The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [420]
Although the SIS plan was more ambitious than the Foreign Office felt able to contemplate at that stage, it met with a constructive response. Ivor Porter, an ex-SOE officer working in the Foreign Office’s Southern Department, prepared a ‘counter-plan’ on similar lines, but laying more emphasis on intelligence-gathering, while recruiting Albanians for subsequent operations. Sargent thought that this was ‘the most we can hope to do in Albania and derive satisfactory results’. He stressed to Menzies the importance of setting up a good intelligence network in the country before attempting any operations, and told him that Bevin would want to be assured that the ‘conditions in Albania’ were ‘sufficiently favourable to justify us in expecting a reasonable degree of success’. While Menzies welcomed the Foreign Office proposals, he observed that the nature of Albania and its people was ‘such that no adequate estimate of resistance potentialities can be made purely by Intelligence methods - that is to say, it would not suffice to put in a few agents solely to form opinion on public feeling or transmit verbal assurances given by tribal chiefs’. The ‘only way’ to see whether there was ‘any substance behind their words’ was ‘by more direct methods of probing and by testing local preparedness to take action on the smallest possible scale’. If such testing ‘provided a satisfactory reaction’, ‘we would then move on to the next stage’. Clearly anxious to ensure that the government was aware of the consequences of embarking on any kind of action in Albania, Menzies also warned that it was ‘not worth incurring the effort and possible loss of life entailed by the preliminary operations, unless we are prepared to follow them up by striking as hard as possible at any sensitive point we may find’. This might, he added, ‘involve fairly extensive supply operations at a later date’.13
Sir William Strang (Sargent’s successor as Permanent Under-Secretary in the Foreign Office) put the scheme up to Bevin (and, on Bevin’s request, to Attlee) for approval, and on 28 April 1949 Strang wrote to Menzies conveying the Foreign Secretary’s approval to ‘set up an intelligence system in Southern Albania’ to test local preparedness for action and, if the outcome of this was ‘encouraging’, to ‘infiltrate instructors in modern guerrilla warfare, in order to recruit, arm, feed, clothe and train anti-Communist supporters for military operations against Greek rebel bases and lines of communication’. The ‘practicability for extending operations to Northern Albania and to insurrectionary purposes’ was left ‘for further examination’ in the ‘light of the progress achieved’. Consultations in Washington revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency (which had been created in 1947) also had plans for Albania, similar to the British, ‘though on a rather broader basis’. The State Department and CIA proposed joining forces to mount operations, with a combined Policy Committee directing the project. Although there were worries about the ‘grandiose’ nature of the American plans, and the extent of their involvement with dissident Albanian exiles, SIS agreed that co-operation was necessary, ‘and that our original scheme should be regarded as the first phase in a joint operation’, though an immediate effect of American participation was to widen the scope of the initial reconnaissance to include the infiltration of parties into central and northern Albania as well as the south. In practice some co-ordination with the Americans was unavoidable if the British operation was to succeed. Even in October 1949, John Teague in Broadway noted ‘evidence of lines being crossed and the work of certain individuals