CHAPTER 9
Odyssey of the First CIA Paramilitary Team
In August 1950, Yatsevitch and Burke accelerated the efforts to infiltrate the first group of OPC agents in Albania. Yatsevitch defined the agents’ mission as laying the foundation for and forming the nucleus of resistance groups in their area of operations, establishing safehouses, and preparing facilities for eventual covert air supply of limited guerrilla groups.1 Burke shuttled between Germany, Rome, and Greece, occupied with selecting and training the agents, and developing infiltration plans, supply plans, communication plans, and other operational tasks required for the execution of the mission.
The Office of Special Operations, which had its own agents in Albania jointly run with the Italian Naval Intelligence as part of Project Charity, followed the progress with interest initially. The interest turned into concern when the OPC decided that the first group of agents would parachute into the northeastern part of the country, where the OSO teams were operating. There was clearly the potential for overlapping activities and a great deal of confusion that might ensue.
James Angleton took the lead on behalf of the OSO to work out some sort of arrangement with the OPC to avoid the issues. The Charity agents were members of the Blloku Kombëtar Indipendent, BKI, which the OPC had decided to leave out of the National Committee for Free Albania in 1949.2 Angleton argued that they needed to review that decision now that OPC activities in Albania had matured to the point where they were considering operations on the ground.
In his view, the BKI was one of the strongest, if not the strongest, Albanian opposition group, who, unlike the NCFA, had proven that they had a following in Albania. The OPC couldn’t ignore their intelligence and operational capabilities. Including them in the NCFA would keep them from aligning with the Italians, French, or Greeks. It would also give the Italians, the BKI’s main supporters, an incentive to support the NCFA, which they barely tolerated only as a favor to the Americans. Ultimately, Angleton argued, whether the NCFA liked it or not, they could not keep the BKI out of operations in Albania or out of the government if the revolution was successful.3
Angleton believed that the OPC and OSO should collaborate and staff officers from both organizations at headquarters and in the field should have frank discussions about running Charity and Fiend jointly and leveraging the respective agents they were parachuting in Albania for the benefit of both organizations. He proposed an operational arrangement between the OPC and OSO in which Charity agents operated under joint OPC-OSO jurisdiction in the zone where they already were in contact with resistance personalities. The OSO also proposed to arrange some type of alliance between the BKI and NCFA, in which the BKI took a lead role in a specific area of the country and in turn supported the NCFA as an organization outside the committee.4
The OPC would have none of the OSO suggestions. OPC officers had little regard for the work of their OSO counterparts or the quality of intelligence they were producing. They would often ridicule the OSO reports for their F-6 ratings,5 indicating that the authors couldn’t vouch for the reliability of sources and had no way of judging the veracity of the reports’ content. OPC officers relished in taking potshots at their OSO counterparts. For example, the OPC had anxiously requested an assessment of the Albanian Air Force capabilities to intercept covert flights they planned to start toward the end of 1950. The OSO duly delivered a package containing forty intelligence items on Albania, or Pixieland as they referred to it at the time. After reading it, Michael Burke sent the following scathing comments:
The data first appeared as an excellent compilation of undisputed information by subject, probably a granite foundation for all future intelligence. There was one glaring exception: none of it had been evaluated. For example, Item #14 (‘Air Force’) was a startling pearl of news. Until this pouch, Pixieland had been pictured nude of air power, with the possible exception of three Junkers in unknown but probable moth-eaten condition and an equal number of discarded [crop] dusters perhaps unserviceable but surely not moth-eaten. Suddenly we are confronted by a phantom, 300-plane force, without any evidence of aircraft shipments, accelerated training programs, or increase in operating personnel. And our subsequent query of ZRMETAL [code name for Washington, DC] only confessed that the Pixie Air Force so mightily described was F-6. As you are aware, air power within Pixieland is a touchy matter with us. The damage of all this was the complete disenchantment of the other 39 items.6
The failure of the OSO to establish a good working relationship with the OPC was perhaps the last in a string of reasons that pushed the OSO to downsize significantly its efforts on intelligence collection activities in Albania at the beginning of 1951. Starting in mid-1947 and for two and one-half years, OSO had made a concerted effort to obtain intelligence about Albania. These efforts had been expensive in the loss of agents, consumption of staff officer time, and expenditure of funds. The hostilities on the Korean peninsula compelled the OSO to reprioritize its resources, and Albania was now deemed a low priority from the intelligence perspective. As a result, the OSO cut down infiltration of agents from abroad in favor of efforts to develop legal resident agents inside the country who could provide sufficient information to reasonably service customers’ intelligence requests, including OPC requirements growing out of their Fiend operation.7
* * *
While Colonel Yatsevitch ran interference in Washington and navigated the political issues between the OPC and OSO, Burke kept busy in Europe with the myriad of tasks required to make a successful infiltration in Albania. Building on his war experience, his preferred infiltration method for Fiend was to parachute the agents from low-flying aircraft, leaving landings by boat along the coastline to the British. There was one complication, however, created by the need to provide the operation full deniability in case things went wrong: neither the aircraft flying over Albania nor the crew operating it could be linked in any way to the United States. Burke worked with Major General Truman H. Landon, the director of the Air Force Office of Plans and Operations and chief of staff for the US Air Forces in Europe to secure the necessary aircraft. On June 9, 1950, Landon approved the OPC request for aircraft and made available two C-47 aircraft for communication flights. They would not fly in hostile air space; therefore they retained the air force markings and were operated by air force crews. A third C-47, which would be used for flights over denied areas, was stripped of any air force insignia and was transferred to the OPC for operations.
Having secured the aircraft from the US Air Force, Burke turned to the British for help with the crew that would fly the covert plane. The SIS recruited a crew of Polish Air Force veterans who had fought with the Western allies during World War II and had chosen to stay in Britain rather than serve under the Communist regime the Soviets established in Poland after the war.8 The leader of the crew was Roman Rudkowski, an ex-colonel with the Polish Air Force who had commanded a bomber squadron that had completed thirty operational bombing missions during the war.9 It included the pilot Zbigniew Wysiekierski, the navigator Stanisław Król, the engineer Władimir Brundel, the dispatcher and radio operator Janusz Barcz, and the jumpmaster Władysław Buryn. The Polish crew received operational clearance at the end of August, and arrived in Frankfurt in early September 1950 to take delivery of the covert aircraft.10
The plans were for the crew to fly out of Frankfurt at midnight on September 13 and arrive in the early morning hours of September 14 at the Eleusis airstrip, near Athens, which was to be its permanent location. The OPC arranged for a Greek Air Force officer to receive the plane and to keep its presence under cover from the rest of the personnel at the airfield. However, the US Air Force headquarters in Frankfurt sent the plane ahead of schedule. When the plane arrived in Greece prematurely at 1900 hours on September 13, the Greek officer was not at the Eleusis airfield. His subordinate, faced with an unmarked plane that had just made an unscheduled landing on his tarmac, arrested the crew, searched the plane, and summoned Major Harold A. Tid
marsh, the American military attaché, to identify the crew. Fortunately, before the Greeks had blown the cover completely, the briefed officer returned to Eleusis, immediately placed the plane under physical security of the Greek service, and took the necessary steps to avoid further interest on the matter. Tidmarsh received a cable from his commanding officer ordering him to drop further investigation of the incident and classify all discussions of the plane as “Top Secret.”11
Having secured the covert plane and the crew, Burke focused next on the agents. Captain Mangelli, the American commander of the Albanian Labor Service Company in Germany, selected sixteen members of the company from Balli Kombëtar, Legaliteti, and Kryeziu followers, grouped in teams based on their region of origin, which would also be their operations area.
On the night of October 12, US Army personnel transported the sixteen future agents from the Labor Services Company to a rendezvous point near Munich, where staff from the covert school transferred them to a blacked-out truck and drove to the training site in Murnau, Germany. Burke had set November 3, 1950, as the target date for the drop into Albania, so time was of the essence and training started the following morning, October 13. Thirteen intensive days of training from 0615 until 1700 included calisthenics, close combat, weapons handling and firing, communications, and parachute training. The training officers maintained a semi-military discipline, not allowing themselves to become familiar with the trainees, in order to emphasize the seriousness of the mission in which they were about to embark. At the same time, they did their best to maintain the morale of the trainees, including providing good food in sufficient quantities, in contrast to the conditions that existed at the Labor Services Company and that the agents had experienced for the past several years. The agents had access to free candy, tobacco, chewing gum, and beer, as well as a radio, playing cards, and chess and checker sets for use during the little time they had available for recreation.12
On October 26, the last day of training, the staff officers helped the agents prepare their personal packs and issued the equipment, weapons and ammunition. The agents would carry with them personal clothing and weapons, together with a small quantity of ammunition, food, and other supplies. The plan was to resupply them from the air as soon as they had established a base in Albania and could communicate back the coordinates of a good drop zone.
The training was rushed because of the approaching winter, which could be unforgiving, especially in the mountainous parts of Albania where the teams were going to operate. Burke had just received information from the OSO that many members of the Albanian resistance movement felt they could no longer endure the suffering and they planned to flee to Yugoslavia at the first opportunity. They were unwilling to spend another winter in the mountains, since life there was so difficult that it drove men mad.13
Yet, hurrying through the training and preparations for the mission didn’t set the teams on a strong footing for their work on the ground. Here is how Halil Nerguti, the leader of one of the teams, described their experience: “The preparations and training done so hurriedly, in thirteen days, were not at all sufficient to fulfill a special mission. The ammunitions for the machine guns and revolvers were few. On account of the hurried time they did not even give us maps we would have used if the radio did not work.”14
Late in the evening of October 26, the training staff loaded the agents and their equipment in the blacked-out truck and drove the entire night to Frankfurt, about three hundred miles north of the covert school location. There, the agents boarded a covert flight to Athens and arrived at the Eleusis airfield the next day. Burke traveled from Rome to personally see the agents off on their flight, scheduled for the night of November 3. Upon arrival, he found that several of the agents had developed pneumonia or felt so stressed out physically and mentally that they were no longer fit for the mission.
Burke allowed only nine of the sixteen agents to proceed. Halil Nerguti, Myftar Planeja, Ramadan Cenaj, and Rexh Berisha would operate in the Kukësi area in the northeastern part of the country, along the border with Yugoslavia. Adem Gjurra, Zetan Daci, and Sali Dalliu were destined for the Dibra region, fifty miles south of the Kukësi team. Iliaz Toptani and Selim Daci would operate in the mountains of Kruja in central Albania only twenty miles north of Tirana.
The covert aircraft flew out on the night of November 3 but had to return without completing the drop because the weather had been rough over the target area. A second attempt just a few days later failed because the navigator had not been able to find the drop zone. They made a third attempt on the night of November 11–12, 1950. The crew reported upon return that they had successfully dropped nine agents and six bundles of equipment into the two preselected drop zones in Albania. But reading between the lines, Burke could see that it had not been a perfect operation.
The drops were performed on a moonless night and in mountainous areas. The aircrew, unfamiliar with the terrain, had guessed the location of drop zones on the ground, having spent more than an hour circling the area, unable to find the precise DZ. The arrangements were for the crew to drop the men first, then, after receiving their recognition signals from the ground, to drop the supply bundles. However, the plane had remained over the targets two or three minutes at the most, hardly enough time for the jumpers to descend, recover, and signal as agreed upon in the briefings.15 Information received later from Nerguti would confirm Burke’s concerns. Nerguti wrote:
Instead of dropping us at the pre-agreed point Fusha e Degës near Tropoja, the pilot by mistake dropped us ten kilometers further from this point, in the forest of the village Zarish–Qarr. We had received instructions that as soon as we landed we had to signal to the pilot in order for him to throw the material. But the pilot did not wait for the signal and threw the material in the darkness, without us knowing where it had fallen. The ammunition fell in the middle of the village Zarish. We looked for it in vain. The next day, the material was caught by the forces of Sigurimi and the frontier guards.16
Under any circumstance, the poor quality of the drops would have compromised the success of the agents’ mission. In this particular case, it seems to have saved their lives. Both parachuted groups reported that the authorities had set up reception parties on the ground, clearly on the alert and expecting their arrival. Nerguti described the narrow escape of the Kukësi team on the night of the drop as follows: “All the people of the village were mobilized and with the forces of Sigurimi at their head, entered the forest searching for us. . . . We remained encircled for three days. Our rescuer was a young boy of seventeen, who we did not know, Islam Limani from the village of Nikolic, whose brother was shot three months later.”17
Adem Gjurra and the rest of the agents in the second drop had a similar but less fortunate experience. Villagers in the area told Gjurra that the police had warned them of his arrival from the skies and were waiting. They evaded capture on the first night only because they had landed several miles away from the prearranged drop zone. After landing, the two groups split and headed for their separate areas of operations. Almost immediately, they encountered pursuit detachments. Gjurra’s team spent several days on the run, then, with Gjurra wounded on the leg, crossed into Yugoslavia, where the authorities arrested them. After several month’s detention, they were set free but kept under surveillance. Gjurra was able to emigrate to the United States after seventeen years. Forty of his family members and relatives in Albania were not so lucky—the Sigurimi shot his brother and cousin outright. The authorities sent the rest to prison, where a number of them, including three of Gjurra’s children, died of disease and malnutrition.18
The pursuit forces captured Iliaz Toptani and Selim Daci the day after they parachuted. Under torture, they confessed of their activities in the Labor Service Company and at the Murnau training facility. These confessions were broadcast publicly at their 1951 show trial in Tirana and included in a report that the Albanian government submitted to the president of the General Assembly of the United Nat
ions at the time.19 Both Toptani and Daci received life sentences of hard labor. Selim Daci managed to get out alive in 1990, forty years after his capture.20
* * *
Burke’s misgivings about the status of his teams increased when efforts to establish communications with them failed. Each team had radiophones and receivers operating on VHF frequencies, which they were to use at prearranged time slots to contact the base. A communications aircraft, often referred to by staff as the commo plane, flew in international airspace along the Albanian coastline during these time slots. A radio specialist on board monitored the frequencies and attempted to raise each team on the radio—without success.
The commo flights were long, and the crew onboard found them unnecessarily demanding, uncomfortable, and risky. After one of the first flights, they reported:
News of a blacked-out aircraft floating over the narrow confines of Western Adriatic for six of more hours could not be hidden for long. This was anything but a clever show of deception.
The elongated duration of the mission violated all JBALERT [Cryptonym for US Air Force] regulations for flying safely. With less than an hour’s supply of fuel remaining when the flight was completed, there was no margin of safety at all. Had any weather developed in the LCDRINK [Cryptonym for Greece] area, one aircraft and everything aboard would have been ditched. The ensuing furor of such an incident is fearfully obvious.21
After a few tries, Burke and Yatsevitch considered the communication plan operationally impossible and abandoned it. The search continued for better wireless transmitter equipment and a more successful method of communication.
* * *
Left to fend for themselves, Nerguti and his team resorted to communicating by letters hand-carried across the border to Yugoslavia and then mailed to their NCFA contacts in Rome or Athens. Because of lack of training and an undeveloped sense of security, they wrote letters in the clear referring to people and places by their real names. Attempts by OPC staff to explain to the “prolific letter writers” the dangers of a complete disregard of security did not go anywhere. Upon receiving a letter that Nerguti had sent to his NCFA contacts in January 1952, in which he mentioned a number of local contacts by name, an exasperated Athens station chief commented: “The tragic part is that Nerguti mentions the names of people within KMWAHOO [Cryptonym for Albania] who befriended him, which is tantamount to signing their death warrants if the information has fallen into the wrong hands.”22
Operation Valuable Fiend Page 14
