Operation Valuable Fiend

by Albert Lulushi

  At the same time, sixteen agents began training as wireless transmitter operators. They would be part of the teams that would go in the autumn—three teams in late September and three teams in October. While regular team members received six weeks’ training, the W/T operators required approximately four months of training.4 The schedule of infiltrations in 1951, as in 1950, did not take into account the realities of the weather in Albania, where winter set in early, especially in the mountains where most of the teams were headed.

  The pace of infiltrations planned for 1951 upset the members of the NCFA military junta. Abas Ermenji was particularly vocal in expressing his discontent with the American operatives who had turned a deaf ear for the past two years to his suggestions to train a large force and send it to drive the Communists from Albania. Ermenji also favored infiltrations by sea rather than airdrops and threatened to refuse to allow members of the Balli Kombëtar to participate in parachute drops. He argued that Albania was their country and they knew it like the palm of their hand, and that sufficiently large dropping areas did not exist in its mountainous terrain to stage airdrop operations.5

  Lieb had to walk a fine line in explaining to the junta the reasons for the disappointing number of infiltrations without revealing that the CIA had abandoned the concept of actively training and equipping a larger force with the ultimate objective of overthrowing the Hoxha government. To deflect their attention, he sent them to visit the covert training school on July 3 and 4. They found the morale of the trainees high and complimented the staff on the training program.6

  The first class of fourteen agents completed training in mid-July and were transferred from Germany to Athens on July 20. The ferrying plane returned to Germany with forty-six Albanians from the Lavrion IRO camp, who joined the reservoir of Albanian personnel in the Labor Services Company.7

  The first three operational teams for 1951 were parachuted into Albania between July 22 and 24. One of the teams, code name Olive, was dropped in Delvina, near the Greek border in southern Albania; a second team, code name Cypress, in the center of the country between Berati and Elbasani; and the third team, code name Oak, in the Puka district in the north.

  * * *

  After the drop of the four-man Olive team near Delvina, the OPC station in Athens had no news of them for weeks. Then, reports began arriving indicating the annihilation of the team. The first report came from a British team, code name Tiger, which entered southern Albania by sea on July 10 and came out to Greece on the night of August 7–8. The Tiger team had spent a hectic month on the run, suffering four ambushes by special pursuit detachments, police, armed civilians, and soldiers. One of these attacks, which lasted twenty-four hours, depleted the team’s ammunition supply and ended with an escape so miraculous that the members did not know themselves how it happened. Informers and Communist followers had replaced shepherds who had been sympathetic to their cause in the past, probably because of the nationalization of the flocks and subsequent removal of the original owners. En route to Greece, the team followed the higher flats of the Drino River valley, away from roads, which were swarming with troops.

  They seized civilian hostages all along the escape route, a practice commonly used by infiltration teams to discourage local villagers from betraying them. The fate of these hostages was often tragic, as shown by the case of Servet Pupe, seized by the Tiger team near the village of Nepravishta only a few miles from the Greek border. Caught in the crossfire between the Tiger team and local Communists pursuing them, Pupe was wounded and unable to move. The team left him behind as they continued their escape toward Greece. The leader of the Communist posse found Pupe bleeding to death and saw an opportunity to earn the government’s good graces. He finished Pupe off, dragged his body in the village, and branded him as a collaborator of the “diversionist” agents. The local Communist leader received rewards for his deed and for the next forty years he and his children enjoyed the favors of the Communist government. Pupe’s children, branded as offspring of a traitor, languished in menial jobs digging trenches and laboring in a collective farm.

  The members of the British Tiger team learned the fate of the OPC Olive team from a local man from the village of Lazarati, just south of Gjirokastra. Initially, he had provided the Olive agents with food and shelter. Later, he was forced to participate in their roundup, together with all civilians and troops in the area nearby. This was a new development, because up to that point only trusted Communists were armed and pressed into posse duty. The search party also included unarmed civilians, some of them women, who preceded the armed hunters with pleas to surrender, obviously in the belief that the hunted would not fire on unarmed searchers and might give up more easily.8

  Nijaz Rrapushi, a former corporal of the 7th Regiment of Gjirokastra, who had escaped to Greece, recounted that the Sigurimi had asked for aid from his regiment to pursue “reactionaries” in the area. He recounted that the Sigurimi, police, and army troops had surrounded the members of the Olive team and exchanged fire in a battle that lasted five hours. When they overran Olive’s position, they found Riza Zyberi and Fido Veliu dead. They had agreed to a double suicide with a grenade; one died when the grenade exploded, but the other lived to kill himself with his pistol. The pursuit forces captured Kasem Shehu, who was wounded. Muhamet Hoxha, the fourth member of the team, had also been wounded but was not in position with the other three men. When he spent his ammo and it became obvious that the Communist forces would overrun their position, Hoxha had decided to head for the border, but he passed out from loss of blood and was captured some distance from the position.9 Both Hoxha and Shehu, no relation to the top two Communist leaders of the country, faced trial in October 1951 and received a sentenced of twenty years hard labor each.10 Hoxha was the only one who lived long enough to see the fall of the Communist regime. He died at an old people’s home in Gjirokastra in the 1990s.11

  * * *

  The second team, Cypress, was dropped in the central Devolli River region between Berati and Elbasani and included five men. This team exfiltrated over the Greek border on August 15 due to lack of food. They had lost all their supply containers during the drop. They had been able to receive communications from the commo plane, but the plane was unable to receive the team’s communications, another example showing that the Motorola voice radios were totally inadequate for communications and they needed to be replaced with W/T sets.12 Upon their return to Greece, the team reported utterly deplorable living conditions in the country. They described the growing uselessness of gold and other foreign currencies and the increasing value of barter items. Measures against infiltrations, including random unannounced searches, had intensified.

  The team members reported a general lack of confidence in the NCFA. They pointed out that, although the Albanians they met received them well, the team had not been able to accomplish its goals without the services of an educated, respected NCFA officer. People in Albania were looking for deeds rather than words and longed for genuine liberation that involved neither the Yugoslavs nor the Greeks.

  The most disconcerting fact from the debriefing was that the team confirmed counterintelligence reports received earlier, indicating that the Sigurimi knew of their July infiltration before its actual staging. Two team members reported that government officials had visited their families with news of the arrival in Albania of their relatives three days before they actually appeared.

  A Communist reception party awaited their drop at the designated landing area. Luckily, the team dropped a few miles from the preselected DZ into a village; dogs barked, the aircraft roared overhead, and the villagers awoke. A patrol was organized and the intruders hastened their exit, leaving their equipment behind.

  The suspicion for the source of the leak immediately fell on members of the NCFA. The military junta had selected the drop zones and picked the team members. The only vital information kept from them was the exact drop date. From all the parachute drops that Fiend had completed up to that point
, either for the OPC or the OSO, this was the first one in which the NCFA was allowed this much operational latitude; this was also the first of these operations where the security breach was confirmed. Was it a coincidence?

  The CIA considered polygraph tests for members of the executive committee of the NCFA and the military junta who were familiar with Fiend operational details.13 It is not known whether they were carried out, although polygraph tests became standard practice for agents before they were sent on missions and after they returned for debriefing.

  Lieb and the rest of the Fiend staff saw this NCFA-inspired debacle as the final proof that they should no longer accept the junta’s operational proposals. They felt that the premium placed on the junta’s intelligence was too high, and that their criteria for forming the teams were primarily political and partisan rather than serving the needs of the operation. Lieb proposed to Yatsevitch the elimination of the NCFA’s executive committee as a body and the complete removal of NCFA from any operational aspects of the endeavor.14

  There was certainly no love lost between Lieb and the NCFA leaders, in particular Abas Ermenji. In an interview more than thirty years later, Ermenji laid the blame for the security compromise on the Americans in general and Lieb in particular. He blamed Lieb for putting too much trust on the Legaliteti followers, whom he described as a group without order, discipline, or sophistication thoroughly penetrated by the Communists. Ermenji said that Gaqo Gogo, the NCFA’s secretary and Lieb’s translator, learned all the details of the drops from Lieb and gossiped about them in cafés. As a result, the Albanian embassy in Rome was well aware of all the operations coordinated with the NCFA, according to Ermenji.15

  * * *

  There is one significant piece of evidence that adds credence to the hypothesis that NCFA members compromised the 1951 drops. During that same time, Fiend staff oversaw two successful infiltrations of agents that were not affiliated with NCFA—one by parachute drop and another one overland from Greece—by Hamit Matiani and his followers.

  Hamit Matiani first came to the attention of the OPC in spring of 1951. He had been used since 1949 in an operation sponsored by the OSO and fronted by the Greek intelligence, which consisted of leading teams into Albania to collect intelligence and distribute propaganda materials. Matiani had established a very good track record. He knew his way inside the country, accomplished the tasks assigned, and made it out with minimal losses.16 He had a considerable following in Albania and was well respected by the Albanian émigrés in Greece. The OPC planned to use him to form several teams that would enter Albania via Greece for resistance activities and “special tasks,” such as mailing derogatory letters about Communist leaders, distributing targeted propaganda materials inside the country, performing acts of sabotage, and carrying out coups-de-main actions.17

  On the night of June 23–24, 1951, the OPC covert plane dropped a seven-man team led by Matiani a few miles southeast of Peqini in central Albania on an intelligence-gathering mission for the OSO.18 Takeoff from Athens occurred at 2310 hours on June 23. Climbing to six thousand feet, the aircraft proceeded on course through the Gulf of Corinth, then west of Corfu, turned north, and cruised along the Albanian coast. The aircraft crew reported that all team members behaved very well during the flight. All men sat upright and remained awake. The air was notably smooth and no one became ill. There was some singing and a considerable amount of smoking.

  At 0129 hours, the aircraft headed in a northeasterly direction and began a descent to 1,500 feet. Five minutes before the Albanian coast was crossed, the dispatchers unfastened the door and readied the static lines. All but two of the men took a drink of cognac. They penetrated the Albanian coast at the mouth of the Shkumbini River at 0203 hours at 1,500 feet altitude. The aircraft crossed the village of Divjaka and the northern quarter of Lake Tërbufi and turning east flew directly to the drop area. Steady moonlight outlined vividly the streams, roads, fields, woods, lakes, and land shapes. Matiani, recognizing his whereabouts, pointed out known landmarks to others, as the terrain unfolded below.

  At 0210 hours, the pilot gave the jump signal, at which point the dispatchers tossed two bundles. The team leader followed by three men jumped headfirst almost atop the containers. No. 5 quickly sat on the floor, legs on the doorway, and pushed himself into the air. No. 6 immediately dived out, and the last man followed in the same manner after a fraction of a second of hesitation. The seven men had left the plane in under twenty seconds with no prompting from either dispatcher. The dispatchers judged the group unusually good and deemed their manner and rate of jumping exceptional—there were no noticeable worries, mainly noticeable confidence. The aircraft proceeded to fly around Elbasani then set on the outbound course, dropping fifty thousand leaflets along the way as a deceptive measure.

  At about one and one-half miles west of Lushnja, the aircrew observed a large, rectangular pattern of strong, evenly spaced lights. They had seen and reported this pattern on other Albanian missions. From the air, it looked to them like a special area similar to the concentration camps they had often observed in Germany during the war. It was Gradishta, an infamous Albanian gulag built in the middle of nowhere and reserved for special enemies of the government and their families. The plane crossed the coast just north of the Viosa River mouth at 0233 hours and the aircraft flew homeward to Athens, where it landed at 0505 hours. Total time of flight was 5 hours 55 minutes; time over Albania was 34 minutes.19

  This was Matiani’s last mission for the OSO. At the end of June, the OPC and OSO reached an understanding to jointly handle and control the Matiani group. The group would have an operational mission aligned with OPC objectives but would also include personnel specifically trained and briefed by the OSO for intelligence reporting. The OPC and OSO would share the expenses to maintain the group, with the OPC carrying 40 percent of the costs.20

  Upon Matiani’s return from his mission, the Fiend field chief in Athens met with him in late July and made plans for an infiltration into the Kolonja area in southern Albania across the Greek border on or about August 10. The team would split up then meet at a prearranged spot on August 22, when the OPC covert plane would drop supplies to them together with a W/T operator.21

  On the night of August 9–10, 1951, a six-man team, code name Pear, walked across the Greek border south of Korça under the leadership of Matiani.22 The team exfiltrated intact from Albania on September 3. Upon their return, they reported that they had been involved in a battle with Albanian Communists between Gramshi and Voskopoja and killed two without loss, including Thoma Prifti, secretary of the Communist Party for the district of Gramshi. The team was very successful in obtaining assets for future operations—a considerable number of Communist identity documents in current use. In addition, they compiled a list of hundreds of potential safehouses.23

  However, the team disobeyed instructions by operating outside their assigned area and becoming involved with the enemy before becoming properly established. In addition, they failed to display fires for the supply drop to the team. The British case officer in Athens was annoyed, because the activities of the Pear team took place in one of the British operating areas and had forced his own team to abandon its operation and retreat to Greece. The Fiend Athens chief recommended disbanding the Pear team but requested they retain its two top members, Hamit Matiani and Xheladin Sakollari, for future hit-and-run operations.24

  Matiani was his own man in the field and allowed only his own instincts to guide his actions. They had helped him survive while being constantly on the run in the years since the Communists had taken over Albania. Matiani knew his way around the countryside and over the years had developed a network of trusted people who helped him scout the terrain and find the paths in and out the country that best avoided pursuit forces. He distrusted resupply drops by aircraft, which he felt alerted the security forces and weighed down the team. His cunning sense of survival had turned Matiani into a legend, hated and vilified by the Communists but admired and re
spected by opponents of the regime.

  * * *

  A joint Fiend-Valuable meeting was held in Rome on October 22–24, 1951. Yatsevitch, Lieb, and other field officers of Project Fiend attended from the American side; their Valuable counterparts Harold Perkins and Anthony Northrop represented the British side.25 The meeting began with a discussion of external political factors that influenced the activities of both projects. The British believed that 1952 was the last year that their operation could continue at its current pace. Following that year’s activities, the operation either had to be sharply curtailed or expanded into a full-fledged effort to overthrow the Hoxha regime. Both sides agreed that failure to develop an active resistance movement in the near future would result in disillusionment and apathy within the ranks of the opposition inside and outside Albania. They discussed overt and covert propaganda efforts that were necessary to sustain the will to resist among the Albanian people but, at the same time, avoid raising morale prematurely.

  The meeting then focused on Yugoslav intentions, particularly in light of the activities of the Yugoslav-sponsored League of Albanian Refugees against the National Committee for Free Albania. Both the Office of Policy Coordination and Secret Intelligence Services agreed that the Yugoslav government desired only enough of a change in the Albanian regime to break away from the Soviet Union and become again friendly toward Belgrade. An Albania oriented toward the West was only a second choice for Tito, and a non-Communist Albania would be contrary to Yugoslavia’s basic desires.

  Next, the discussion moved to the internal political structure of the NCFA. Both sides felt that the original NCFA structure composed of an executive committee and a general committee had outlived its initial usefulness. The British saw a need to reconstruct the committee in order to increase its power and appeal, prevent it from becoming a two-party organ of Balli Kombëtar and Legaliteti, and to make it a real, capable committee, not merely a grouping of people. The Americans agreed and suggested that the process of broadening the committee would provide an opportunity to include outside elements that would be of value as potential assets in the event of armed insurrection.