Operation Valuable Fiend

by Albert Lulushi

  Although the OPC had responsibility over Trieste, it didn’t have any presence there, so it asked the OSO to help evaluate the plan’s feasibility. Richard Stolz, a young OSO operative on his first assignment in Trieste at the time, received the assignment and described it as follows:

  The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the euphemistic name of the then covert action arm of the Agency, heard that an Albanian “ship,” the Queen Teuta out of Durrësi, regularly stopped at Trieste. We were instructed to check this out and examine the possibility of using limpet mines to put it out of action. Another case officer and I soon discovered that this ship was a small, wooden-hulled tub that was hauling sand up and down the Adriatic. We had some difficulty in persuading OPC that their idea was not a good one.14

  * * *

  A campaign of terror began in Albania in February 1951, triggered by the explosion of a pack of dynamite thrown in the courtyard of the Soviet embassy in Tirana on February 19, 1951. The explosion occurred in the evening when very few people were on the premises, and the damage was limited to a broken door and shattered glass of a few windows. It is not clear to this date whether this was a spontaneous act of individuals opposed to the regime, an act sponsored by the Yugoslav secret service, or a provocation by the Sigurimi. The Albanian authorities used the explosion as a pretext to arrest hundreds of individuals in the capital immediately afterward. On February 27, they executed extrajudicially twenty-two of them, mostly intellectuals unaffiliated with the Communists, and sentenced to long prison terms another eighty.

  The terror spread to the rest of the country. Radio Tirana announced that the trial of four Greek agents took place on March 19 in the village of Zemblaku in the Korça prefecture. Two of the accused, Abdul Kalaja and Fuad Kulla, were sentenced to be hanged and the other two to a term of twenty years’ imprisonment. According to Radio Tirana, all four confessed to have collaborated with the Balli Kombëtar during the war and that, on the orders of the Greek security service, they set fire to a Zemblaku collective farm building.15

  American newspapers began reporting in a series of sensational articles in March that the situation in Albania was about to explode in open revolt against the government and that the Soviets had sent reinforcements, including ten or more MiG fighter jets to Tirana. The OPC was concerned that the events in Albania were accelerating beyond their control, despite the OSO’s assurances that news of an uprising against the Hoxha government was a gross exaggeration by misinformed journalists. The OSO discounted press reports that the bomb episode was the result of a wide-scale plot to overthrow the government or that the Soviets had sent military reinforcements.16

  The Yugoslav government had always considered the activities of the British and Americans in Albania as trespassing in their own backyard and took the opportunity to link these activities with the escalation of tensions in Albania. Leveraging the goodwill that their opposition to the Soviet Union had created among Western allies, Yugoslav officials pointed out to the US and British ambassadors in Belgrade that the activities of the NCFA and other groups in Albania were likely to cause the Soviets to intervene and thus endanger the peace in the Balkans.17

  At a meeting at the State Department in early April, Frank Wisner and officials of the Policy Planning Staff, including Robert Joyce, liaison with the OPC, John C. Campbell, in charge of Balkan affairs, and Randolph H. Higgs, covering Yugoslavia and Trieste issues, agreed that “matters in Albania should be allowed to cool off a bit for the present.” They would suspend all propaganda leaflet drops for a period of two months, at the end of which the situation would be reconsidered. The OPC could proceed quietly to build an internal network in Albania with occasional secret parachute drops of agents and small supplies for their support. But until further notice, the OPC would avoid measures designed to create violent outbursts, or provocative activities that could attract notice.18

  The State Department’s ban on leaflet drops continued for several months. At the end of June, the CIA decided to cancel all leaflet-dropping flights over Albania and end the entire program of preparing leaflet texts. They would continue to drop existing leaflets and miniature copies of the NCFA newspaper Shqipëria only as a diversion during flights to parachute agents or supplies.19

  CIA director Walter B. Smith involved himself personally in ensuring that the OPC followed the guidance. At a meeting on April 18, he told Wisner to make certain that the covert aircraft used for the drops would not go close to the Yugoslav frontier or take a roundabout route over Albania and risk being shot down. “The plane goes straight to the dropping point, makes the drop and comes straight out,” said Smith.20 Strict directives like this are an example of the degree to which Wisner and the OPC had lost their autonomy of the early days and come under the direct control of the director of Central Intelligence.

  A plainspoken Midwesterner who never earned a college degree, General Walter B. Smith rose through the ranks to become a key aide to General George C. Marshall early in World War II and then Eisenhower’s chief of staff in Europe. After the war, President Harry S. Truman named Smith as ambassador to Moscow, where he served until 1949.21

  Smith took over as DCI on October 7, 1950, and quickly moved to reorganize the CIA into a cohesive and integrated intelligence organization, which to this day remains structured according to the blueprint that Smith put in place in the early 1950s. One of his first changes at the CIA was to put an end to the autonomous status that the Office of Policy Coordination had enjoyed since its creation in 1948. In early January 1951 Smith ordered the merger of the OPC and the Office of Special Operations under one organization, the Directorate of Plans, and assigned Allen Dulles to be the first deputy director for plans—DD/P. Frank Wisner succeeded Dulles as DD/P in August 1951. It took until August 1952 to fully merge the OSO and OPC—each with its own culture, methods, and pay scales—into an effective, single directorate of intelligence, with Wisner at its helm as the CIA’s first deputy director for intelligence.22

  * * *

  In early June 1951, OPC began receiving reports about the proceedings of a Congress of the Albanian League of Political Refugees held in May in Prizreni, a town in Kosovo, only ten miles east of the Albanian border. The Congress had been an idea of Dushan Mugosha, a member of the Yugoslav Communist Party Central Committee, who ten years earlier had been instrumental in creating the Albanian Communist Party and controlling its actions during World War II. The league took the line that “democratic” Albanians in Yugoslavia rather than “reactionary” émigrés in Italy, Greece, and elsewhere should oust the Hoxha regime.23 The Congress claimed to represent four thousand Albanians and passed a resolution calling for the mobilization of eighty thousand Albanians to form a force to overthrow the Hoxha government. They would proclaim a republic for which the Yugoslavs gave guarantees of independence and inviolability of borders.24

  The league’s president was Apostol Tenefi, a former member of the Albanian Communist Party and professor of Mathematics in Tirana until 1948, when he escaped to Yugoslavia. Tenefi was an ardent Titoist and a close follower of Koçi Xoxe, the former Albanian minister of interior executed in 1949 for being pro-Tito.25

  The announcement of the creation of this group caused considerable agitation within the National Committee for Free Albania and in Albanian émigré circles in the West. Yugoslav diplomats and league representatives approached prominent Albanian refugees in Italy and outlined the militant nature of the new organization, clearly aimed at overthrowing the Hoxha regime. It was becoming clear to the Albanian emigration that the Yugoslavs were prepared to support a much more vigorous program against Hoxha than the relatively mild one that the Americans and British had undertaken in the name of the NCFA. There was a serious danger that the Yugoslav cause would lure Albanians away from the NCFA and erode its support among the Albanian public outside and inside the country.26

  To maintain the situation under control, Lieb instructed the NCFA to adopt an attitude of skepticism toward the Prizreni proc
lamation calling for a “Free, Independent and Republican Albania,” without launching into an exchange of polemics with the Yugoslav league.27 In the meantime, Wisner insisted through his contacts in the Policy Planning Staff that the State Department take action at the diplomatic level in order to clarify Yugoslav intentions and factor them into the formulation of the US policy toward Albania and the OPC plans for immediate action in that area.28

  The US ambassador in Belgrade met with Yugoslav officials to point out the inconsistency of their positions. On one hand, they complained that Western-sponsored resistance groups such as the NCFA could bring about Soviet intervention in Albania and Yugoslavia; on the other hand, the Yugoslavs themselves had permitted the creation of a far more militant organization that was openly announcing its intention to recruit a large armed force to overthrow the Albanian government. General Omar Bradley of the Joint Chiefs of Staff also brought up the subject up with General Koća Popović, the Yugoslav minister of defense, during the course of conversations between the US and Yugoslav military representatives that were taking place in Washington at the time.29

  * * *

  The creation of the League of Albanian Refugees by the Yugoslavs was part of a plan they had set in motion to replace the Hoxha regime with one friendly to Tito. Another step in the plan was the preparation by Generals Peko Dapćević, Svetozar VukmanovićTempo, and Kosta Nadj of a military program for the invasion of Albania. Known as Plan R-7, it envisioned a preparatory period during which diversionary and propaganda actions would arouse the Albanian public against Hoxha and the Soviets. Then, armed units of the League of Refugees in Yugoslavia, interspersed with a division of the Yugoslav regular army made up of Kosovar elements, would enter Albania and converge on Tirana from several different approaches. The ranks of the strike force would grow to approximately 50,000 during its march to Tirana from internal supporters and deserters of the Albanian army. The operation was expected to accomplish its mission within a very short time.30

  As they prepared the plan, the Yugoslavs approached the Greek government in June 1951 with a proposal for cooperation in case hostilities broke out in Albania. They said that if the Albanian regime collapsed or if Soviet Union or its satellites attacked Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav army would immediately invade Albania. Since they expected the Greeks to follow suit, the Yugoslavs wanted to prearrange zones of influence and demarcation lines in order to avoid confrontation between the Greek and Yugoslav armies when hostilities started.

  The Greek Foreign Office sought the advice of the US State Department on responding to the Yugoslav proposal, which in turn invited the British to voice their opinion in the matter. The British Foreign Office sent a memorandum to Washington on June 20, 1951, in which it summarized the British position in one sentence: “If the US and UK wish to see Albania remain independent they should extract assurances from Greece and Yugoslavia that the occupation will be temporary; if Albanian independence is no longer vital, they should restrict efforts to merely averting a clash between Greece and Yugoslavia.”31

  The memo went on to explain that the British preferred an independent Albania friendly to the West, but not at the cost of weakening Yugoslavia or Greece, and they wanted to see a line of demarcation agreed upon, just in case. In favor of the continued independence of Albania, the British memo listed factors such as ethnic and historical considerations, the existence of the NCFA, and the difficulty of implementing an alternative solution without conflict between the interested powers. Factors against Albania’s independence were its size and instability as state, which, the British argued, might position it better as a Yugoslav Federative Republic, with or without the Northern Epirus region claimed by Greece. This alternative might be acceptable to Yugoslavia, Greece, and even Albanians, but might alienate Italy. However, the British memo concluded, “since the Yugoslavs were orienting towards the West and in view of the large Albanian population already there [within Yugoslav borders], this might not be a wholly unacceptable solution.”32

  The ambiguity of the British position concerning the future status of Albania caused concern and agitation among State Department officials. In a forcefully worded response, the State Department emphasized the US government’s objective that Albania become an independent state friendly to the West. The United States would not support any policy aimed at the extinction of Albanian independence, such as partition between Yugoslavia and Greece.

  Reasons for this position included the fact that the Albanian people had a definite national character and strong patriotic sentiments. Furthermore, their right to independence had been recognized and supported in various public statements by the US and British governments and there had been a nominally independent Albanian state in existence since 1912.

  The State Department emphasized that “without an independent Albania there seemed no way to reconcile the conflicting interests of Yugoslavia, Greece and Italy in this strategic area which affected the security of all three.”33 None of these states would willingly accept a special position of either of the others; any partition arrangement would be inherently unstable and would only sow seeds of long-term minority problems, which would undermine the security of the whole area.

  Finally, recanting Albania’s right to independence was morally indefensible before public opinion and would provide the Soviet government and its Albanian puppets with a powerful propaganda weapon.

  The US position was that they should continue diplomatic and other efforts toward the transition from a Soviet-dominated Albania to a free and independent Albania not dominated by neighboring states and supported by Western countries. They could keep in mind the possibility of Albania’s inclusion in a larger federal unit at some future time. However, such a federation would have to be at least Balkan in scope and not limited to some special federal arrangement with Yugoslavia or Greece. The Western powers should encourage no federal arrangement with Yugoslavia until and unless that country’s regime showed closer affinity with Western ideals.

  The main obstacle to achieving the Albanian objective was the tangle of conflicting interests that Yugoslavia, Greece, and Italy had in their neighbor. Each of them feared and suspected the designs of the others in Albania. The State Department proposed that the US and UK initiate diplomatic efforts to get the three countries to state openly that they had no claims to a privileged position in Albania and recognized the right of the Albanian people to independence and institutions of their choosing. Ideally, their statements would renounce all territorial claims on Albania, although Greece would have difficulties accepting this. Such pledges by the three neighboring countries, with the backing of the US, UK, and possibly France, would prove most helpful to the efforts to liberate Albania from the Soviet-Communist domination and to future efforts to reestablish an independent Albania after the elimination of the Hoxha regime.

  The memo concluded with a clear indication to the British that the American side would not allow them to drag their feet on this issue. The State Department suggested clearly that the moves they proposed might be accomplished easier on a broader basis than action by the US and UK alone. It might be more efficacious to deal with these aspects of the Albanian problem in the context of NATO and its considerations and planning of the defense of the North Atlantic area.34

  CHAPTER 12

  Adverse Developments in the Infiltration Program

  The increased pace of Operation Fiend activities in the areas of propaganda and psychological and economic warfare was matched by an equally accelerated tempo in preparing for the 1951 infiltrations in Albania. There was one significant change in the planning of infiltrations compared to the previous season. The leadership of National Committee for Free Albania pressed for a more active role in the selection of agents and operational areas in Albania. They blamed the unimpressive outcome of the November 1950 drops on the fact that the Americans had selected the agents and the drop zones. In endless arguments with Lieb in Rome, the members of the military junta, Abas Kupi, Said Kryeziu, a
nd Abas Ermenji insisted on assuming this responsibility and even threatened to withdraw from the NCFA if the Americans didn’t grant them the privilege. Reluctantly, Lieb agreed and Yatsevitch seconded his decision from Washington.

  The operational activities for 1951 began with the physical and psychological assessment of all Albanian personnel in the Labor Services Company 4000 in Germany, which the OPC had set up in June 1950 as cover for maintaining a pool of potential infiltration agents. An OPC screening team evaluated the medical and mental conditions of everyone there. From 220 personnel, only sixty-six of them were fit for infiltration purposes. The finding caused considerable aggravation among the NCFA leaders, who considered all the Company 4000 members “first-class fierce fighters.” The assessment team reported that at the insistence of the NCFA military junta, they had included in the selection men with physical illnesses, among them a man with one kidney, a man prone to diabetes, and one with spots on his lungs. The junta agreed to scratch from the list one man with rheumatism, who they felt might not be able to run fast enough in an emergency.1

  The plans for 1951 were to infiltrate ten teams of four men each plus several smaller teams for special missions. Four of these teams began training in late May at the Loeb country estate in Murnau for infiltration in the coastal plain area during the June moonless period.2 A typical day of training included physical conditioning, radio-telephone usage, knife use, wrestling, boxing, and weapons training. In the afternoon, there were lessons on geography, map reading, and two hours of parachute training. In the evening, the agents saw army training movies.3