Secrets of the murderous Albanian betrayal now revealed

Press, 6 November 1984, Page 17

Secrets of the murderous Albanian betrayal now revealed

LAURENCE MARKS of the London “Observer” examines one of the worst postwar Western intelligence disasters.

The first detailed account of the Anglo-American undercover military operation against Albania between 1949 and 1953, one of the greatest Western intelligence disasters of the post-war era, was published last month. Several thousand Albanians were executed or condemned to forced labour by the Hoxha regime as a direct consequence of this botched attempt to foment anti-Communist rebellion. Hundreds more are still in prison more than 30 years later. In “The Great Betrayal: The untold story of Kim Philby’s biggest coup,” Nicholas Bethell alleges that: ® Britain’s Special Intelligence Service and America’s Central Intelligence Agency continued to land agents in Albania after Philby, the S.I.S. link with the C.1.A., was suspected of being a K.G.B. agent and forcibly retired; ® An Albanian leader in exile, Midhat Frasheri, who died in a New York hotel on the day the first agents landed, may have been murdered by Philby’s masters, the K.G.8.; 0 Philby’s treachery apart, knowledge of the supposedly secret landings was widely leaked in diplomatic circles in the Balkans and southern Europe soon after they took place; ® The 5.1.5., relying on misleading experience of the Second World War operations in German-

occupied territory, gravely underestimated the effectiveness of Communist control inside Albania' which made it impossible for agents to mobilise active support among opponents of the regime. All S.I.S. files and most Foreign Office files relating to this bloody debacle remain secret. The C.I.A. is silent. Bethell says he has pieced the story together from interviews with those who took part and from documents in the possession of the exiled royal family of Albania. One of the principal authors of the plan was Julian Amery, now a Tory member of Parliament, who had served as a wartime agent in Albania. In 1948, Albania was the base for Communist rebels in Greece. It also provided Russia with a strategic toe-hold in the eastern Mediterranean. Amery argued that the Hoxha regime, desperately short of food and riven by the Stalin-Tito schism, would not survive a popular revolt. Persuaded by Amery’s knowledgeable lobbying and supported by advice from his officials and from the S.I.S. chief, Stewart Menzies, the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, approved a smallscale covert operation “to detach

Albania from the orbit.” (“Are there any kings that could be put in?” Bevin asked United States Secretary of State Dean Acheson.) The Americans were even more bullish, and the plan was approved at an intelligence conference in Washington early in 1949. The British delegation, led by William Hayter, included Gladwyn Jebb and Lord Jellicoe. Amery and two other veterans of wartime operations in Albania, lan Mac Lean and Alan Hare (both also to become Tory M.P.s) acted as unpaid political advisers. A fourth, Lt-Colonel David Smiley, then second-in-command of the Blues, was reclaimed from his regiment by the S.I.S. to set up a training school in Malta for Albanian agents. Amery, Mac Lean, and Smiley have provided Bethell with information. Hare (now Lord Blakenham) refused. The British landed nine agents by ship on October 3, 1949. Two days earlier, Philby had left Lon-

don briefed to take up his new post in Washington. He broke the news of the landing to his C.I.A. colleagues. Four agents were killed, one disappeared, and the rest retreated across the Greek border. The S.I.S. and the C.I.A. were at once worried by evidence obtained from debriefing the returned men that the Albanian authorities had known about the landings in advance. A week later, 11 more agents were landed. They, too, retreated after several weeks on ' the run. On October 3, Frasheri, in America for talks with the State Department, was found dead in New York’s Lexington Hotel. Doctors diagnosed a heart attack. Bethell points out that the K.G.B. is now known to have murdered eastern European nationalists in the West by simulating heart attacks with a drug or gas. Six more agents entered Albania in September, 1950. They spent most of their time hiding in caves

or retreating one jump ahead of security forces. Morale among the trainee agents slumped. The operation was continued on the understanding that the C.1.A., which had been training Albanians in Germany, would take the lead. They parachuted nine agents into the country in November. Two were captured, the rest retreated. The villagers they had contacted were picked off one by one.

By early 1951, Philby was under deep suspicion. The C.l.A.’s director, Walter Bedell Smith, demanded his withdrawal from Washington under the threat of breaking off United States-British intelligence relations. Philby was recalled to London in May. After an investigation that failed to prove his guilt .or to remove suspicion, he was retired from the S.I.S. Bethell says: “It seems now hard to understand why, with C.I.A. convinced of Philby’s guilt and S.I.S. suspicious of him, they nevertheless decided in mid-1951 to proceed with the ‘secret’ Albanian operation that for nearly two years Philby had jointly commanded.” Less than two months later, on July 23, the Americans dropped three more groups into Albania. This mission ended in total catastrophe. One group, surrounded in a house, was burned alive by security forces. Another group was killed the moment it landed. Of the third group, two were swiftly killed and the other two captured. At a 12-day show trial of captured agents in the Albanian capital, Tirana, almost all the trainee agents in the American camp were named in court. Yet, even while the trial was in progress, the Americans dropped five more. Two were killed, and three retreated across the border after weeks on the run.