Art of Betrayal (10 page)

At the same time as the Latvian operation was under way at the northernmost reaches of the Iron Curtain, an even more ambitious, but equally ill-fated, covert action was being undertaken by MI6 at the southern end. On the moonless night of 3 October 1949, a boat called the
Stormie Seas
lay 200 yards off a cove on the Albanian coast. A group of men climbed into a rubber dinghy and rowed ashore.
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Hidden by darkness, the landing spot was a remote ravine at the bottom of cliffs with a goat track leading up the scrub-covered mountain. One of the men thought he spotted a light, but a few seconds later it disappeared. When a British marine brought the second half of the team over in his dinghy, he found the first arrivals still waiting, unsure of what lay in store for them in the dark. He ushered them up the hillside. ‘They all just mooched off,' he later recalled. ‘We'd let them down very badly.'
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The nine men again split into two groups. Within hours, one group was ambushed and three of its four members killed. The others made contact with villagers who told them that soldiers had been in the area for several days. The Albanian security forces had been
preparing for weeks. Their networks of informers had been told to be on the lookout.
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At a radio station in Corfu the MI6 team running the operation began to panic as days passed with no contact. Slowly messages trickled back and a few survivors made it into Greece to report the bad news. A second team that went in had likewise been expected and had fallen into a trap.

These teams' objective was to get a feel for the population in preparation for toppling the Albanian government.
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The losses were bad but not bad enough to put off those who had decided that this was the way in which the Cold War was to be fought. There were late-night conferences to work out what had gone wrong. Sitting in a secure office in the Pentagon, monitoring those first drops, one American said there had to be a leak. His counterpart, the newly arrived liaison from MI6, whom the Americans found comfortingly English and only mildly eccentric by his colleagues' standards, remained quiet.
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The culture of the times, one MI6 officer recalled, was to meet every setback with the cry ‘not to worry, bash on regardless'.
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The USSR was seen by Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee in 1948 as a ‘hostile, messianic state, with a world-wide mission of hastening the elimination of capitalism'.
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Albania had been identified by both MI6 and the CIA as a weak spot in the Communist front and in February 1949 the decision had been taken to make it the test case to ‘roll back' Communism, a policy in many ways as aggressive as anything the KGB was attempting. All means short of war were on the table.

Britain had one problem. Money – or a lack of it. The country was broke. The solution was obvious: the Americans. They did not take much persuasion. Britain was retreating from centre-stage and passing the baton. In February 1947, London had informed Washington that its economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey would have to stop because Britain was approaching bankruptcy. Given the danger that those countries would fall to Communism, the US President announced the Truman Doctrine offering support to all ‘free people who are resisting subjugation'. This was followed by the Marshall Plan to offer economic aid to prevent Communist influence. It was accompanied by a vast increase in propaganda and covert action, including the backing of émigré groups and the financing of
anti-Communist political parties in places like Italy where enormous effort had been expended to ‘win' the election in 1948. The vogue phrase to describe this was ‘political warfare'. It ranged from propaganda to manipulating commodity prices, from counterfeiting currency to sabotage, from bankrolling émigré front organisations to dropping leaflets from hot-air balloons (some of which, destined for Czechoslovakia, were discovered by Scottish farmers, much to their bemusement).
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Albania was a test case for the most aggressive end of the political-warfare spectrum. The British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, a fierce anti-Communist thanks to his battles inside the trade unions, was a supporter. There were differences in emphasis between London and Washington, particularly over who to back. In one discussion with US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Bevin uttered that great British battlecry: ‘Are there any Kings around that could be put in?'
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Not everyone in the Foreign Office and State Department was keen on the plan, but MI6 found an enthusiastic backer in Washington in the form of Frank Wisner, known as ‘the wiz'. A former corporate lawyer from Mississippi, he was smitten with the idea of using covert operations to take on the Soviets. From an office known as the ‘rat palace' because of the vermin scuttling through its corridors, he ran the Office of Policy Co-ordination, which was tasked with fighting the secret war, a role he continued after the OPC was absorbed into the CIA in 1950. By 1951, Wisner was spending more than $200 million a year on his covert operations, three times the money spent on collecting and analysing intelligence.

MI6 and the CIA have always had two functions – information gathering and covert action. The latter involves engineering outcomes with the hand of government hidden. For Wisner and his people, intelligence was about doing things, not finding out about things. ‘The central and decisive battles of the secret war are fought in the vast realm of covert political operations,' wrote James McCargar, who led the American side of the Albanian operation. ‘The ultimate national aim in the secret war is not simply to know; it is to maintain or to expand national power.'
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Not everyone agreed. ‘The operational tail will wag the intelligence dog,' one American spy chief warned.
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But the CIA, even more than MI6, came to be infused with a paramilitary culture and enthused by the possibilities that covert
action offered. The US was deciding there was only one way to play against an implacable, deadly new enemy hell-bent on domination. ‘There are no rules in such a game,' an official report argued in language that would be echoed after 9/11. ‘Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered … We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us.'
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(‘We cannot afford methods less ruthless than those of our opposition,' a fictional British intelligence man argues in John le Carré's
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
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Bankrolling Britain's Albania plan was no problem for the cash-rich American spies who operated a slush fund siphoned out of the Marshall Plan money with almost no oversight.
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How the cash-strapped British Secret Service housed in the Broadway buildings by St James's tube station, with its brown linoleum floors, grotty furnishings and bare lightbulbs, must have gazed in envy at the wealth of its younger, brasher cousin. Beneath the surface, a few in Washington detected a sour resentment of the Americans, particularly among some upper-class Britons, who disliked the passing of the baton and the anti-imperial instincts of their cousins.

The awareness of no longer being top dog and of being reliant on American largesse was expressed in the fictional writings of one of Anthony Courtney's friends and former colleagues from Naval Intelligence who, just as the Albania operation reached its zenith, was writing his first book. ‘Our people are definitely interested. They think it's just as important as your friends do and they don't think there's anything crazy about it all. In fact, Washington's pretty sick we're not running the show,' the CIA man explained to James Bond. Just as Bond's British operation, fought at the baccarat table of Casino Royale rather than in the Albanian mountains, looked lost, CIA man Felix Leiter slides an envelope across the table, ‘thick as a dictionary', with the words ‘Marshall Aid. Thirty-two million francs. With the compliments of the USA', allowing Bond to win the day and bankrupt his enemy. In Ian Fleming's fantasy world, the British were still in charge even if they did need American money. This was an escapist alternative reality in which the British reader could be consoled by
the thought that, even as the days of Empire and greatness were passing, Britain was still good at something, a world in which the illusions of power and influence could be preserved in the form of a cool and ruthless superspy.
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In the real Albanian operation, the exchange was not quite so one sided. In return for American cash, Britain could offer two things – a claim (only partly true) to have wisdom and expertise on Albania and also, crucially, real estate from which to run the operation. Leftover bits of Empire, from Cyprus to Hong Kong and later Diego Garcia, always came in useful and the Americans' propensity for favouring decolonisation certainly had its limits. ‘Whenever we want to subvert any place,' Frank Wisner confided to an MI6 officer he wrongly believed was on his side, ‘we find that the British own an island within easy reach.'
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For Albania, the island was Malta.

The cultural differences between the two countries' spies are captured in McCargar's account of attending planning meetings on either side of the Atlantic. In Washington, he arrived to find an intricate bureaucratic, organisational chart on the wall for the Albanian operation. ‘A colleague pointed at it and said we'd need 457 bodies. I didn't think we could find 457 bodies and said that I would happily settle for six brains,' McCargar recalled. A week later he went to London to confer. After an hour or two someone said, ‘I say, why don't we get old Henry up here? He knows about this.' ‘A day or two later old Henry showed up from down in Sussex and when the problem was put to him, finally agreed to undertake the task, although, as he said, “This will wreak havoc with the garden, you know. Just getting it into trim.”' He then said he needed a grand total of six people to report to him.
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The ‘old Henrys' of the Albania operation were a group of Special Operations Executive (SOE) veterans who would become known as the Musketeers. During the war, the SOE had sent in men and weapons to support Albanians fighting first against the Italians and then against the Germans. There had been a sharp and bitter division between those who favoured the Communist-allied partisans and those who worked with the nationalists and royalists and who favoured the exiled King Zog (who had been ensconced for much of the war in the front line of Henley-on-Thames). The partisans had proved more willing to take on the Germans and eventually their
pudgy leader Enver Hoxha had emerged triumphant, installing a Communist government which, in turn, distrusted the British for their backing of his rivals. ‘Another King down the drain!' Churchill wrote to his Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden when Hoxha's victory became apparent.
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The SOE veterans who had worked with the nationalists were bitter at the turn of events. They talked angrily of treachery and of the machinations of the Communist sympathisers among their rivals within SOE. The key figures included Julian Amery, later a Conservative minister, Billy McLean and David Smiley – ‘the Three Musketeers'. After the war Amery had worked the overlapping worlds of Whitehall offices and the clubs of St James's in which the demimonde of British intelligence and its hangers-on lived, telling everybody who would listen that the Albanian people were ‘seething with discontent against their Communist masters'.
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The Musketeers believed that their SOE experience of training and supporting resistance groups was the way to fight the new Cold War, without realising that this time the enemy was playing a different game. SOE had been swallowed up by MI6 which in turn had absorbed its gung-ho culture. New recruits into MI6 were trained, in classic SOE style, to place explosives by a railway line as much as to recruit agents. A divide had emerged in the culture of MI6, just as it had among their American counterparts, between those who wanted action and those who wanted intelligence. The men of action, who believed in continuing the paramilitary methods they had enjoyed in the Second World War, had the upper hand in these years. These were the men who had ‘had a good war' and could not let go. The Chief of MI6 was unsure about the Albania operation, saying there was no point in undertaking it unless it was followed through, but he also saw it as a way of keeping the SOE ‘stinks and bangs people' happy.
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Colonel and Musketeer David Smiley was in charge of training the Albanians. His name crops up again and again in accounts of the clandestine wars fought by Britain from the Second World War onwards (making it perhaps ironic that a man of action not dissimilar to Bond coincidentally enjoyed the same name as le Carré's pudgy, cerebral spy). He had been commissioned into the full plumage of the Royal Horse Guards – a world of strict formality in which he was once reprimanded for being seen at the Café de Paris wearing a
dinner jacket when he should have been in white tie and tails.
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As the Second World War began, he sold his racehorse and private aeroplane and moved into irregular warfare. In 1943, he had been recruited to work for SOE in Albania, parachuting out of a Halifax bomber. He first worked with Hoxha, whom Smiley, being an old-fashioned British imperialist, argued with incessantly, before switching to the more amenable nationalist Abas Kupi. A few years after the war, an old SOE colleague now with MI6 explained that the old crew was getting back together for one more adventure.
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In the summer of 1949 Smiley arrived at the base of operations in Malta, an isolated hill-top fort, equipped with drawbridge and moat. He lived under cover and spent the mornings at an office being as conspicuous as possible. Summer afternoons were for playing polo, sometimes with Admiral Mountbatten and his nephew Prince Philip accompanied occasionally by his wife, the then Princess Elizabeth, who stayed on the island for a while. When the Princess was crowned queen a few years later, Smiley rode alongside as commander of her escort.
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