TIRANA (Realist English). In 1949, at the height of the Cold War, the newly created Office of Policy Coordination — the forerunner of today’s CIA National Clandestine Service — launched the first covert military operation in the agency’s history.
Together with British intelligence MI6, the Americans devised a plan to overthrow the communist government of Enver Hoxha in Albania — the weakest of the Soviet satellites in Europe.
The operation, codenamed BGFIEND and Valuable, was meant to be the first blow against the Iron Curtain. It ended in catastrophe.
The Plan: Drop Paratroopers and Spark an Uprising
From May 1949, the CIA and MI6 began recruiting and training Albanian emigres for a covert war against Hoxha’s government.
The operation had three phases: the formation of a “Committee for Free Albania” as political cover, intelligence and propaganda actions, and finally an armed invasion designed to provoke a mass uprising and overthrow the government.
The “intermediate objective” of the operation was to create an internal conflict in Albania sufficient to weaken the regime and end its support for Greek partisans. The maximum objective — the complete overthrow of the regime.
According to some reports, up to 2,000 paramilitaries and 500 agents were prepared for the invasion. They were to be landed by aircraft, submarines and landing craft.
Kim Philby: Scapegoat or Traitor?
For many years, the accepted version of the failure was the betrayal of British intelligence officer Kim Philby — one of the most famous double agents of the 20th century. In 1949, Philby was in Washington, serving as MI6 station chief and the main liaison between British and American intelligence.
In theory, he had access to all information about the operation and could pass it to his Soviet handlers, who would in turn warn the Albanian state security service, Sigurimi.
According to some accounts, Philby did indeed pass information about the operation in December 1949. It is believed that this betrayal cost the lives of roughly 150 to 300 agents. Philby officially confessed to this in his autobiography, My Secret War.
However, historian Stephen Long, in his book A Rich Harvest of Bitter Fruit, argues that Philby played no role in the operation’s failure. Long points out that these missions were never originally aimed at overthrowing Hoxha.
The failure is explained by a whole complex of factors: CIA incompetence, internal rivalry between intelligence services, and conflicts between anti-communist factions, including the Albanian King Zog.
Thus, Philby’s figure may have become a “scapegoat” to cover up the systemic problems of the intelligence services.
‘A Sad Story’ and 300 Victims
For five years, the West sent groups of agents into Albania, but almost all of them failed. The Albanian Sigurimi was ready for them.
Hundreds of trained emigres were captured, executed or disappeared. Most of them died. The operation was shut down in 1954, but some activities continued until 1956.
Legacy: Failure as a Lesson
The failure of the Albanian operation became a painful but important lesson for US intelligence. The experience gained from this failure was used in subsequent operations — the overthrow of governments in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), as well as the ill‑fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (1961).
This story remains one of the darkest and most controversial episodes of the Cold War, where geopolitical ambitions, betrayal and the tragedy of hundreds of people intertwined.
