Not long after, his entire family was sent to a newly drained swamp in central Albania, near Gradishta, where they joined Abas Kupi’s wife and six children. Together with other persecuted families, they founded a village inhabited by internal exiles and opponents of the regime for the next thirty-seven years. One of Dosti’s sons married Kupi’s daughter41 there, thus creating a stronger bond between the two families suffering under the Communists than their fathers had been able to create as leaders of the NCFA in exile.
It is easy then to understand the sense of bitterness against their sponsors that a few of the Albanian participants in the US-British operation expressed in interviews they gave in the mid-1980s to Nicholas Bethell for his book Betrayed, the earliest account of their activities. Abas Ermenji, a member of the NCFA’s military junta, told Bethell in 1983: “We were deceived by the British and Americans. They promised to provide us with the means to liberate our country. In actual fact, they only trained a handful of people. . . . [T]he British and Americans were treating Albania like a guinea-pig. If it had succeeded, they would have tried another country and another people.”42
Bethell carried the banner of reproach to the British and Americans for using the Albanians for their own purposes. At least as far as the American side of the operations goes, three reproachable moments are: (1) not sharing with the NCFA the decision to remove the elimination of the Hoxha regime from the scope of the operations; (2) prolonging the reconnaissance stage of operations despite the mounting casualties; and (3) incompetence of some of the case officers who ran the operations.
However, going a little deeper in the analysis, it is easy to see that the presence of the United States in the region and its active involvement in the Balkans at the time contributed to maintain the stability in the region. Its forceful diplomacy in support of Albania’s territorial integrity and continued independence, especially with the British, Greek, and Yugoslav governments, most likely assured the continued existence of the Albanian state after World War II, just as it had guaranteed it after World War I.
One final perspective to consider is the relative inexperience of the Albanian political leaders who were involved in the operation. Of them, McCargar said:
There is no way by which the Albanians, under their own steam, could have ever mounted any kind of an operation which would have had any hope of liberating their own country. They had to address themselves to some larger power which would provide the necessary assistance. There’s an advantage to being a supplicant if you know how to play that role. The Albanians representing the political groups were not naïve and, in fact, some of them were very good operators. They knew how to intimate a little blackmail here and there. They just were not as good at the supplicant role as some. They didn’t have the experience.43
McCargar’s statement is not necessarily an indictment of the individual NCFA leaders per se. It is rather an indication that the level of political maturity that the Albanians as a nation enjoyed in the middle of the twentieth century, embodied in their political leaders in exile, was not high enough to convince a major power like the United States to support them all the way. Moving the dial of history forward by sixty years reveals that Albanian politicians at the beginning of the twenty-first century have learned how to be much better “supplicants.” They aligned themselves firmly with the United States in the 1990s when the Balkans came again at the forefront of the US national and security interests. Through key events, such as the transition to democracy in Albania, the conflict in Bosnia in 1995, and the war in Kosovo in 1999, politicians from Albania and Kosovo were able to keep their ever-present internal differences in check and articulate with a united voice their national interests before the international community. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, against the United States, the predominantly Muslim Albanians have given unwavering support to the US in the war on terror and shown in practice the benefits that religious tolerance can bring to a nation like theirs. Because of the increased maturity of their political class, and with the strong support of the United States, the Albanians have been able to attain two significant accomplishments for their nation: Albania’s admittance to NATO and the recognition of Kosovo as an independent state.
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Looking at the experience from a broader geopolitical perspective, it is hard to miss the implications of Project Fiend and its outcome. Although its initial goal was to overthrow the Hoxha government, the Albanian operation never developed beyond the reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering stage. It was from the outset and remained throughout its existence a probe to see if covert operations could break a Soviet satellite away from Moscow’s orbit. The results of the experiment showed that it was extremely hard, if not impossible, to achieve this goal. The Communists had established a firm chokehold on their countries that could not be broken with the type and magnitude of covert actions that the US and Great Britain were prepared to engage in, without risking an all-out war with the Soviet Union. Rolling back the Iron Curtain was too hard. Rather than spending resources in countries already under Communist rule, the agency had better chances of success trying to stop Communism from spreading in countries still outside the Soviet umbrella, primarily Italy and France in Europe and especially countries in Latin America and Indochina.
Disengagement from Europe was hard and painful to accept, especially when Soviet tanks crushed spontaneous challenges to Communist rule, first in Berlin in 1953, then in Hungary in 1956, and later in Czechoslovakia in 1968. For the people trapped on the other side of the Iron Curtain, it often felt like they were abandoned, forgotten, and lost without a hope. Yet, considering the events from today’s viewpoint, it is not hard to see how that disengagement led to an unprecedented period of peace in the continent. When the conditions were right, Europe experienced the most significant reversal of fortunes in recent history, with a relatively peaceful and jubilant replacement of diametrically opposed economic, political, and ideological systems throughout the continent. Communism came to Europe with a roar in 1917, but left with a whisper in the late 1980s to early 1990s.
Thus, while the botched CIA activities to roll back the Iron Curtain in Europe may have seemed a failure at the time and for decades afterward, in the end they contributed to the peaceful establishment of pro-Western democracies in most of the continent. Operations like those in Guatemala and Iran, held as spectacular successes initially, turned out to be preludes to disasters. Guatemala sank into a civil war that lasted for decades and cost the lives of hundreds of thousands. The shah of Iran was run out of power in 1979, and the fervently anti-American theocracy that has ruled the country ever since remains today one of the major challenges confronting the United States foreign policy.
With the benefit of hindsight then, one can make a reasonable argument that the world today is a better place because of efforts spent on Project Fiend and lessons learned from its failures, despite the terrible price in lost lives, pain, and suffering that a lot of participants had to pay.
Epilogue
Frank G. Wisner, the catalyst and inspiration of the early days of Office of Policy Coordination, continued through the mid-1950s to pour his heart and mind into directing actions against the Soviet Union and the Communist threat around the world. During one of his frequent tours of stations overseas, he was in Europe when the Hungarian Revolution exploded in 1956. The CIA had not instigated the spontaneous uprising, but Wisner strongly felt they ought to support it. When the White House decided not to intervene, Wisner obsessed about and suffered at a personal level the brutal Russian crackdown of the revolution in November 1956. Shortly after, he experienced a nervous breakdown. Upon his return to the United States, he took a leave of absence from the agency to treat his depression. He returned to service in 1959, no longer as deputy director of plans but as chief of station in London. He retired from the CIA in 1962 and moved to his farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where he spent many hours working in his garden and hunting. He also did some consulting and
engaged in a number of business ventures, some of which were focused in Laurel, Mississippi, the town where he was born and where a number of his relatives still lived. These activities were interrupted more and more frequently by bouts of depression, during which he felt deeply despondent. On October 29, 1965, Wisner lost his battle against depression and committed suicide. He was fifty-five years old when he died.
His son, Frank G. Wisner, Jr., joined the Foreign Service in 1961 and became one of the nation’s preeminent diplomats, serving as the United States ambassador to several countries. In 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appointed Ambassador Wisner as the special representative of the United States to the Kosovo Status Talks, where he played a crucial role in negotiating Kosovo’s independence from Serbia.
James McCargar transitioned from clandestine work back into the diplomatic service in 1950 and then resigned from the Foreign Service in 1953. In 1955 he joined the Free Europe Committee in Paris as director of European political, social, and cultural programs.1 In this capacity, his path crossed again with that of Abas Kupi and other former NCFA members when they attempted to create an Albanian Committee within the FEC.2 In later years, he worked for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the US National Commission on UNESCO. McCargar wrote and published articles, books, and works of fiction under his name and as Christopher Felix. He briefly described his experiences in the early days of the OPC and on Project Fiend in A Short Course in the Secret War, first published in 1963. In 1985, when asked if he regretted anything about his role in the Albanian operation, he said: “Obviously if I were doing it over again today, I’d do it differently. I’d do it much more hesitantly, much more cautiously, but that comes with age. I don’t regret the operation itself. I certainly regret the outcome for an awful lot of people. Some of those stories are pretty shattering. But the operation was a valid attempt. I think it could have been done much more prudently than it was.”3 James McCargar died in 2007 at the age of eighty-seven.
Robert Low went back to the State Department after leaving the CIA, where he handled Congressional relations. After moving to New York City in 1954, he entered local politics, serving two terms on the City Council during 1961 to 1969. He moved to San Francisco in 1996.4
Michael Burke gave up clandestine work in 1954, after five years with the CIA. At a ceremony in Washington, Allen Dulles awarded him the Distinguished Intelligence Medal with the following citation:
For the performance of outstanding services in planning and directing operations of the Central Intelligence Agency while serving as a senior officer in a foreign country. Through his unusual vision and foresight, his broad area and technical knowledge, skill in maintaining delicate liaison relationships, and outstanding qualities of leadership, he inspired a high level of performance on the part of his subordinates and contributed greatly to the successful conduct of operations in the foreign area.5
In the private sector, Burke took executive positions with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, CBS, the New York Yankees, and Madison Square Garden. He retired to Ireland in 1981. In 1984 he published his memoir, Outrageous Good Fortune, in which he provided a discreet and heavily sanitized version of his experience in Project Fiend. Burke was seventy years old when he died in 1987.
Gratian Yatsevitch followed in the footsteps of Kim Roosevelt, with whom he became acquainted in the early days of the Albanian operation. Yatsevitch was assigned to Teheran as the CIA station chief in Iran in the late 1950s. After retiring from government service in 1969, he went on to private business before retiring to Maine. His harrowing childhood experiences of the havoc brought upon Russia and the imperial family by the Bolshevik Revolution remained with him over the years. He remained decidedly opposed to everything Communist and sympathized over the years with the royal families he became acquainted with during his career in the military and the CIA. Yatsevitch maintained contact with the families of the king of Bulgaria, the shah of Iran, and King Zog, not as a CIA officer but as an individual and on a personal level. He corresponded with Queen Geraldine up to the end of his life in 1997 at the age of eighty-six.6
Joseph C. Lieb’s last act as the CIA liaison with the National Committee for Free Albania was in early May 1954, when he and Archibald Lyall, his British counterpart, read a joint announcement to the NCFA leaders in Rome informing them that they were leaving by the end of the month and would not be replaced. “It is the wish of our superiors that the Committee should henceforth conduct its own affairs, so far as possible, and it is their firm conviction that it is now capable of doing so,” they said.7 Lieb returned to Washington and in July 1954 the agency offered to hire him as an employee for a delicate assignment where he would apply his public relations skills toward helping the shah of Iran consolidate his power. Lieb would join the shah’s cabinet as a minister, but there was a twist: he would have to serve openly and, therefore, had to renounce his US citizenship. Lieb didn't find the idea wise and declined the offer. He returned to New York, where he resumed his advertising career, which later would lead him to become the worldwide advertising director for Pepsi. He moved his family to Northern California in the 1970s, where he semi-retired. Lieb passed away in March 1986 at the age of seventy-four.8
Alfred C. Ulmer returned to Washington in 1955 where he worked in the Far East division of the CIA before going back to Europe to head the CIA Paris station, always under diplomatic cover as first secretary of the embassy and special assistant to the ambassador. He retired from the CIA in 1962 and worked for several years for the Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos before launching his own investment company called Devon Securities. The company floundered for the first couple of years and he found himself heavily in debt, having sent four children to college, but he would say later that he had managed to pay off all his debts and maintain his good name and reputation. He ended his career working for Lombard, Odier and Company, a Swiss private investment bank, out of Geneva and Bermuda. In the late 1990s, he suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed but not defeated—he remained mentally engaged and continued investing in the market despite his severe speech impairment until he died in 2000 in Virginia Beach at the age of eighty-four.9
John H. Richardson took Ulmer’s place as chief of station in Athens in 1956, where he helped resettle some of the last remaining agents of the CIA Albanian operations. In 1958 he moved to the Philippines to head the CIA station in Manila and then took the assignment as chief of station in Saigon in early 1962. His CIA career there came to an abrupt end in October 1963, when Vietnamese newspapers blew his cover and identified him in print as the CIA station chief.10 In the early 1970s he retired and moved to Mexico. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, he was thrilled to see the accomplishment of the goal he had pursued throughout his career and amused at how quickly it all ended. “All that effort,” he told his son ruefully, “and the damn thing flops over like a cake.”11 Richardson died in Mexico in 1998 at the age of eighty-five.
E. Howard Hunt participated in the planning and conduct of the CIA operations against Castro, which led to the Bay of Pigs landing in 1961. After that, he became chief of covert action in the CIA’s newly formed Domestic Operation Division in charge of subsidizing, as a form of covert propaganda, the publication of books and articles in the United States and internationally. Hunt retired from the CIA in 1970 and was hired in 1971 by Nixon administration officials as one of the “plumbers” assigned to stop the leaks of government secrets.
In 1972, Hunt received orders from the White House to bug George McGovern’s campaign headquarters near Capitol Hill and the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate complex in search of evidence that “DNC was receiving illegal contributions from the North Vietnamese.”12 Hunt selected a handful of Cuban exiles from Miami he had known since Bay of Pigs days to carry out the operation. On May 26 and 27 they tried twice to break into the DNC offices at the Watergate without success because the Cubans could not pick the locks. One of them flew
down to Miami on the 28th and returned with the right tools. That evening, the men entered the DNC offices, where they took pictures of files and bugged phones. It turned out that they had not installed the bugging devices correctly, so they were ordered to break in again. On the night of June 16, 1972, the burglars went in for the fourth time, only to be spotted by a security guard who notified the DC police. From the Howard Johnson Hotel across the street, where he had mounted watch, Hunt saw the police load his guys in a white paddy wagon and drive off to the DC jail.13 The next morning, a young reporter from the Washington Post by the name of Bob Woodward learned that Hunt’s phone number had been found in the address book of one of the burglars, next to the initials “W. H.” It was the thread that led Woodward to unravel the Watergate scandal and ultimately forced President Nixon to resign rather than face impeachment and an almost certain removal from office. Hunt served thirty-three months in prison for his burglary, conspiracy, and wiretapping actions. A prolific writer throughout his life, he published dozens of spy novels and several memoirs. Hunt died in Florida in 2007.14
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King Zog never returned to the United States. After the Egyptian government allowed him to leave the country, Zog moved to France in July 1955 and settled in an almost empty villa on the French Riviera, with no servants and refusing all invitations. He sold his estate in Long Island, which had remained unoccupied since 1952 and had been vandalized by treasure hunters in search of Zog’s riches to such an extent that the next purchaser simply razed it to the ground and turned it into parkland.
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