As their financial reserves were depleted, Zog and Geraldine resorted to selling jewelry from their personal collection in order to provide for Zog’s dependents and his retinue. The Ostier Jewelers of New York put up for auction on April 1959 seventeen jewelry pieces that they had custom-designed in 1938 for Geraldine’s wedding. Among the items auctioned was the diamond diadem that Geraldine had worn at her marriage ceremony topped with the heraldic crest of Albania—a helmet surmounted by the head of the white Albanian mountain goat.15
Zog spent his days in France writing the story of his life, which Geraldine translated from Albanian into French. He had planned four volumes but was reported to have finished only two. His lifelong habit of chain smoking caused his health to deteriorate quickly. He died on April 9, 1961, in the Foch Hospital in Suresnes, a suburb of Paris, at the age of sixty-five.16 He was buried in a Paris cemetery, where he remained for over fifty years. In November 2012, as part of the commemorations of Albania’s one-hundredth anniversary of independence, Zog’s remains were repatriated from France. He was buried with state honors in the newly built Royal Mausoleum in Tirana.
Hasan Dosti remained in the United States after the dismantling of the NCFA. He kept a low public profile in the hope that the Communist regime would stop persecuting the seven children he had left behind in Albania. All of them suffered in prisons and deportation camps until the fall of the Communist regime. Dosti died on January 31, 1991, in Los Angeles at the age of ninety-six.17
Abas Kupi settled in 1955 in the south of France, close to King Zog. A few years after Zog’s death he immigrated to the United States, where he settled in Queens, Long Island, in 1967. He always remained attached to the .38 Colt revolver given to him by Colonel Low in the summer of 1949. In 1971, he caused a minor incident at Kennedy International Airport when he brought the revolver on board an American Airlines plane. To the Port Authority policemen who searched and detained him, he described his occupation as unemployed.18 Kupi died in Freeport, Long Island, in 1976 at the age of seventy-five.19
Abas Ermenji and Said Kryeziu were the only member of the original NCFA leadership who lived to see the fall of the Communist regime in 1991. Kryeziu settled in the United States in 1959 and lived in New York until 1993, when he died at the age of eighty-two.20 Ermenji, after breaking away from NCFA, moved to Paris where he created the National Democratic Committee for a Free Albania. He returned to Albania in 1991 and reconstituted the Balli Kombëtar, which he tried, unsuccessfully, to promote into a political force in the Albanian post-Communist scene. He died in Paris in 2003 at the age of ninety.
The three principal leaders of the Blloku Kombëtar Indipendent remained in Italy. Gjon Markagjoni died in 1966. Ismail Vërlaci died in 1985. Ernest Koliqi continued to teach at the University of Rome, write, and translate until his death in 1975. His works did not become available in Albania until 1991. Xhafer Deva moved to the United States in 1956, where he lived in obscurity until his death in 1978. An obituary in the Palo Alto Times on May 27, 1978, said that Deva was assistant supervisor in the mailing service department at Stanford University, where he had worked between 1959 and 1971.21
* * *
After resigning from MI-6 in July 1951, Kim Philby spent several years fending off inquiries and investigations by MI-5 and MI-6 into his activities as a Soviet agent. He was officially cleared in October 1955 when the British Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan publicly exonerated him in a speech in the House of Commons. In August 1956 he moved to Beirut as a correspondent for the Observer and the Economist, where he resumed collaboration with MI-6. His contacts with the KGB, which had been suspended since his return from Washington in 1951, were renewed shortly after.
As years went by, additional evidence surfaced that removed any doubts in the eyes of the British SIS of Philby’s KGB connections. On January 1963, Nicholas Elliott, an old friend of Philby’s and former SIS chief of station in Beirut, confronted him with the evidence. Offering him immunity from prosecution, he was able to extract a verbal confession on January 10, 1963. They were supposed to meet again at the British embassy to formalize the deal, but on the night of January 23, 1963, Philby boarded the Russian freighter Dolmatova destined for Odessa.22
Far from giving him a hero’s welcome in the Soviet Union, the KGB kept Philby at arm’s length. One faction within the KGB had always suspected him of being a British double agent. Even those who genuinely trusted him knew that his value as an intelligence officer was over once he was recalled from Washington. He spent his years in Moscow translating for the Russians and training intelligence officers they were preparing to send to the West. In 1968 he published his memoir, My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy, in which he recounts his involvement in the early days of the Albanian operation without providing any indication that he had played a role in the failure of these operations, which was attributed to him later.
Recollections of those who knew him in Moscow show that Philby’s Soviet reality was very different from the rosy utopia he had imagined during his Cambridge years. He found solace in the bottle, although it seems his drinking prowess hit its limits in Moscow. Vladimir Lyubimov, a Soviet spy who had trained with Philby for an assignment to London, recalled: “I met Philby quite a lot and drank more than one bottle of whisky with him, although all the talk about him being a terrible drinker are exaggerated.”23
Philby died in Moscow on May 11, 1988, at the age of seventy-six. In death, he received the recognition he was not awarded in life. He was buried with full military honors and in 1990 was depicted in a commemorative stamp of the USSR postal service. The Soviet Union, the country to which Philby devoted fifty-five years of his life, ceased to exist in 1991.
* * *
Enver Hoxha remained the absolute ruler of Albania until his death in 1985. His first ten years in power, between 1944 and 1954, were a prolonged and tenacious fight for the survival not only of his regime but also of his own physical self. The pressure traumatized him psychologically and fed the obsessive paranoia that would drive his behavior for the rest of his life. Among the obsessions impressed by the experiences of those years were his hatred for Tito and the Yugoslavs; his absolute certainty that the Americans and the CIA were actively working against him; and his adoration for Stalin.
When Khrushchev came to power in 1954 and embarked on a course of de-Stalinization, rekindling relations with Tito, and peaceful coexistence with the United States, Hoxha was the only leader of the so-called people’s democracies in Europe who refused to follow his lead, forcing Khrushchev to break all ties with Albania in 1961. Thus, the CIA’s goal of removing Albania from the Soviet orbit was accomplished, albeit not exactly as Wisner and Kennan had envisioned in 1949. Hoxha aligned himself with China against both the Soviet Union and the United States during the years of the Cultural Revolution. When Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping began the course of rapprochement with the United States, Hoxha broke off the relations with China too, leaving Albania completely isolated in the late 1970s.
Each one of these major realignments was preceded and followed by Hoxha’s infamous purges of real, perceived, and imaginary enemies, which sent dozens of his fervent followers in front of the firing squad and thousands of innocent Albanians to prisons and hard labor camps. It is still not clearly understood what pushed Hoxha to turn repeatedly against his closest collaborators and eliminate them without mercy. Explanations have ranged from his mental imbalance and Stalin-like paranoia to succession battles orchestrated in the background by his wife, infamously known as Lady Macbeth of Tirana. Yet another hypothesis can be advanced in light of the psychological warfare operations that the CIA carried out as part of Project Fiend. Did Hoxha fall victim to the “poison pills” the CIA may have sent him over the years, directly or through intermediaries from other intelligence services? Did Communist personalities who were purged become the victims of calumnious letters against them or “compromising” documents planted deliberately for the Sigurimi to find and report to Hoxha? It is
a hypothesis that may well be proven if and when CIA declassifies operational records of their activities after 1960.
Mehmet Shehu became prime minister of Albania in 1954 and retained this position until his death on the night of December 17–18, 1981. The authorities declared the official cause of death a suicide during a nervous breakdown, although an autopsy was not performed and suspicions of murder have remained unanswered ever since. Although the true cause of Shehu’s death remains a mystery, it is generally accepted that he was the victim of the succession struggle that heated up in the early 1980s, as Hoxha’s health was deteriorating. After Shehu’s death, Hoxha declared him enemy number one and a “poly-agent” of the American, Yugoslav, and Soviet secret services. Hoxha alleged that Shehu had been recruited in the American service as early as the mid-1930s by his former schoolteacher, Harry T. Fultz, with whom Shehu had maintained contact over the years, according to Hoxha’s tale.
Kadri Hazbiu became minister of interior in 1954, a post he retained until 1980, when he became minister of defense. Although he had been a protégé of Shehu all his life, Hazbiu was one of the most vocal supporters of Hoxha in the attacks that led to Shehu’s downfall in 1981. Ten months after Shehu’s demise, Hoxha turned on Hazbiu as well, accusing him of being a key member of Shehu’s spy ring. Within a matter of weeks, Hazbiu was stripped of all the positions in the Party and government structures, arrested, and jailed. He was tried, sentenced to death, and shot in September 1983.
* * *
After Hoxha’s death in 1985, Albania continued on the path he had set for her as the only Stalinist country in Europe, completely isolated from the West and from the East. The first visible cracks in the armor of the regime appeared in July of 1990, when thousands of Albanians scaled the fences and the walls of Western embassies in Tirana, requesting asylum from the Communist government. The grounds of the United States legation, which at the time housed the Italian embassy, became a place of refuge for hundreds of men, women, and children of all ages and from all backgrounds, united by their desire to escape to the West. Popular discontent grew despite the government’s efforts to quell it. The first opposition parties were created in December 1990. A swelling of demonstrations culminated in the toppling of statues of Hoxha and Stalin in Tirana and other major cities in Albania in February 1991. The Communists were voted out of power in March 1992.
The United States and Albania reestablished diplomatic relations in 1991, sixty-two years after they were interrupted by the Italian occupation. Albania joined NATO in April 2009, thus accomplishing the goal of establishing a democratic Albania friendly to the West, which Operation Fiend had tried to achieve sixty years before. Albania today maintains friendly relations with the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Greece, and the half-dozen countries that sprang up after the collapse of Yugoslavia.
As of 2014, Greece continues to maintain on the books the anachronistic law declaring a state of war between Greece and Albania, passed by the Greek parliament after Italian forces in Albania attacked Greece in October 1940.
Notes
Prologue
1 “First Team Drop into HBPixie, 11–12 November 1950,” BGFIEND documents, November 13, 1950.
2 Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, “The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954-1974,” History Staff, Central Intelligence Agency. 1992.
3 “First Team Drop into HBPixie, 11–12 November 1950,” BGFIEND documents, November 13, 1950.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Major D. H. Berger, USMC, “The Use of Covert Paramilitary Activity as a Policy Tool: An Analysis of Operations Conducted by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, 1949–1951,” Federation of American Scientists, Intelligence Resource Program, May 22, 1995.
Chapter 1: The Office of Policy Coordination
1 William Colby and Peter Forbath, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 70.
2 Ibid., 71.
3 Mark F. Wyatt, interview, Cold War, CNN, 1998.
4 Gianni Agnelli, interview, Cold War, CNN, 1998.
5 Mark F. Wyatt, interview, Cold War, CNN, 1998.
6 “NSC 4-A, NSC Minutes, 4th Meeting,” NSC documents, December 17, 1947.
7 “NSC 10/2,” NSC documents, June 18, 1948.
8 Christopher Felix (pseudonym for James McCargar), A Short Course in the Secret War (Lanham, Maryland: Madison Books, 2001), 280.
9 Ellis Wisner and Wendy Hazard, interviews with author, June 2013.
10 Ibid.
11 “Current Status of Project BGFIEND, with Particular Reference to OPC Organization,” BGFIEND documents, August 16, 1949.
12 “History of OPC/EE-1,” BGFIEND documents, n.d.
13 “James G. McCargar,” UNESCO in the Spotlight, May 31, 2007.
14 Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 71.
15 E. Howard Hunt and Greg Aunapu, American Spy (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2007), 40.
16 Thomas, The Very Best Men, 40.
17 Hunt and Aunapu, American Spy, 50.
18 Thomas, The Very Best Men, 63.
19 “Current Status of Project BGFIEND, with Particular Reference to OPC Organization,” BGFIEND documents, August 16, 1949.
20 Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 154.
Chapter 2: Albania between 1912 and 1949
1 “Former King Zog of Albania Dead,” New York Times (1923–Current file), April 10, 1961.
2 Nicholas C. Pano, “Albania: The Last Bastion of Stalinism,” East Central Europe, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1982), 188.
3 US House of Representatives, 83rd Congress, 2nd Session Select Committee on Communist Aggression, Communist Takeover and Occupation of Albania, 1954.
4 “Former King Zog of Albania Dead.”
5 “King Zog’s Wedding Celebrations in Tirana,” The West Australian, April 30, 1938.
6 Owen Pearson, Albania in the Twentieth Century, A History, vol. I: Albania and King Zog (London, New York: Center for Albanian Studies in association with I. B. Tauris, 2004), 401.
7 “King Zog’s Wedding Celebrations in Tirana.”
8 “CIA Information Report No 00-B-8501-49,” BGFIEND documents, n.d.
9 Grose, Operation Rollback, 154.
10 Pearson, Albania in the Twentieth Century, 483.
11 Peter Lucas, The OSS in World War II Albania (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2007), 22–24.
12 Lucas, The OSS in World War II Albania, 140.
13 “OSS Biographies of Albanian Leaders,” NARA, Tirana US Mission General Records, 1945.
14 “Midhat Frasheri, Albanian Ex-Aide,” New York Times (1923–Current file), October 4, 1949.
15 Julian Amery, Sons of the Eagle (London: Macmillan & Co., 1948), 189.
16 Robert Elsie, Historical Dictionary of Albania (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 116.
17 Amery, Sons of the Eagle, 57–58.
18 Ibid., 65.
19 Dosti Family, Hasan Dosti: Një Jetë për Çështjen Shqiptare (Tirana: Botart, 2008), 122–123.
20 Amery, Sons of the Eagle, 190.
21 “Albanians Seize Briton,” New York Times (1923–Current file), February 16, 1944.
22 Leigh White, “Guerrillas of Albania,” New York Times (1923–Current file), March 13, 1949.
23 Robert Elsie, Historical Dictionary of Kosovo (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 106.
24 Owen Pearson, Albania in the Twentieth Century, A History, vol. II: Albania in Occupation and War (London, New York: Center for Albanian Studies in association with I. B. Taurus, 2005), 388.
25 Amery, Sons of the Eagle, 337.
26 Bernd Jürgen Fischer, Albania at War, 1939–1945 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999), 229.
27 Lucas, The OSS in Wor
ld War II Albania, 150.
28 Ibid., 182.
29 “J.E. Jacobs Telegram No. 163,” NARA, Tirana US Mission General Records, June 27, 1946.
30 Paolo Benanti, La Guerra Piu Lunga (Rome, Italy: Mursia, 1964), 257.
31 Adam B. Siegel, “The Use of Naval Forces in the Post-War Era: US Navy and US Marine Corps Crisis Response Activity, 1946–1990.” The Navy Department Library. n.d.
32 Owen Pearson, Albania in the Twentieth Century, A History, vol. III: Albania as Dictatorship and Democracy, 1945–99 (London, New York: Center for Albanian Studies in association with I. B. Tauris, 2006), 32.
33 “Corfu Channel (United Kingdom v. Albania)” The Hague Justice Portal, February 15, 2013; and “Albania expected to resume secret talks with Britain” CREST Database, August 26, 1985. Currency conversion based on calculator at www.fxtop.com. Conversion to today’s dollars based on the website US Inflation Calculator at www.usinflationcalculator.com.
34 Karen Mingst, “International Court of Justice (ICJ),” Encyclopædia Britannica Online. n.d.
35 Tony Barber, “6.5m in war gold returns to Albania after 49 years,” Independent, February 23, 1996.
36 Lucas, The OSS in World War II Albania, 160.
37 Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 181–182.
38 “The Albanian Operation,” BGFIEND documents, March 21, 1949.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Pearson, Albania in the Twentieth Century, vol. III, 38.
42 Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, 143.
43 Cyrus L. Sulzberger, “Exiles Map Fight on Tirana Regime,” New York Times (1923–Current file), August 29, 1949.
44 Raymond Zickel and Walter R. Iwaskiw, editors, “Albania: A Country Study,” Country Studies, Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, 1994.
45 Sulzberger, “Exiles Map Fight on Tirana Regime.”
46 Cyrus L. Sulzberger, “West Held Easing Stand on Albania,” New York Times (1923–Current file), March 27, 1950.
47 “Summary of MacLean Profiles for Albanian Politicians,” BGFIEND documents.
Operation Valuable Fiend Page 31
