Operation Valuable Fiend

by Albert Lulushi

  Yatsevitch was an active duty US Army officer with a considerable knowledge of Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans, although not of Albania specifically. He was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1911 into a family of old Polish nobility, which was shattered by the Bolshevik Revolution in ways that left permanent marks on Yatsevitch. His father, an official in the Russian imperial government, was in London when the October Revolution started, and remained stranded there while the family struggled to survive the chaos of the revolution and the civil war that followed. His mother, the daughter of the British consul in St. Petersburg, died in 1919 during the influenza pandemic. Helped by an aunt, Gratian and his younger brother made a harrowing journey through the war-ravaged countryside to join their father. Years later, scenes from Doctor Zhivago would bring tears to his eyes, for they reminded him of his own travel west in cattle cars packed with terrified people and trains rushing through ghost villages where women and children were starving to death.1

  After spending his youth in England, Yatsevitch went to the US, where he studied mining and mineralogy at Harvard. Upon graduation, he spent five years between 1935 and 1940 in Yugoslavia, where he managed a small gold mine and was the engineer in charge of prospecting for a group of British mining companies.2 Once World War II started, certain that the Germans were going to take over Yugoslavia, Yatsevitch blew up the mine works and returned to the United States.

  He spent the war years in the army, in the Office of the Chief of Ordnance in Washington, DC, where he was in charge of the development and procurement of all artillery shells from twenty millimeters on up to sixteen inches in caliber. Due to this experience, he attended later as an observer the test firing of one of the early atomic cannons, nicknamed Atomic Annie, developed in the late 1940s and fielded in the early 1950s. In 1945, he joined Army Intelligence, G-2, and served as military attaché in Moscow and then, from 1946 to the end of 1949, as military attaché in Bulgaria.3

  Yatsevitch was fluent in Russian and Serbo-Croatian and spoke good French, German, and a number of other languages—skills that came handy in his military and intelligence career. From his years in England, he retained a noticeable English accent, which complemented his striking appearance and led women who met him at the time to describe him as “devastatingly handsome and charming beyond belief!”4

  As the newly appointed head of OPC’s Southeast European branch, Yatsevitch brought to the job the discipline and rigor of his military career. While McCargar routinely arrived ten minutes late at meetings, he “made it a point of being five minutes early.”5 He began his assignment with a thorough review of the Albanian plan, the assumptions upon which it rested, and the progress up to that point. In a memo on May 17, 1950, Yatsevitch asked:

  Do we now believe that the reasons for which the “ultimate objective” of the original BGFIEND Project was cancelled are still valid? Or have new factors entered the picture and/or new developments taken place which make the time more propitious and, in general, make it desirable to attempt the accomplishment of that “ultimate objective?” A paper covering present thinking on a re-evaluation of BGFIEND is now under preparation.6

  Yatsevitch established a good rapport with Philby, who continued to serve as the British joint commander of the Albanian operations. Philby spent a few days at the Yatsevitch’s summer place on an island in Maine. It was a rather Spartan arrangement, because the house at that time was “devoid of any urban entertainment and with no telephone, electricity or running water.” But there was plenty of time to sit around and talk, sail out on the water, or just read, thus a great opportunity to know someone without competition from others. Yatsevitch was not a drinker, but he kept a well-supplied bar. He described Philby as never “spilling the beans,” regardless of how much alcohol he consumed.7

  * * *

  Michael Burke had spent the war years with the OSS, which he had joined at the invitation of William J. Donovan in 1942. Donovan had first noticed Burke when he was an all-American halfback at the University of Pennsylvania before his graduation in 1939. In addition to his athletic prowess, Burke possessed other qualifications that fitted perfectly the type of man Donovan was interested in for dangerous OSS assignments. He had spent his early life in Europe, spoke French fluently, and knew the country well.

  Burke was assigned to the Mediterranean Theater of Operations six months before the Salerno invasion, with the task of infiltrating OSS men into Italy. During this time and following the Salerno invasion, Burke worked on several daring OSS assignments contacting Italian naval leaders and scientists working on advanced torpedo systems and spiriting them to the United States.

  Burke was in England just before the Normandy invasion. At that time OSS teams of three were being parachuted into France. Called Jedburgh teams, they usually consisted of either two Americans and a Frenchman or two British and a Frenchman. Each team carried a radio, and one of the members was a qualified radio operator. In constant radio communication with these “Jed” units scattered throughout France, the Allied High Command was able to coordinate and integrate their underground activities with overall military operations.

  Burke prepared and dropped forty-six agent teams, eighty-six people in total,8 behind German lines. In July 1944 he led his own team parachuting into the Haute-Saône province in the northeastern section of France for intelligence gathering and sabotage purposes. He also organized and trained members of the French resistance and led them in repeated skirmishes with the Germans. For his exploits during the war, Burke earned the Silver Star medal and the Navy Cross.

  Burke left active duty in October 1945, returned to the United States, and worked in Hollywood as a technical adviser to the scriptwriters for Cloak and Dagger, a tribute to the OSS directed by Fritz Lang and starring Gary Cooper.9 Then he moved to New York, scraping by, living in a “dim railroad flat in Greenwich Village,”10 borrowing from his father to make ends meet and keep his wife and infant daughter from going hungry.11

  When the CIA called, offering him a contract staff position at fifteen thousand dollars a year for “an exploratory mission, a clinical case” that suited his experience overseas,12 Burke jumped at the opportunity. In March 1950 he moved to Rome to take over from Low the Project Fiend activities in the field. On the way, he stopped in London for meetings with his SIS counterparts, including Philby, who was there at the time and invited him to dinner.

  Burke’s description of Philby echoes those of others who knew him. He was pleasantly surprised and flattered that a man of Philby’s rank would invite him to a private dinner. He found Philby “entirely likable and very much at home in and on top of his profession.” Burke expected Philby to know about his assignment, but he was surprised with his familiarity with operational matters. Burke later wrote that Philby “was a heavy, indiscriminate drinker, but his protective mechanisms were so deeply rooted that no amount of drink betrayed him.”13

  Burke’s assignment in Rome was to maintain the relationship with the National Committee for Free Albania leaders and to coordinate the first paramilitary actions of Fiend, which meant selecting agents among the NCFA supporters, training and inserting them in Albania in order to connect with any resistance elements that still survived, and creating an underground movement. He saw the NCFA leaders as people with “disparate political philosophies and personal interests; a modest but regular allotment of US dollars was the glue.” They were “political activists—agrarians, socialists, royalists. In exile, like all refugees, they were a threadbare lot, drawn loosely together in common cause against a Communist dictatorship and by a longing to go home.”14

  Burke realized that he was in a position of power over the Albanian leaders. He commanded their attention as the representative of a rich and young country, but as an individual he had to earn their respect. In dealing with them, he tried to convey his “human sympathy for their plight and a sense of shared equality with them as individuals.”15 He was particularly fond of Abas Kupi, the Legaliteti leader: “I liked him fro
m the start and grew fond of him as our enterprise progressed, though apart from smiles, embraces, and other body language our communication was through the interpreter, inasmuch he spoke no language but his own, and could write nothing but his name.”16

  * * *

  As the OPC began to energize efforts across all the components of the Fiend project, one of the first achievements was the creation in Germany of a holding area for Albanians that would be involved in these activities.

  After World War II, the US Army created a number of guard and labor service units composed of displaced persons from Eastern and Central European countries. They were responsible for guarding railways, bridges, military depots, and roadblocks in postwar Germany, thus freeing up US personnel from such duties. Carmel Offie, who had spent time dealing with issues of displaced persons in Germany and maintained very close connections with the army, came up with the idea of using the Labor Service as cover to assemble a company of 220 to 250 Albanian refugees who had potential for agent training and operational activity in Albania. He traveled to Germany in January 1950 to work out the details with the US Army European Command (EUCOM).

  According to the agreement, the OPC provided funds to pay the individuals who would join the Albanian Labor Service Company—on average about 250 marks ($60 at the time or $600 today) per month per man. In order to maintain secrecy over the source of these payments, the OPC deposited the funds in the Army Intelligence (G-2) confidential accounts, and G-2 transferred them to Army Logistics (G-4) accounts through the comptroller. G-4 used its own funds to cover rationing, housing, and administration of the company without OPC assistance and without causing comment among German civilians.17

  Labor Services Company 4000 was officially launched on June 7, 1950,18 in the Pulaski Barracks in Kaiserslautern,19 in the US zone of Germany. Members of the NCFA military junta Abas Ermenji, Abas Kupi, and Said Kryeziu selected the members of the company mostly from IRO camps in Italy and then from similar camps in Greece. The company structure was along party affiliations with strict proportions in personnel: 40 percent from Balli Kombëtar, 40 percent from Legaliteti, and the remainder from Said Kryeziu’s followers. Members of a political party were assigned in the same unit, slept in the same barracks, took their meals together, and performed guard duties together. This structure deepened the existing divisions between the groups and led from the beginning to quarrels, fights, and even murders among members of different factions.

  The Albanian commander of the company was Major Çaush Basho, a member of the Ermenji’s left wing of the BK. Basho ran the company with an iron fist, forcing his will on BK followers within the company and treating harshly members of other parties. Excerpts from a letter that Hatip Reka, a soldier in the company, wrote to a friend in Greece paint a clear picture of the atmosphere:

  The situation of the company here is something like it is in Russia. We have been civilized so much that they are bringing us pork meat three times a week. They are trying to destroy our religion. The officers who belong to Balli . . . have said that whoever does not eat pork is not a Ballist. Due to this one hundred persons are staying without food . . . We would have been better off if we had collaborated with Hoxha because these guys are worse.20

  Overseeing the entire camp was a captain of the US Army, Thomas Mangelli, who came from an Albanian-American family in Boston, Massachusetts, affiliated with left-leaning Zog opponents in the United States. Mangelli favored the BK elements of the Guard Company, although in general he did not hold any of the Albanians stationed there in high esteem. He said: “As far as I am concerned, they could all be turned over to Enver Hoxha; but I have to carry out orders of the American Government which desires to train them for action against the present regime.”21 Initially, Mangelli was also responsible for working with the NCFA military junta in selecting members from the company’s personnel for infiltration training. To cover the trainees’ disappearance from the barracks, the officials announced that they had been transferred to another camp or had emigrated to another country. In reality, CIA staff had transported the men to a covert site they had set up to train Albanian and Bulgarian agents.

  * * *

  The covert training site was located at the Loeb estate in Murnau, about seventy kilometers south of Munich. The estate consisted of approximately sixty acres of rolling wooded terrain fronting on a lake. The terrain offered good visual cover and concealment from surrounding points, and the entire exterior line of the property was fenced. The estate accommodated two farmhouses, a gatehouse, a guesthouse, and the main mansion. The OPC signed a lease for the estate on the first week in October 1950 and promptly evicted the occupants of the gatehouse and renters of the second floors in the two farmhouses.

  They allowed two families occupying ground floors in the farmhouses to remain, because they were located in a depression at one edge of the estate, away from and out of sight of the main mansion. OPC personnel warned the two families to stay away from the mansion, threatening to evict and thus deprive them of their means of livelihood if they failed to heed the warning. The OPC staffers retained an elderly man and his wife as servants in the mansion where they’d conduct the training. The couple received the same threats of firing and eviction if they ever disclosed what they saw at the mansion. All roads leading up to the estate had posted signs warning intruders to stay out and the gates remained locked at all times. The parachute instructors built a training rig on an old tennis court located in a depression and surrounded by trees. The only facility the trainees ever utilized off the estate was the army range located approximately seven miles from Murnau.22

  OPC trainers found issues with the process used to select candidates for training. They felt that Mangelli and Basho had chosen most of the trainees among men they had blacklisted as undesirables and wanted to remove from the company. Often the prospective agents didn’t know the true purpose of their mission, which created grievances and unhappiness once they found out during training what they were getting into.23

  The physical and mental state of the agents created problems as well. A lot of them had physical handicaps or were emotionally and mentally unstable, which led to their elimination from the training program. Medical exams of the contingent of eleven agents in training in the summer of 1951 found “five who had active syphilis, three acute anxiety reactions, one man with apparently chronic ulcerative colitis, and one man with possible active tuberculosis.” The medical officer in charge of the screening wrote: “No attempt is being made to demand that these men be of the caliber of Army Profile A, but I believe it is important that we do not find ourselves saddled with men who are either psycho-neurotic, actively syphilitic or actively tubercular, because these men are liable at any moment to present severe security problems and subsequently disposal problems.”24

  * * *

  Under the auspices of the US Army, personnel in labor service companies throughout the American-occupied zone of Germany engaged in guard duties and reconstruction activities. The Albanians assigned to Company 4000 were responsible for guarding depots and other installations around their camp, which is why the unit is also known as the Albanian Guard Company. Their activities were public knowledge, and there was no real security around the facility or the movement of personnel inside and out. This had been the intent from the beginning in order to provide official cover for the use of agents selected from the company in the OPC Albanian operation. However, even supposedly covert activities, such as the selection of agents for training and their transfer from the main camp to the training site, were secrets poorly kept.

  The covert training site had security issues of its own due to its location in a residential area, only two miles from Murnau. The rumor that it was an intelligence center spread among the local population, “accustomed to intrigue and of a highly suspicious nature,” as one of the OPC training officers described them. The German housekeeping personnel who worked at the site never received a security clearance.25

  There is ev
idence that the Albanian secret service had infiltrated the company and knew fully well what was going on there. One reported story is that of Dalip Cena, who escaped from Albania in 1949 and settled in the IRO camp of Cinecittà in Rome. There he joined the BK organization and in 1950 was selected in the BK contingent that joined the Labor Services Company. In 1951 he was among a handful of candidates that received training at the covert site. At the end of the training course, he escaped to the Soviet zone of Germany. The authorities there handed him over to Czechoslovak service agents, who transferred him by plane to Tirana.26

  Due to the security issues around it and the low of quality of personnel there, by the end of 1951 the OPC had given up recruiting potential agents from the Albanian Labor Services company. Apparently, the issues were not unique to the Albanian company. By the end of 1952, the CIA terminated all of its connections with the Albanian, Bulgarian, and Czech guard companies and turned them over completely to the US Army. In a cable to headquarters on December 13, 1952, the OPC Frankfurt station chief reported that the CIA was “no longer in Guard Company Business.”27 The US Army continued to use Company 4000 through the end of 1955 for auxiliary guard duty.

  The Sigurimi conducted intelligence activities against the Albanian Labor Services company for as long as it lasted, years after the CIA had stopped recruiting agents from it for activities in Albania. As late as the end of 1954, CIA case officers in Rome, using information obtained from a double agent they were running against the Sigurimi in Italy, proposed to headquarters a deception operation: “to throw a bit more dust in the Sigurimi’s eyes by arranging body movements and periodically getting a creditable rumor or two started in the right places. . . . It would seem to be a deception activity which would confuse the opposition and draw his attention to a cold scent and would not be an expensive undertaking.”28