Operation Valuable Fiend Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by Albert Lulushi

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Control Number: 2014004159

  ISBN: 978-62872-322-9

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-394-6

  Cover design by Owen Corrigan

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Enit, Alex, Anna, and Tereza

  “I am very strongly of the opinion that the lessons which are daily being borne in upon us by the development of this Project are to a considerable extent being neglected in favor of rapidly growing vested interests, and that as a result we stand a very good chance of being faced with a failure the nature and causes of which will be confused in an exchange of recriminations.”

  —From CIA memorandum “Current Status of Project BGFIEND,” August 16, 1949

  “One general feature, which seems to be common to many instances of controlled operations, is the unconscious effort on the part of all concerned to rationalize the appearance of security checks when used to indicate control. Such a reaction is natural when considered in terms of the case officer’s identification with the Agent. Obviously, however . . . such a rationalization negates the entire purpose of such checks.”

  —Chief, Communications Security Division, CIA, January 13, 1954

  “It’s part of a writer’s profession, as it’s part of a spy’s profession, to prey on the community to which he’s attached, to take away information—often in secret—and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it’s his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.”

  —John le Carré, September 25, 1977

  Contents

  List of Maps and Documents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  List of Acronyms

  List of Cryptonyms and Pseudonyms

  Note on the Pronunciation of Albanian Names

  Prologue

  1 The Office of Policy Coordination

  2 Albania between 1912 and 1949

  3 Genesis of Operation Fiend

  4 The National Committee for Free Albania

  5 Philby in Washington

  6 First Infiltrations of 1949

  7 Reevaluation of Project Fiend

  8 Labor Services Company 4000

  9 Odyssey of the First CIA Paramilitary Team

  10 Philby’s Exit

  11 Propaganda and Psychological and Economic Warfare

  12 Adverse Developments in the Infiltration Program

  13 A Bucket of Diamonds and Rubies

  14 A Rich Harvest of Bitter Fruit

  15 King Zog Overstays His Time in Egypt

  16 Planning the Fondest Dream

  17 The American Backers Are Obliged to Withdraw

  18 Lessons and Legacy of Project Fiend

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Maps and Documents

  Albania circa 1950

  The last note of the US mission in Albania to the Foreign Ministry

  Minutes of meeting between Zog I, King of the Albanians, and Burton Y. Berry, from the Office of Policy Coordination, in Alexandria, Egypt, on May 5, 1949

  Itineraries of the 1949 infiltration teams in southern Albania

  CIA-distributed leaflet about Soviet aid to Albania

  CIA-distributed leaflet featuring Nastradini, the sage in Albanian folklore

  CIA map indicating the status of teams in Albania by the end of October 1951

  CIA map indicating the area of operations of Apple team and the spot where the covert plane was hit by antiaircraft fire on October 24, 1953

  Operational map showing the movement of forces during the CIA-planned coup d’état in Albania

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to all those who made it possible for me to write this book. They include: employees at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, who helped me track hundreds of hardcopy and electronic documents from the CIA and Department of State archives; Alex Rankin and Laura Russo at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center for facilitating access and research of the McCargar and Burke collections; Breanne LaCamera at Columbia University Center for Oral History for tracking down interview transcripts of Col. Gratian M. Yatsevitch; and my friends in Albania Anton Ashta and Xhevdet Shehu for locating material from Albanian archives and sources.

  I received tremendous help and encouragement from those who read early drafts of the book and provided invaluable suggestions that improved the end product. They include Astrit Lulushi, Elez Biberaj, William E. Ryerson, Frank G. Wisner II, Ellis Wisner, Wendy Hazard, Gratian M. Yatsevitch III, Monica Morrill, Rose Dosti, Nicholas Pano, Marguerite Ulmer-Power, Jon Lieb, and David Robarge.

  A big thank you goes to my editor at Skyhorse Publishing, Cal Barksdale, who saw the value of the book from the beginning and provided great guidance throughout the editing and publishing process.

  Last but not least, infinite thanks to Enit, Alex, Anna, Esmeralda and “Slim Shady” who put up with my writing schedule and created a warm and cozy environment so I could finish the project, even when the feat seemed so far from possible.

  Introduction

  In 1949 a newly minted branch of the CIA, flush with money and burning with determination to roll back the Iron Curtain, embarked on the first paramilitary operation in the history of the agency. Theirs was an elaborate plan, coordinated with the British Secret Intelligence Service, aimed at detaching the weakest of the Soviet satellites in Europe, Albania, from Moscow’s orbit. The operation suffered a dismal failure and the CIA substantially shut it down by 1954.

  I had heard the story growing up in Albania in the 1970s and 1980s, where the Communist propaganda machine trumpeted it as a triumph of the Albanian secret police, the Sigurimi, over the “reactionary forces of internal and external enemies.” All of these enemies, the story went, were controlled by the CIA and its numerous subordinate foreign intelligence agencies, including the British, Greek, Yugoslav, and Italian services. Until the fall of the Communist regime in 1992, a museum of the Sigurimi in Tirana prominently displayed clothes, parachutes, radio transmitters, and weapons of the so-called “diversionists” together with gruesome pictures of those who were killed next to pictures of those who were captured and put on show trials between 1949 and 1954.

  When I came to the United States in the early 1990s, I read the version of the story recounted by Nicholas Bethell in his book Betrayed, in which he places the blame for the failure of the operation on Kim Philby, the most famous Soviet mole inside the British Secret Intelligence Services. Philby had served as the joint commander of the operation in its early days. It s
ounded like a reasonable explanation, and I didn’t think much about it until the fall of 2012, when I reread Bethell’s book over the Thanksgiving weekend. Going over the sequence of events, I realized that Philby had been involved with the effort only until the summer of 1951 when he fell under suspicion, whereas the operation sustained most of its casualties afterward. It was logical to think that other factors must have been in play to cause the compromise.

  I began researching what others had written about the story, only to find that most authors had retold Bethell’s version of the events or had treated the subject in a cursory fashion, based on a limited set of primary sources that had become available over the years. To satisfy my intellectual curiosity, I made a list of questions I wanted answered about this story: Why did the CIA choose to conduct an operation of this kind? Why did they pick Albania? Who were the key players in the operation, from all sides? Where did they come from and how did their background influence their choices and actions during the operation? What happened to them afterward? What were the lessons the agency learned from the Albanian operation? What were the warning signs that were missed, and did they have an effect on other operations that followed? Ultimately, how are we to judge the outcome and legacy of the operations conducted at the time from today’s perspective?

  I began a journey of research and discovery in order to answer these questions. It took me to the National Archives, where I found a surprisingly large number of CIA documents—declassified as of 2007—about the operation BGFIEND, also known as Project Fiend, which thoroughly detail how the agency planned and conducted their activities. Given the usual reluctance of the CIA to reveal sources and methods of operations, I found these documents fascinating in that they provide a unique insight into the actions of the paramilitary arm of the agency—the precursor of today’s National Clandestine Service—in the early and formative years of its existence.

  Further insight into the character and thoughts of a number of CIA officers who participated in the events came from materials I found in personal archives of James McCargar and E. Michael Burke located at Boston University, as well as from interviews with sons and daughters of Frank Wisner, Gratian Yatsevitch, Joseph Lieb, and Alfred Ulmer.

  Albanian nationalists who participated in the operation spoke or wrote very little about their activities in those years, in order to protect family members trapped in Albania from the continued wrath and persecution by the Communist government. Nevertheless, I was able to capture a glimpse of their feelings about the operation from conversations with family members of Hasan Dosti, from transcripts of interviews with Abaz Ermenji by Robert Elsie, and from other material that I found in the McCargar and Burke archives.

  I also tried to research and incorporate in the story the perspective of the Communist opposition to the operation. Unfortunately, primary source documents remain mostly locked away in the Sigurimi archives. When the political will and resources allow these archives to be opened, we may learn exactly how the Sigurimi learned about specific details of the operation, the role of Soviet advisers in the conduct of the operation, the interrogation techniques that the Sigurimi used against captured agents, and other aspects of this story that remain in the dark.

  Nevertheless, I was able to leverage interviews and memoirs published in Albania since the fall of Communism by members of the Sigurimi. These accounts continue to glorify Sigurimi’s role in crushing any opposition to the Communist regime in its early days; therefore, I filtered them rigorously in order to separate pertinent facts from diatribes and praises to a bygone system. The result is a multi-faceted story, which presents elements of the operation from the perspective of both sides: those who participated on the American side and their Communist opponents.

  In the early phases of writing the book, I reached out to a family member of one of the CIA officers that directed Project Fiend with some questions about his father’s role in it. After several days of silence, I received a one-line response: “I am surprised that anyone is interested in the events in Albania so many years ago.” We began a long exchange of emails in which I explained that this particular project, while small compared to other efforts undertaken by the agency—his father had participated in a number of them—was important in a unique way.

  The agency used the Albanian operation, the first paramilitary action in its history, as the proving ground for developing and honing future plans, organizational structures, and methods of operations. It harvested the experience collected from engaging the adversary in a new front—covert paramilitary actions—and drew lessons, good and bad, which left the imprint on the planning and execution of other Cold War paramilitary actions that followed, including coup d’états in Iran and Guatemala, and the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, to mention a few.

  Our exchanges were fruitful and I received not only answers to all my questions but also additional input that strengthened the book. But his one-line response in the first email remained in my mind. It has kept me thinking of the value that the story continues to have today, over and above what we expect to learn from it as a historical account covering the CIA, the Cold War, intelligence, espionage, the Balkans, and other similar topics.

  Physicists working to understand how the universe works today and how it will evolve tomorrow often reach back into the depths of time, as close to the Big Bang as possible, for clues and information. The paradigm applies equally well to the study of history. Operation Valuable Fiend takes us in the past, to a crucial moment in the late 1940s when the US intelligence community had a requirement to fight a new kind of war, the Cold War, and it realized that it needed to develop new capabilities beyond intelligence collection, analysis and reporting. It then shows how the CIA, still in its early days at the time, went about developing these capabilities and taking the fight to the adversary.

  The world is very different today with new threats that range from global terror and nuclear proliferation to narco-trafficking and the rise of China. But the core processes by which the agency identifies mission gaps, develops new capabilities, and takes them into operations remain the same. As a case study of an early application of these processes, Operation Valuable Fiend helps us understand their complexities and the myriad of ways in which the best-intentioned efforts can get derailed or produce unforeseen results.

  I hope then that Operation Valuable Fiend becomes a solid source of information for you, dear reader, with an interest in the history of the CIA in its early days, its attempts to roll back the Communist threat around the world, and the consequences—intended and unintended—of these attempts.

  And if you are simply looking for an intertwined set of characters—refugees, lawyers, officers, politicians, spies, kings, traitors, farmers, writers, Ivy Leaguers, illiterates—who pushed, pulled, supported, mocked, loved, hated, betrayed, respected, pursued, and killed one another, then read on.

  Albert Lulushi

  Oakton, Virginia

  List of Acronyms

  ACEN Assembly of Captive European Nations

  ADPC Assistant Director for Policy Coordination

  BBC British Broadcasting Company

  BK Balli Kombëtar, the National Front

  BKA Balli Kombëtar Agrarian, a leftist splinter group of Balli Kombëtar

  BKI Blloku Kombëtar Indipendent, the National Independent Bloc

  BKO Balli Kombëtar Organization, a conservative splinter group of Balli Kombëtar

  CIA Central Intelligence Agency

  Cominform Communist Information Bureau

  DCI Director of Central Intelligence

  DDP Deputy Director of Plans

  DOD Department of Defense

  DZ Drop zone

  EUCOM US Army European Command

  FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation

  GNA Greek National Army

  ICJ International Court of Justice

  IRO International Relief Organization

  JCS Joint Chiefs of Staff

  KGB Komitet Gosudarstve
nnoy Bezopasnosti, the Committee for State Security in the Soviet Union

  LNÇ Lëvizja Nacional Çlirimtare, the Albanian National Liberation Movement

  NCFA National Committee for Free Albania

  NCFE National Committee for Free Europe

  NSC National Security Council

  OPC Office of Policy Coordination

  OSO Office of Special Operations

  OSS Office of Strategic Services

  OTP One-time Pad

  PSB Psychological Strategy Board

  RFE Radio Free Europe

  Sigurimi Drejtoria e Sigurimit të Shtetit, the Albanian Directorate of State Security

  SIS Secret Intelligence Services

  SOE Special Operations Executive

  VOA Voice of America

  W/T Wireless transmitter

  List of Cryptonyms and Pseudonyms

  For obvious reasons, the original CIA documents used to reconstruct the story recounted in this book are full of cryptonyms and pseudonyms. To the extent possible, I have avoided them from the main body of text in order to maintain the narrative flow for the reader. They appear more frequently in the notes and bibliography, where I cite original titles of memos and documents. The CIA often used multiple cryptonyms for the same entity to strengthen operational security and maintain compartmentalization of the information.

  In the CIA nomenclature, cryptonyms always appear in capital letters. The first two letters were used for cryptographic security and were based on factors such as the geography or type of operation. The rest of the cryptonym was a word selected randomly from a dictionary, in principle with no particular relation to the place or person the cryptonym was supposed to mask. However, it is not difficult to imagine tongue-in-cheek CIA officers picking words like “wahoo” for Albanian, “drink” for Greece, “credo” for Rome, “gypsy” for Communist, “roach” for Yugoslavia, “crown” for United Kingdom, “steel” for Soviet Union, and “metal” for Washington, DC.