Albanian Subversion

The Albanian Subversion (Albanian: Përmbysja e Shqipërisë) is one of the earliest and most notable failures of the Western covert paramilitary operations in the Eastern Bloc. The British SIS and the American CIA launched a joint subversive operation, using as agents Albanian expatriates. Other anti-communist Albanians and many nationalists worked as agents for Greek, Italian and Yugoslav intelligence services, some supported by the UK and U.S. secret services. A Soviet mole, and, later, other spies tipped off the missions to Moscow, which in turn relayed the information to Albania. Consequently, many of the agents were caught, put on trial, and either shot or condemned to long prison terms at hard labor.

The Albanian subversion cost the lives of at least 300 men and for a long time was one of the most carefully concealed secrets of the Cold War. In 2006, some 2,300 pages of documents laying out major parts of the Albania Project under its two major cryptonyms, BGFIEND and OBOPUS, were declassified by a U.S. government interagency working group acting under the terms of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. These documents are available at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.

The reason behind the operation in Albania was that Albania was separated from the Eastern Bloc by Yugoslavia, which had split with the Soviet Union in June 1948. Albania was also the poorest European nation, and was home to about one million people, many still divided along semi-feudal lines. There were three major religious groups and two distinct classes: those people who owned land and claimed feudal privileges and those who did not. The landowners, only about 1% of the population, held 95% of the cultivated land as well as the principal ruling posts in the country's central and southern regions.

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