The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [421]
With the green light from the Foreign Office, SIS began serious work on the scheme, contacting dissident Albanians in Greece and Italy and making plans for a main base at Malta and a forward one in Corfu (for which it was accepted there would have to be some liaison with the Greek authorities). Training began in Malta at the beginning of August and in the early autumn twenty-nine southern Albanians in six parties were landed by boat along the Albanian coast near Corfu. Meanwhile (though getting the dissident Albanian émigré groups to agree proved very difficult) an Anglo-American-sponsored Committee for Free Albania was launched in Paris on 26 August, to provide the umbrella the Americans particularly desired for anti-Communist operations in Albania itself. Of the six SIS parties, one was wiped out and by the end of 1949 the fate of another was ‘unknown’. Three parties, ‘having become the object of intense interest to the Security Authorities’, withdrew to Greece in less than four weeks, but the sixth ‘successfully maintained itself for over 2 months’. Having ‘failed to find winter quarters’, however, ‘and being also much harried by the now fully alerted Albanian Police’, it also withdrew to Greece in early December. Before the fate of all the groups had become fully clear, one Foreign Office official optimistically concluded that the fact ‘that at least four of these small and lightly armed parties, carrying comparatively heavy wireless equipment’, had ‘received sufficient help from the local population to enable them to survive for a number of weeks and to traverse this most difficult area’, was ‘a favourable indication of the state of affairs in the country’.15
Reflecting on the operation, SIS concluded that while there was evidence of ‘resentment against the Communist regime’, and that the loyalty of the police and army was ‘doubtful’, it had been ‘clearly demonstrated that security is in practice almost impossible to maintain in operations of this type in Albania’. A report of leakages about the operation noted that there were widespread indications among émigré groups in Italy and Greece that something was up and that the British were recruiting Albanians from a refugee camp in Bari. At the beginning of July the Russian head of the Albanian counter-espionage service was reported as believing that the British were running agents from a base at Corfu. A representative of the Italian Foreign Office revealed in a conversation in late September that he knew the British were ‘training Albanians in Malta’, but did not know ‘whether the Americans had a hand in the scheme’. A report in December 1949 stated that members of the ‘National Committee for Albania’ had shown ‘a complete lack of discretion in their letters to political followers in Italy, Turkey, Syria, Egypt and France’. The ‘most serious result of this lack of security was that the Albanian Government was evidently aware of the imminent arrival of the parties some two months before they were actually infiltrated’. The parties that withdrew to Greece, moreover, ‘talked freely to the Greek officials who interrogated them’, thus jeopardising any future operations organised along similar lines.
The results of Operation Valuable in 1949 were not sufficiently positive to support moving on to the second stage, and ‘the tentative project for encouraging active revolt against the Hoxha regime by introducing a shock force of trained Albanian guerrillas in 1950’ was abandoned. The Foreign Secretary ruled that future British participation would be limited to ‘continued support of the Committee for Free Albania’, propaganda, economic warfare and ‘recruitment of a small reserve force of Albanians for use