet contact in London in late September.”19 Bethell adds: “Everything he learned from British intelligence about the proposed operation had been communicated to the Soviet secret service and the Albanian police before he embarked on the S.S. Caronia.”20

  Bethell repeated and amplified this claim for the rest of his life, tying the fate of the Albanian operation to the treacherous actions of Philby. A number of books and articles written on the subject since picked up the claim as a fact and echoed it. Considering what we know today, it is very unlikely that it happened that way.

  Philby was at his post in Istanbul until the end of August and couldn’t have known about the selection, training, and targets of the agents or anything else related to the Albanian operation. He returned to London in September for briefings on his new position in Washington. By that time, Smiley had already infiltrated two-thirds of the agents, and the remainder went in early October. Even if the Albanian operation had been included in Philby’s briefings, it is doubtful that he received operational details specific enough to compromise the action. If he received such details, the path they’d have to follow to reach the Albanian authorities on the ground is long and tortuous. Philby would have provided the information to his handler in London to forward it to Moscow center for evaluation and analysis. If deemed important, Moscow would have sent it to their staff in Tirana with instructions to share it with the Albanian authorities, which then had to react to the information and mount the pursuit efforts in the south of Albania. All these actions had to occur within a matter of days.

  Even if the Communist intelligence networks had been able to work with such efficiency, the information was not sufficiently urgent or important to cause such a precipitous chain of events. Infiltration raids against the Soviet Union itself and its satellites, including Poland, the Baltic republics, Bulgaria, and Albania, were the norm rather than the exception at the time. Philby was rising to important positions and many insiders, including James Angleton, the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence, felt that Philby someday would head the British secret service.21 It is not likely then that Moscow would have risked compromising Philby’s cover over routine information like this.

  During his month-long stay in London to prepare for the Washington mission, Philby focused mainly on trying to understand the extent to which the British and American cryptographers had been able to decipher a series of Soviet cables intercepted between Moscow and the Soviet missions in Washington and New York. He met once a week with his handler, “Max,” to pass on the information he learned. The last time they met was a few days before Philby’s departure. Philby reported everything that had happened over the week. Max summarized it for Moscow as “nothing substantial, no important news.”22

  * * *

  If there was a leak, it came most likely from the Albanian community in Italy, which was infiltrated at many levels by the Albanian intelligence service, the Sigurimi, as well as elements from the Italian Communist Party, who reported directly to the Russians. Describing the atmosphere at the time, James McCargar recalled: “The leaks went in about 26 directions in Italy. Everybody was informing on everybody else, and the Russians were getting a lot of stuff out of there.”23

  A report that the OSO received in December 1949 from a source they considered of the highest reliability fingered Sotir Kosmo, an intellectual residing in Rome at the time, as Sigurimi’s main source of information for the activities of the NCFA in Italy. Kosmo was a member of the Blloku Kombëtar Indipendent and was reported to have kept the Albanian Legation in Rome completely informed on the formation of the NCFA, the relations of the committee with the British and Americans, and the recruitment of Albanian elements by Abas Kupi and MacLean. Kosmo reportedly received a monthly salary of fifty thousand lire (eighty dollars at the time) from the Sigurimi.24 Only a few months later, Kosmo was found in the Tiber River, shot and strangled.25 Émigré circles in troubled times have no tolerance for people suspected of double-crossing their own brethren and waste little effort in finding out whether the suspicions are founded or not.

  Yet another explanation for the demise of the Lepenica team, the only one that the Sigurimi completely annihilated, is that it fell victim to a control operation that the Sigurimi was running at the time. The British had instructed the team to establish contact with Ethem Çako, whom they assumed to be in their area of operations between Vlora and Dukati.26 Çako had been recruited in early 1949 for an operation known as Plan Fontana, run jointly by the Italian Naval Intelligence and OSO.27 On July 8, 1949, Çako and three others (Kasëm Zhupa, Llukman Lutfiu, and Zyber Lika) had been parachuted in southern Albania in the mountains of Kurveleshi 40 miles southeast of Vlora. Four days after their landing, the forces of the Sigurimi surrounded the group in an area called Buza e Bredhit, or Fir’s Edge. In the ensuing firefight, they killed Lika and forced the other three to surrender.28 Under the threat of execution, Çako agreed to work with the Sigurimi in order to lure more agents in the trap.

  For almost a year, Çako exchanged over one hundred radio messages with his Italian handlers, providing fictitious information fed by Sigurimi and requesting drops of more agents, supplies, and arms—all of which the Albanian authorities promptly captured upon landing. The operation, code-named “Buza e Bredhit” by the Sigurimi, continued until May 24, 1950, when the Albanian media announced the trial in Tirana of Çako, Zhupa, and Lutfiu, who were accused of spying for Greek, Italian, and American services. At the end of the trial, on June 6, 1950, the court condemned all three defendants to death but the authorities commuted Çako’s sentence later in light of his cooperation with the Sigurimi.29

  The SIS and OSO had information to suggest that the Sigurimi controlled Çako as early as November 1949. Indeed, on November 1, 1949, when Colonel Smiley visited Captain Zotos, one of the intelligence officers in General Papagos’s headquarters, Zotos volunteered the following information:

  [F]ive men including Ethem Chaku [sic] . . . were dropped by parachute in July. . . . This party was all captured by Communists and four of them were executed. Ethem Chaku, after being in custody for some time was allowed to escape. He is moving in the mountains receiving supply drops (he received two drops of 28 containers on October 17th and October 18th). The Communists helped him to collect supplies!!30

  A summary of Smiley’s meeting with Captain Zotos, including his suspicions about Çako, was in the OSO’s hands within a few days and then forwarded to the OPC. No one noticed any worrisome signs in the report or connected Çako with the fate of the Lepenica team. It would be a harbinger of worse things to come.

  * * *

  Bob Low, the American commander of Fiend in Rome, had planned to follow the preliminary infiltrations of the British agents with fifty agents he would select among supporters of Abas Kupi and Said Kryeziu, train in Malta, and infiltrate into central and northern Albania.31 By the end of October 1949, neither Kupi nor Kryeziu had identified any candidates. The British had planned all along to close the Malta training base by December 1 as part of their cover story—in case its existence became publicly known, they could deny it had ever existed. Thus, Low and McCargar found themselves with no agents readily available for continued infiltrations and no location where to train future agents.

  By that time, the Greek National Army had put an end to the Communist guerrillas in Greece by capturing and dispersing most of them and pushing the few remaining hardcore fighters completely out of Greece and into Albania. Hence, one of the major objectives of the Fiend operation no longer applied and proceeding with the infiltration schedule was less urgent. As a result, McCargar instructed Low to temporarily suspend all activity toward infiltration operations and focus his efforts on resolving the NCFA leadership crisis that had developed after Frashëri’s death.32

  CHAPTER 7

  Reevaluation of Project Fiend

  In its original version, Project Fiend had as a m
inimum objective to develop internal conflict within Albania so as to impair the government’s ability to support the Greek guerrillas. The maximum objective was the overthrow of the Hoxha regime in order to eliminate Albania as a base for the Greek guerrillas, to deny the Soviet military air and naval bases in the Mediterranean, and to boost the morale of other Eastern European nations by demonstrating that it was possible to remove a securely entrenched Communist dictatorship. As 1949 was coming to a close, two major changes occurred that pushed the Office of Policy Coordination to reexamine the status, objectives, and conduct of Fiend. The first was the cessation of guerrilla warfare in Greece, and the second was the intensification of pressure by the Cominform on the Tito regime, which led the US-British policy to shift toward maintaining that regime as an obstacle against the Soviet Union.

  In addition, the existence of the operation and the fact that the British and Americans were behind it had become widely known to the intelligence services of all the countries that had an interest in the nature of the regime in Albania, particularly Greece and Italy, and to some extent France and Yugoslavia. OPC and State Department officials overseeing the operation feared that considerable conflict might develop among these countries as they tried to take advantage of an unstable situation in Albania, particularly since the National Committee for Free Albania was not equally acceptable to all these players as an alternative to the Hoxha regime.

  On November 15, 1949, Frank Wisner convened a meeting at the Policy Coordination Group offices in the Pentagon to discuss the operation. Attendees included Wisner, Kermit Roosevelt, and James McCargar from the OPC and Kim Philby representing the SIS. Wisner opened the meeting by stating that time had come to reexamine the Albanian operation and determine whether they should continue on the original course or adjust their plans to account for a number of difficulties they had encountered, including the poor quality of recruits obtained thus far, the lack of a training base, and the serious security leaks.