The letters often contained intelligence information, such as description of Albanian military units, or the names of sympathizers and opponents of the regime in the areas where they operated. However, this information lost its value in the eyes of the OPC because Yugoslav, Italian, or Greek services had read it by the time it arrived in OPC hands.
With the help of local villagers, Nerguti and his three teammates were able to evade capture for a few weeks. At the end of December 1950, they heard news broadcast by Radio Tirana of the capture of Selim Daci and Iliaz Toptani, their fellow parachutists slated to operate in the Kruja area north of Tirana. With pursuit forces closing in, they crossed the border into Yugoslavia. In the area of Prizreni, they recruited sixteen men among friends and family, equipped them with weapons and ammunition purchased with the gold sovereigns they had brought with them, and headed back to Albania.
Yugoslav authorities did not tolerate armed men roaming the countryside any more than the Albanians did. On the way to the Albanian border, Nerguti’s group fought through seven skirmishes with the Yugoslav police. On the other side of the border, two battalions of Albanian security and border police, alerted of the shooting, were waiting for them. The band of twenty fought until the evening and in the cover of darkness was able to evade encirclement and cross into the mountains of Mirdita in central Albania.
For the next several months, they roamed the countryside under constant pursuit, often betrayed by former friends who felt no longer safe to offer them refuge. Recapping the situation in his letter of January 1952, Nerguti wrote: “After long months of activity without means, without any signs from the center, not even a bullet, the friends to whom we went were very demoralized because they saw no signs of help. We had fourteen killed and another winter came. In spite of this we are expecting spring and will go on with our fight, hoping that this time you will give us some sign of life.”23
A cynical Athens station chief had a different reading of Nerguti’s activities:
In reading Nerguti’s report, we are struck with the utter stupidity of the team leader’s actions, which seem to be in complete disregard of our instructions. It is difficult to understand what Nerguti thought he could accomplish by leading an army of twenty men into KMWAHOO after having taken refuge on the TPROACH [Cryptonym for Yugoslavia] border. Nevertheless, he did it and, as the reader can well realize, he is now a hero in the hearts of his HTNEIGH [Cryptonym for NCFA] compatriots.24
Nerguti continued his correspondence with anyone who would listen to him. Writing to Said Kryeziu in Rome, he urged that future groups sent to Albania should be much better equipped than they had been. “They ought to be dressed with a regular uniform, and not with a jacket made of blanket cloth and German trousers made of tent [material]. This is a thing that catches the eyes of the population, brings a demoralization both with the people and the groups, and this is the main thing that damages our propaganda.”25
The unorthodox communications remained a nuisance for the Athens station chief, who failed to notice in Nerguti’s letters red flags and helpful suggestions that would improve the quality of operations for future teams. He wrote to Washington that they were sending aid to the team, but:
We cannot see how this team can be of great assistance since its leader seems bent on conducting an international correspondence club. An effort is being made, however, to persuade subject to confine his writing to one individual within HTNEIGH’s Military Junta. HTNEIGH leaders are also asked to respect this procedure. Knowing the KMWAHOO flair for letter writing, we are of the opinion that mashing potatoes with a needle might be an easier accomplishment.26
* * *
Aid to the stranded agents came in the form of a relief team of two, Tahir Vata and Liman Peposhi, code name Pine Tree, who were parachuted in the Luma region in central Albania on May 18, 1951. A few months later, this team was augmented with two other parachutists, Dalip Kaiku and Dule Koçi, who was the first W/T operator fully trained in Morse code and cryptography and equipped with a RS-1 radio set able to communicate directly with the base in Athens.
This team was the first one in the Albanian operation to use one-time pads (OTPs) to encrypt and decrypt communications with the center. OTPs offered a virtually unbreakable encryption, which, at the same time, was simple to explain and very suitable for use by agents in the field—all they needed to secure their messages was a pencil and paper. OTPs worked in matching sets of two: the agent in the field kept one pad of sheets and the case officer in Athens kept the matching pad. No two sets and no two sheets within a set were alike. Each sheet contained a random key in the form of five-digit groups, which the radiomen used to encrypt the messages. After using the sheet, the communication agent tore it off the pad and physically destroyed it to prevent the enemy from breaking the cipher should it have intercepted the message.27
The improvements in communication enabled the base for the first time to coordinate supply missions with agents in the ground and drop provisions in reception areas they prepared. Pine Tree team received seventy-one containers of supplies and arms that enabled them to survive in the mountains through the spring and summer of 1951.28
However, their activities compromised a number of friends and relatives that the Sigurimi kept under surveillance. The authorities had rounded up and imprisoned over twenty of them by the end of 1951. With the onset of winter and unwilling to risk their local friends further, the relief team exfiltrated to Yugoslavia, where the authorities tried to recruit them for their own missions to Albania. Pine Tree refused to cooperate. In June 1952, Yugoslav soldiers led them to the border and, on the morning of June 9, 1952, ushered them into Albania.
The team recrossed into Yugoslavia that night and proceeded toward the Greek border, traveling by night to avoid detection by the Yugoslav authorities. Pine Tree crossed the Greek frontier eighteen days after they had begun their journey. OPC personnel picked up and debriefed them in Athens and sent them to the Labor Services Company in Germany.29 The achievements of Pine Tree were modest. Despite their efforts, they had not been able to connect with or assist in any way Nerguti, Gjurra, or any of the other agents parachuted in November 1950. They provided only scant information of limited intelligence value upon their return to Athens. However, compared to the experience of the agents that preceded and followed them, Pine Tree would go on record as one of the most successful and luckiest teams that the CIA sent to Albania as part of Operation Fiend.
* * *
From the Pine Tree debriefing and other sources, OPC staff learned that all the surviving members of the November 1950 drops had crossed definitely in Yugoslavia by 1952. Some reports indicated that the Yugoslavs were holding them in prison and tortured them. On April 1953, word came that the Yugoslav minister of interior had pardoned two Kosovar members of the team, Rexh Berisha and Myftar Planeja, and had given them all the privileges and rights of Yugoslav citizens. Berisha was living with relatives in Peja, and Planeja was residing with friends in Prizreni.
The CIA liaison with the NCFA in Rome informed the military junta that, if the information were true, he would consider both Berisha and Planeja to have defected; the pay being accumulated for them would cease immediately and no further funds would be sent to their accounts.30
The other surviving members of the team, Halil Nerguti, Adem Gjurra, Ramadan Cenaj, and Sali Dalliu, remained in a Yugoslav concentration camp.31 At the time, the CIA had just established a cooperation agreement with the Yugoslav secret service, the UDB, and one of the staff officers raised the question whether they should use the opportunity to request the return of the agents to US control. On May 3, 1953, headquarters requested Athens station’s reaction to the possibility of reviving the team. In HQ’s opinion, reestablishing connection with the team simply for debriefing purposes would not be useful because it brought to the forefront the need to dispose of the agents afterward. HQ asked Athens to determine whether the agents would be willing to resume activities for the US before accepting them ba
ck. HQ also cautioned against possible Yugoslav efforts to exploit the returning agents for their own benefit.32 Four days later, Athens cabled the following response: “Negative to reaction in view low caliber team, performance on operations and subsequent activities in Yugo.”33
Fiend personnel wanted to bring finality to the status of the team members who had taken refuge in Yugoslavia, even though they were not willing to intercede with the Yugoslavs on their behalf. In June 1953, the CIA liaison with the NCFA in Rome informed the military junta that the agents had until November 1, 1953, to report at the Greek frontier if they wished to continue to be associated with the NCFA and enjoy the benefits of the US support. If they failed to get to Greece by the deadline, the agency would assume that they no longer wished to represent the NCFA, in which case any remuneration accumulated in the accounts of these agents would stop.34
It is not known whether the agents received the message or whether they could leave Yugoslavia if they wished to. None of them reported to the Greek border by the deadline of November 1, 1953.
CHAPTER 10
Philby’s Exit
The first team of OPC agents infiltrated into Albania experienced misfortune and setbacks from the beginning. In later years, after Philby’s role as a Soviet mole inside the British Secret Intelligence Services was uncovered, it became convenient to ascribe their difficulties to his betrayal. The survivors of the operation, in particular Nerguti, Gjurra, and Berisha, went to the grave believing this version of events. But did Philby really betray their operation?
The review of the facts presented earlier and below raises doubts about whether he had access to sufficient information to compromise their mission, even if he were motivated to do so. Since the beginning of 1950, the CIA and SIS had agreed on a separation of Fiend and Valuable at the operational level, although the overall plans continued to be coordinated at the policy level.
Policy integration and coordination included a joint understanding of the end results desired in Albania and the general methods for accomplishing these results; the composition and general character of activities of the National Committee for Free Albanian; the propaganda lines to be pursued against Albania and with respect to Albania’s neighbors; and economic measures taken against Albania.
Operationally, Fiend and Valuable were entirely separate, although field activities were coordinated in general terms to prevent operations of one service from interfering with those of the other service. Key personnel of Fiend and Valuable in the field met quarterly to exchange information regarding areas of operation and approximate timing of activities. They exchanged freely operational intelligence as well as certain general intelligence and occasional estimates.1
In his memoir, My Silent War, Philby said that when there was an overlap of operations between the British and Americans, they exchanged precise information about the timing and coordinates of the drops. There was no need for an exchange of this kind in the case of the Albanian operation. The British area of operations had always been in the southern Albania, whereas Burke sent his teams in the northeast. The British mode of infiltration was by boat landings, quite different from the parachute drops employed by the Americans.
So it’s reasonable to think that, while Philby was aware of the overall Albanian plan, he was not supposed to have access to the specifics of the operation, including drop zones and times. An intelligence officer as good as Philby certainly could try to get the information from his CIA contacts. But was intelligence on the Albanian operation worth the risk of him drawing attention to himself?
Philby described his involvement in the Albanian operation at some length in his memoir, but he did not indicate having reported it to his Soviet handlers. He was not shy describing other instances where he provided information to the Soviets, such as the case of three teams the British parachuted in Ukraine in May 1951. “I do not know what happened to the parties concerned,” Philby wrote coyly. “But I can make an informed guess.”2 It’s worth noting that Philby wrote his memoir in Moscow under the close supervision of the KGB in the mid-1960s, when the Soviet Union and Albania had completely broken off all relations due to Albania’s siding with Maoist China in its conflict with Moscow. If Philby and the KGB had played a significant role in sabotaging the Valuable Fiend agents, it is hard to believe they did not use the opportunity to credit themselves for it and take a swipe at Hoxha’s regime in Tirana.
Philby himself outlined several reasons the operation was futile from the beginning. The infiltrators were not able to penetrate the towns, which were firmly under Communist control. Forced to stay in the mountains in order to survive, they could have made a difference only if the anti-Communist sentiment in the country had reached a boiling point. Philby wrote: “That, perhaps, was the unspoken assumption behind the whole venture, just as it was assumed more recently (when people should have known better) that a landing in the Bay of Pigs would set Cuba on fire.”3
Ultimately, Philby wrote, the political contradictions between the British and Americans bedeviled their plans in Albania and elsewhere more than anything else.
* * *
There is a simpler explanation for the difficulties that Burke’s teams encountered from the first moment they parachuted into Albania. The Communist regime received detailed information about everything that was happening at the Labor Service Company 4000 in Germany. When the nine members of the first infiltration teams were removed from the company in October 1950, their names and the purpose of their mission would have been passed on to the Sigurimi, who then mobilized the pursuit forces in the areas where the agents hailed from, where they were expected to be parachuted.
As luck had it, most of the agents, except for Toptani and Daci, managed to evade the trap that the Sigurimi had laid for them. What made their mission impossible to succeed afterward was the inadequate training they received and Burke’s failure to put in place working communication and support plans. Burke’s own memoir, Outrageous Good Fortune, describes his sympathies for the plight of the Albanian agents, but leaves the clear impression that Burke was fully immersed in the luxuries of his life in Europe, a sheer heaven after the hardships he and his family had endured in New York City. It’s hard to believe Burke fully focused on the success and survival of his team in those months of 1950, while he enjoyed: “A very attractive villa, a cook, a maid, a nurse for [his daughter], the beauty of the ancient city itself, a beach cabana a half-hour away, October holidays on the Mediterranean, summer visits to Austria, marvelous journeys on the Scandinavian Express through the spectacular Italian and Swiss Alps and out into the beautiful forests and lakes of Bavaria.”4
Just a few weeks after the team was parachuted into Albania, Burke returned to Washington in December 1950 to accept the position of head of OPC operations in Germany, this time as a full-time CIA employee. He assumed the new post in March 1951, not before attending a number of warm and hospitable parties thrown by members of the intelligence community in Washington, the largest, jolliest, and wettest of which was given by the Philbys on February 24, 1951 at their home in Nebraska Avenue.5
Philby’s two-year assignment to Washington was coming to an end, as well. In September, he was supposed to return to London for his next assignment. Unforeseen circumstances forced his early exit from Washington and the SIS in July 1951.
* * *
Since 1940, the Army’s Signal Security Agency, the precursor of the National Security Agency, had been collecting encrypted messages sent to and from Soviet Union’s diplomatic missions in the United States. They recorded and filed the messages away until February 1, 1943, when a small and very secretive project began to decrypt and read their content. The project would later receive the code name Venona. Decrypting the messages was an impossible task at first. While the American cryptanalysts had been successful in breaking the encryption of the German and the Japanese, breaking the Soviet codes proved extremely difficult.
The Russians used two levels of encryption for their communic
ations. First, they converted the clear text messages to numeric representation by using a codebook, a sort of dictionary that mapped words and phrases to numbers. Then, they padded the numbers with random sequences of digits from one-time pads. In order to attack the underlying codebook at the heart of the encryption challenge, the American cryptanalysts had to first strip away these added numerals.
One way to recognize these numbers was to possess the OTP page used to encrypt the message. Another way was to know the Russian algorithm that generated the random sequences of the OTPs and try to guess the numbers used to encrypt a particular message. The small team of cryptanalysts working on the problem devised brilliant analytical techniques trying to break the code using “brute force” methods, but for a number of years the efforts yielded disappointing results.
A third possibility was that the Russians could misuse or reuse the numbers in the pads, which could leave them vulnerable to attack. As it happened, the flaw in the Soviet messages resulted from the duplication of OTP pages during the printing process, rather than from a malfunctioning random-number generator or extensive reuse of pages by code clerks. For a few months in early 1942, for reasons that remain unknown, the cryptographic material manufacturing center in the Soviet Union printed some thirty-five thousand pages with the same sequence of numbers on them, which then were assembled and bound in thousands of OTP codebooks.6
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