How the CIA and MI6 Learned the Hard Way that Covert Action Is Hard

Albania was an early experiment in rolling back communism—and a rank failure

Seldom do we get as detailed an account of a covert action as we do in this compelling new book on CIA and MI6 operations against communist Albania during the early years of the Cold War. It is not a pretty picture. Throughout the book, author Stephen Long more than justifies his claim that “the Albania operation was a bitter and wasteful encounter for all the parties involved.” The story is fascinating to read in much the same way that it is hard to look away from a car wreck.

For years, Long, a professor of International Studies at Xi’an-Jiaotang-Liverpool University in China, has been a trailblazer with his carefully revisionist research into the CIA and MI6 operations in Albania (codenamed BGFIEND and VALUABLE, respectively). His work has been greatly enabled by the discovery of a large quantity of CIA records about BGFIEND and his use of two substantial troves of interviews with participants done by others in the 1980s and 1990s. The two main myths he tackles in this culmination of his work are that these were failed attempts to overthrow the communist regime of Enver Hoxha, then in the Soviet orbit, and that those efforts were doomed by Kim Philby, a Soviet mole within MI6 and the most famous member of the Cambridge Five.

With regard to the first myth, Long tells us that the British launched VALUABLE in 1949 with no thought to regime change, merely as a response to Tirana’s support for communist insurgents in Greece. By contrast, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the covert action component of the newly established CIA, did want an operation to “pilot…covert action capabilities and the strategic viability of a rollback effort against communism in Eastern Europe.” However, the way OPC actually phrased BGFIEND’s objectives at its launch in 1949 was that it aimed “at placing the Soviet position in Albania under great strain,” and that, “if ultimately successful, [this] might result in the overthrow of Hoxha’s regime.”

When the CIA and MI6 learned of each other’s plans, they agreed to integrate them. The combined operation would pursue Britain’s limited aim and if that succeeded and the international conditions were favorable, they would move toward the American goal of overthrowing Hoxha. They never got there.

VALUABLE achieved its goals by early 1950, when Albania ended its support for the defeated insurgency in Greece. At this point, however, the Americans and the British agreed that ousting Hoxha might give the Soviets an excuse to overthrow Josip Tito in Yugoslavia, who was asserting his independence from Moscow. So, the CIA and MI6 settled for harassing the Albanian regime and testing out covert action tactics to be used elsewhere.