Books
The Great Betrayal
Nicholas Bethel (London 1984)
This is either a ‘snow job’, designed to discourage further research in this area (British intelligence attempts to destabilise Soviet and communist influenced regimes), or is just a poor effort on Bethel’s part.
One can’t deny that it is useful – after all, it is the first book written solely about an MI6 operation – but one is disappointed by its thinness and its viewpoint. Bethel’s (partly legitimate) excuse is that documentation is unavailable because of Kim Philby’s involvement in the planning of the Albanian operation. The spectre of ‘national security’ is raised, but as usual it is just another red herring. There are many files available under the Freedom of Information Act in the US on Philby, Burgess and Maclean, (see, for example, Sunday Times 31 March 1985), and the top secret State Department decimal file for Albania 1948/9 is available for all to see in the National Archives.
Philby was definitely responsible for blowing some of the operation (one wonders how much the Russians told the Albanians) but his crime was, as Verrier puts it, treachery against MI6 and not against his country.
It was an ill-conceived and badly thought-out operation which was, in reality, another Special Operations Executive (SOE) attempt to put a corrupt king back on his throne. There is evidence that the training camps for the guerillas were infiltrated, and that the intelligent use of radios (like the XX Committee during the war) by Hoxha’s Albanians was largely responsible for the ‘betrayal’.
Bethel ignores – or didn’t know – that the British and Americans were planning guerilla campaigns in Albania and Romania in 1946. (Bethel does mention that the British were dropping supplies into Bulgaria in 1948).
The man who was recruiting for these operations was, of all people, Klaus Barbie.
“The operation was run by D.A.D. out of Frankfurt with a British intelligence team under the cover of BICOG (The British High Commissioner) which also had a liaison officer with D.A.D. (American Counter Intelligence) in the I.G. Farben building.” (John Loftus, The Belarus Secret Penguin 1984)
Not surprisingly, Bethell ignores the evidence that the Albanians on the CIA-sponsored Free Albania Committee were principally recruited from those “who had previously been denied visas as Nazi collaborators and war criminals. “(Loftus, above). Hardly the stuff of freedom fighters.
SD