• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2929 0

émigré Georgian groups in both Paris and Istanbul, all provided vulnerable points for the watchful Soviet authorities to learn about the mission. A senior Georgian in Paris (who from the start had been included in SIS’s planning and knew about the border-crossing) reported that fellow émigrés were ‘convinced that [the] Climbers had been on a special mission’ to Turkey. He believed that these rumours had originated from Istanbul and ‘somebody must have written from there to a friend’ in Paris. The Climbers themselves did not help matters by arriving back in London ‘with their suitcases bulging with every sort of Turkish delicacy clearly revealing their country of origin’, which they were proposing to give their friends in Paris. They also had ‘a large number of secondhand female garments which they were conveying from mutual friends’ in Istanbul for émigrés in Paris. Before their original departure, moreover, they had apparently ‘told several of their friends’ in Paris that they were going to Istanbul.

Operation ‘Valuable’, a scheme for the penetration of Albania, was also being planned in 1948-9, and provides an example of covert action actively supported by Bevin and Attlee. Albania, where Enver Hoxha (whose anti-German resistance forces had been supplied by SOE) had led a Communist regime since the end of the war, was regarded as a good target for the kind of pressure - ‘all possible means short of war’ - which the British Chiefs of Staff in September 1948 envisaged bringing to bear in the developing Cold War. There was continuing unrest in Albania itself, as Hoxha’s government sought to enforce its rule, and Albanian émigré groups in Italy, Greece and Turkey provided a reservoir of potential recruits for anti-Communist operations of one sort or another. Tito’s breach with the Soviet Union in June 1948 had left Albania isolated and, geographically at least, it looked like a good place to begin chipping away at the Eastern bloc. Albania’s other neighbour, Greece, too, might be disposed to support any action as Communist Greek rebels based in Albania had been making incursions across the frontier. In November 1948 the Foreign Office’s Russia Committee, which had been set up in April 1946 to manage policy towards the Eastern bloc and on which the service Chiefs had just secured representation, decided to explore the possibility of operations against Albania.12

Kenneth Cohen in SIS was willing to take up the baton. Albania, he reflected in December 1948, would be ‘a happy choice’ for a response ‘to the Russian campaign in kind, either by S.O. or quasi-S.O. activities’. The ‘primitive political and economic state of the country’ provided ‘an opening of promoting tribal unrest’. There was the opportunity to weaken ‘the support now being given to the rebels in Greece’ and there would be a particularly low risk ‘of causing an embarrassing situation’ for the British government since Britain did not currently have diplomatic relations with Albania. Cohen, apparently, had an agent ready and willing to go and proposed that he could be dropped in during January 1949. Once in Albania he could assess the potential for special operations there. But when Menzies proposed this, Orme Sargent pressed him to produce a further paper on the possibilities in Albania. The task was given to Richard Brooman-White, a very well-regarded officer who had been an ‘exceptional’ head of station in Istanbul for a year before being brought back to Head Office to be Deputy Chief Controller Mediterranean. Heading his first draft, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’, Brooman-White devised a plan with two objectives: to relieve the pressure on Greece by guerrilla operations aimed at Greek rebel bases in southern Albania and fomenting ‘insurrection in other areas of the country’; and to ‘endeavour to undermine the Communist position in the weakest of the orbit countries’, possibly producing ‘repercussions in the satellite bloc which could in turn be followed up and exploited’. Methods envisaged included sending armed bands or fighting patrols across