The strike force would be organized in three commands. The Central Field Command included Task Force A and had 5,000 men, half of whom would be staged in Yugoslavia and the other half in Greece. They would be inserted by air and sea to capture and hold the Tirana, Durrësi, and Elbasani areas. The Northern Field Command, 1,300 strong, would be staged in Yugoslavia and included Task Force C responsible for Shkodra and Task Force D responsible for Kukësi. The Southern Field Command, 2,150 strong, would be staged in Greece and included Task Force B, responsible for Vlora, Task Force E, responsible for Korça, and Task Force F, responsible for Gjirokastra. Approximately 2,000 men would be kept in reserve as part of Task Force G.
Another 1,000 men would provide complete logistical support to the forces infiltrated into Albania and their supporters throughout the coup. They were divided into two major support commands with the North Support Command being a Yugoslav effort and the South Support Command a combined US-UK activity. Their responsibilities included transporting over 10,000 infiltrated troops in the country and provisioning these troops and their supporters during the operations with almost 1,000 tons of arms, ammunition, food rations, and other supplies. Using 180 C-47 aircraft, 80 landing craft assault (LCA) boats and six landing craft utility (LCU) boats, the support commands would move field forces from staging areas in Yugoslavia and Greece to objective areas in Albania on D-Day, then move reserves and additional supply shipments as required.
The weather conditions in Albania were such that the coup would have to be executed during the period of June 1 to September 30. Target D-Day was set for July 1, 1954. By simultaneous night attack beginning at 0100 (H hour) on D-Day, field forces would attack, seize, secure, and establish control of their assigned objective areas. Assault elements would overpower sentries, seize and replace officers, seize key supply dumps and installations, cut communications, and cause the defection or isolation of opposition armed forces and security personnel. They would secure all airfields, aircraft, key transportation centers, and headquarters of the Communist government. They would also seize and hold key government leaders opposed to the coup. Special units would be responsible for the security and protection of thousands of Soviet advisers and their families in the country at the time, in order to avoid giving the Soviet Union a pretext to intervene.
The NCFA leaders would set up a provisional government, present it to the world as the free independent government of Albania, and force leaders of Hoxha regime to publicly announce their resignations and to urge support of the provisional government. The US, UK, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, France, and Turkey would recognize the provisional Albanian government as soon as it was established. The allies would take whatever overt measures were necessary to preserve the complete independence of liberated Albania.
Anti-Communist sympathizers inside the country would take up arms and assist the task forces in carrying out the coup. The planners estimated that the number of armed elements from internal supporters who would join the fight was one thousand on D-Day, five thousand within the next three days, and ten thousand within thirty days. They also expected the majority of the eighty thousand armed forces that the Hoxha government had at its disposals to defect and join the coup or else throw down their weapons and return to their homes. The combined forces were expected to accomplish most of the objectives of the coup, overthrow the Hoxha regime, and establish a free and independent government in Albania within thirty days from D-Day.7
Operational map showing the movement of forces during the planned coup d’état in Albania
* * *
Weckerling submitted the plan with major caveats, or, as he called it, as a “static plan,” because the fundamental assumptions upon which the plan was based did not exist and the required resources were not available. He wrote: “I gravely doubt the advisability of undertaking an Albanian coup in accordance with the attached plan in view of the extremely sensitive political factors involved and the bigger issues that might be touched off by an inopportune disclosure of the US preparations as compared to the relatively meager gains to the West.”8
Yatsevitch added weight to this opinion as chief of CIA’s Southeast European branch with direct responsibility over Albania. Yatsevitch wrote at the beginning of February 1953 that although detaching Albania from the Soviet orbit was in the realm of possibility, doing so under the circumstances at the time would be unwise. It would entail diplomatic exposure of US intentions and clandestine operations to an undesirable extent and would require a much closer collaboration with the Tito regime than was possible or even advisable at the time. If successful, it would impose an economic burden (albeit a relatively small one) on the US, disturb the delicate power balances in the Balkans, reopen the question of Greek territorial claims on Northern Epirus, and lead to additional frictions between Italy and Yugoslavia. It could invite unpredictable retaliatory aggression on Yugoslavia, Albania, and elsewhere (e.g., Berlin, Iran, Indochina) and even possibly risk starting World War III inadvertently, by placing the Soviets in a position they couldn’t accept and forcing them to react. If unsuccessful, the failure would produce a major psychological victory for the Kremlin and severely strain the relationships of Western Allies.
On the other hand, Yatsevitch argued, it would be equally unwise for the United States to abandon or substantially reduce its ongoing program of covert and clandestine action toward Albania. Over the past four years, the US had built a respectable store of assets in the form of tested agents, political influences, followers both inside and outside the country, operational material, and know-how. While not sufficient to detach Albania from the Soviet orbit, these assets had value and would provide a useful contribution to a broadened effort at a proper time. At the least, Yatsevitch pointed out, they dampened the ambitions of other powers, Yugoslavia first among them, to attempt unilateral action. At the most, they frustrated the Kremlin’s efforts to develop Albania into a useful political and strategic instrument.
The reasonable course of action, Yatsevitch said, was to continue ongoing efforts to maintain the spirit of resistance by carefully crafted propaganda, retain and strengthen the Albanian political assets, preserve the US bargaining power, achieve a broadening area of agreement with Yugoslavia, and “play for breaks,” which for Yatsevitch meant taking more drastic action if circumstances allowed or the national policy required.
The only argument against this course was that it would be impossible to maintain internal resistance much longer. The resistance spirit would be broken unless decisive actions were taken with the clear goal of overthrowing the Communist government. A gradual erosion of Albanian morale would have far less serious consequences than a premature and unsuccessful coup, Yatsevitch wrote. However, available information indicated no approaching breaking point but rather hardened and more durable resistance against the government.9 The information Yatsevitch referenced in his analysis came from intelligence reports being received from the Apple team, which, unbeknownst to Yatsevitch, were fed to them by the Sigurimi in their efforts to entice the CIA to send additional agents and resources to Albania.
* * *
The mood in Washington in the first half of 1953 called for more action rather than caution. The new Eisenhower administration, inaugurated at the beginning of the year, wanted to differentiate itself from the Truman administration, which the Republicans had branded during the presidential campaign as timid against the Soviets and focused on a policy of passive containment rather than aggressive rollback actions. In fulfilling this new direction, the administration expected the CIA to put into play the paramilitary capabilities of its recently created Directorate of Plans. With his characteristic enthusiasm, Frank Wisner, the newly named Deputy Director for Plans (DDP), steered the organization toward maximum development of covert action in preference to clandestine collection of intelligence.
On June 25, 1953, Wisner sent a memo to all area division chiefs requesting their input on aggressive actions that could be taken in their areas of r
esponsibility. Responding to Wisner’s memo became one of the first tasks for John “Jocko” Richardson in his new assignment as chief of the Southeast European branch at the Directorate of Plans, when he took over the responsibilities of Yatsevitch.
Richardson was born in Burma, where his father, a geologist, was prospecting for oil. He grew up in Whittier, California, a Quaker town surrounded by orange and lemon groves. Richard Nixon was one class ahead of him all through high school and college.10 Richardson began his intelligence career during World War II in the US Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps. He was instrumental in tracking down and capturing German spies in Italy during 1944–1945. After the war, he switched to the Central Intelligence Group, the precursor to the CIA, and worked on a number of assignments in Italy and Austria, where he earned praise for his integrity and professionalism. His assignment as chief of the Southeast European branch, in fact, had been a promotion for a successful operation he had run in Vienna turning and handling a Russian military intelligence officer.11
Richardson prepared his response to Wisner’s request with the collaboration of one of his deputies, E. Howard Hunt, recently transferred to Washington after having served as Mexico City’s OPC chief of station for the past two and a half years. Hunt later described his assignment to the Southeast European branch as follows: “True to what must be unpublished government specifications to hire the worst person for a job, I found out that my new position was as chief of covert operations for an area of the world that I knew absolutely nothing about—the Balkans.”12
On June 30, 1953, Richardson wrote to Wisner that it was the “fondest dream” of his branch to overthrow the Hoxha regime in Albania by fall of 1954. The plan that Richardson presented was not as detailed or substantiated as the one that Weckerling and Yatsevitch had prepared earlier, which had been full of organizational diagrams, estimates of force strength, and activity descriptions for the strike force. Both plans had in common the need to broaden the NCFA and give it the traits of a provisional government in exile as a prerequisite to preparing the ground for the coup d’état.
The Weckerling plan had proposed a strike force of over 10,000 men from the outside complemented by another 10,000 insurgents within the country within the first thirty days. Richardson’s plan required only 1,000 to 1,500 Albanians entering Albania overland from Greece and Yugoslavia and from the sea by amphibious landings at the time of the coup d’état. This much smaller force would be backed up by 4,000 men that the Yugoslavs claimed to have organized under the Prizreni League of Albanian Refugees, as well as units of the Yugoslav and Greek armies, standing by to intimidate the Communist government in Tirana and to assist if called upon. If Yugoslav and Greek forces were involved, they would retire beyond their Albanian frontiers immediately upon the successful conclusion of the revolution. The American Sixth Fleet would engage in maneuvers in the Adriatic and Ionian Seas during the revolution to cover the amphibious landings and to assist the revolutionaries in the name of the United Nations if called upon to do so. The fleet would remain in the area for some weeks to discourage any retaliatory action by the Soviet Union or any of its satellites.
Another difference between the Richardson plan and earlier plans is that for the first time it envisioned the direct involvement of Americans in the operations on the ground, brushing aside the “plausible deniability” constraints that had been in place up to that point. In one instance, American experts would be recruited and infiltrated as soon as weather permitted in order to direct resistance activities and establish a dependable trained nucleus around which the population would rally on signal. These experts would operate primarily in the north, where Richardson assumed a skeleton resistance organization already existed, based on reports he had been receiving from the Apple team. They would be supplied by airdrops with food, arms, and ammunition for the revolt. In the second instance, in the weeks leading up to the coup, the CIA would infiltrate into Albania a high-level American agent with authority to contact Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu and offer up to $500,000 and future safety for their defection in place, which would include issuing orders to the army and the Sigurimi to lay down their arms at the appropriate moment.
What makes the Richardson plan striking, though, is the bold and brazen disregard for the legality of some of the other actions it recommended. It proposed that the CIA print sufficient counterfeited Albanian lek banknotes to finance the agent operations. Fiend staff officers, frustrated by their inability to procure genuine leks despite extensive efforts to do so, had been advocating this action for some time. As early as October 1951, Wisner had presented a request to the director of Central Intelligence, Walter B. Smith, to authorize the reproduction of at least one million Albanian leks, approximately $26,000 at the artificial exchange rate of that time, to sustain CIA agent teams in Albania during the six-month period beginning May 1, 1952.
Next, the agency would procure five submarines to effect a complete blockade of all shipping into and out of Albania. The submarines, Richardson wrote, would not be identifiable as American but would be pirate vessels operating under no flag out of Greece and Italy and would be manned by “volunteers” without papers. Both countries would be required to assist in enforcing the blockade by stopping all commerce between themselves and Albania. Right before the launch date of the coup, the CIA would kidnap the Albanian ministers in both Rome and Paris. Clandestine radio, leaflet drops, and the NCFA newspaper would announce that the ministers had defected.
Other psychological warfare activities would be stepped up and take an increasingly inflammatory line as the day of revolt approached. All émigré leaders would broadcast appeals urging their followers to join the resistance movement. By August 1954, the members of the military junta would be dropped into Albania to lead the insurrection. Simultaneous action by the resistance forces from within and the striking force from the outside would end in the successful overthrow of the Communist regime and the establishment of an acceptable interim government under UN auspices, to be replaced as soon as possible by a freely elected democratic government.13
It was a highly optimistic plan that surely provided what the CIA customers had asked, aggressive actions against the Communist opponents. At the same time, it was infused with a bravado that shaded into arrogance, especially when one takes into account that the plan contained no analysis of risks or even a minimal attempt to identify where things could go wrong, let alone to develop mitigation actions or contingencies to counter the enemy’s moves. Unfortunately for the agency, it was not an aberration, but rather a byproduct of the atmosphere, attitude, and mindset that existed at the time, which gave birth to similar plans for action around the world, whose outcomes would shape the legacy of the CIA for years to come.
* * *
Dulles submitted the plan for the Albanian coup d’état to the Psychological Strategy Board on July 29, 1953,14 where it was discussed at several meetings throughout the summer of 1953, “with continued enthusiasm for a program of action both broad enough and strong enough to accomplish the objective of detaching Albania from the Iron Curtain bloc if possible.”15 As these discussions were occurring, news began coming out of Iran about the coup d’état that had overthrown the Mossadegh government and brought to power Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the new shah. Kim Roosevelt, one of the early planners of Project Fiend, had moved on to lead the OPC’s Middle East division in 1950 and was the principal planner of the Iran operation, code name TPAJAX, which, like the Albanian project, was a joint venture between the CIA and SIS.
The coup was successful, thanks to a large extent to the energetic efforts of Roosevelt in Teheran, who during the critical phase of the operation cut off all communications with London and Washington and took complete operational control. At a meeting with SIS chief John A. Sinclair afterward, Roosevelt gave as his reason for acting this way that: “if they had simply reported what they were doing, London and Washington would have thought they were crazy and told them to stop immediately; if they had
reported the reasons why they felt justified in taking such action, they would have had no time to take action; accordingly, they followed the third course which was to act, and report practically nothing.”16
On August 26, Winston Churchill, bedridden and in bad shape physically, received Roosevelt at 10 Downing Street and heard a firsthand account of how the operation had been executed. Churchill expressed envy of Roosevelt’s role and wished he had been a few years younger to serve under his command. “If the success of this operation could be maintained,” Churchill said, “it would be the finest operation since the end of the war.”17
That same day, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Psychological Strategy Board met in Washington and decided that the situation in Iran needed to settle and the victory there had to be consolidated before other actions were attempted that could aggravate the Soviet Union. Two weeks earlier, on August 12, the National Security Council had authorized covert action in Guatemala to overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz, leading to the expectation of further turmoil. As a result, the PSB decided that “the question of a covert operation in Albania be put on ice for the moment being.” At the same time, it requested that preparations be made to put the US in a position to act quickly and decisively when such a covert operation might become feasible and desirable. At the end of August 1953, the PSB established a working group with representatives from the Department of Defense, CIA, and State Department to explore the problem thoroughly and to recommend actions that the appropriate departments and agencies could take to prepare for such an operation.18
Operation Valuable Fiend Page 26
