The Albanian operation was an example of gung-ho wartime thinking wrongly applied to the more nuanced circumstances of the Cold War. But within MI6 it was seen as the opening salvo in a new, covert war. Stalin had backed a communist insurgency in Greece, engineered the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, and blockaded Berlin. Albania would be the target of a counter-attack, in direct contravention of international law but in keeping with the new mood of aggression. Many greeted the prospect with glee. Richard Brooman-White, Elliott’s friend in MI6, even imagined a situation whereby the Albanian campaign could spark ‘formal British and American armed intervention’. Philby would be responsible for coordinating Albanian plans with the Americans.
Before leaving for the US, Philby was indoctrinated, with due reverence, into perhaps the most closely guarded secret of the Cold War. Between 1940 and 1948, American cryptanalysts had intercepted some 3,000 Soviet intelligence telegrams written in a code that was, theoretically, unbreakable. In 1946, however, due to a single blunder by the Soviets, a team of codebreakers led by the brilliant American cryptanalyst Meredith Gardner began to unpick the messages that had passed between the US and Moscow. What they revealed was staggering: more than 200 Americans had become Soviet agents during the war; Moscow had spies in the Treasury, the State Department, the nuclear Manhattan Project and the OSS. The code-breaking operation, codenamed ‘Venona’ (a word which, appropriately, has no meaning) was so secret that President Truman himself was not informed of its existence for more than three years; the CIA did not learn about Venona until 1952. But it is a measure of the trust between the British and American intelligence agencies that news of the breakthrough, and its chilling implications, was immediately shared with MI6, because the intercepts also revealed that Soviet spies had penetrated the British government. In particular, the Venona team uncovered evidence of a Soviet agent, codenamed ‘Homer’, who was leaking secrets from within the British embassy in Washington in 1945. The identity of this mole was still a mystery, but it was assumed that, like ‘Cicero’ in Turkey during the war, ‘Homer’ was probably an embassy employee, a cleaner perhaps, or a clerk. Philby knew better: Donald Maclean, his Cambridge friend and fellow spy, had been first secretary at the Washington embassy between 1944 and 1948. Maclean was Homer.
The first flicker of a shadow, as yet no more than a mote in the far distance, fell across Philby’s long and sunny run of luck.
See Notes on Chapter 8
9
Stormy Seas
Bido Kuka crouched in the hold of the Stormie Seas, huddled alongside the other fighters clutching their German Schmeisser submachine guns, as the boat rose and fell queasily in the dark Adriatic swell. Kuka felt patriotic, excited and scared. Mostly, he felt seasick. A pouch filled with gold sovereigns was strapped inside his belt. Taped to the inside of his wristwatch was a single cyanide pill, for use should he fall into the hands of the Albanian secret police, the Sigurimi. In his knapsack he carried a map, medical supplies, hand grenades, enough rations to survive for a week in the mountains, Albanian currency, propaganda leaflets, and photographs of the émigré anti-communist leaders to show to the people and inspire them to rise up against the hated dictator, Enver Hoxha. Through the porthole, the jagged cliffs of Karaburun rose blackly against the moonless night sky, the edge of a country Kuka had not seen for three years. The Englishmen could be heard on deck, whispering muffled orders as the boat drew inshore. They were strange, these Englishmen, huge sun-reddened men, who spoke a barely comprehensible language and laughed when there was nothing funny to laugh at. They had brought along a dog, called Lean-To; one had even brought his wife. They were pretending to be on a boating holiday. The man called ‘Lofty’ kept his binoculars trained on the cliffs. The one called ‘Geoffrey’ rehearsed, once more, the procedure for operating the wireless, a bulky contraption powered by a machine that looked like a bicycle without wheels. Kuka and his eight companions smoked in nervy silence. The Stormie Seas edged towards the Albanian shore.
Six months earlier Bido Kuka had been recruited for Operation Valuable in a displaced persons camp outside Rome. Kuka was a ‘Ballist’, a member of the Balli Kombëtar, the Albanian nationalist group who had fought the Nazis during the war, and then the communists after it. With the communist takeover of Albania hundreds of Ballists had been arrested, tortured and killed, and Kuka had fled, with other nationalists, to Italy. Since then he had spent three miserable years in Fraschetti camp, nursing his loathing of communism, rehearsing the Balli Kombëtar motto ‘Albania for the Albanians, Death to the Traitors’, and plotting his return. When he was approached by a fellow émigré and asked to join a new guerrilla unit for secret anti-communist operations inside Albania, he did not hesitate. As another recruit put it: ‘There was no question of refusing. When your life is devoted to your country you are prepared to do anything to help it.’ On 14 July 1949, Kuka and a fellow Ballist named Sami Lepenica boarded a military plane in Rome, and flew to the British island of Malta in the Mediterranean. They had no travel documents. A British Army officer, flapping a red handkerchief by way of a recognition signal, marched them past the customs barrier, and into a car. An hour later the bemused Albanians arrived at the gateway to a large castle, surrounded by a moat: Fort Bingemma, a Victorian citadel on the island’s southwest corner, selected by British intelligence as the ideal place from which to launch an anti-communist counter-revolution.
Over the next three months, Kuka and some thirty other Albanian recruits underwent intensive training under the watchful (if slightly mad) eye of Lieutenant-Colonel David de Crespigny Smiley, an aristocratic British Army officer with a legendary taste for derring-do. During the war Smiley had fought the Italians in Abyssinia as part of the Somaliland Camel Corps, foiled a German-backed coup to unseat the King of Iraq, fought alongside Siamese guerrillas and liberated 4,000 Allied prisoners (‘all absolutely stark naked except for a ball bag’), from the Japanese camp at Ubon. But it was in Albania that he earned his reputation for raw courage: in 1943 he parachuted into northern Greece, and set about blowing up bridges, ambushing German troops, and training guerrillas. He emerged from the war with a deep love of Albania, a loathing for Hoxha and the communists, a Military Cross, and facial scars from a prematurely exploding briefcase. When MI6 needed someone to equip, train and infiltrate anti-communist fighters into Albania, Smiley was the obvious choice. He was imperialist, fearless, romantic and unwary, and in all these respects, he was a neat reflection of Operation Valuable.
The training programme was brief but intensive, and conducted amid rigid secrecy. A series of British instructors, including an eccentric Oxford don, provided instruction in map-reading, unarmed combat, machine-gun marksmanship, and operating a radio with a pedal generator. Since the instructors spoke no Albanian, and the Albanians spoke not a word of English, training was conducted in sign language. This explains why Kuka’s conception of his mission was somewhat vague: get into Albania, head for his hometown near the Greek border, sound out the possibilities for armed insurrection, then get out and report back. None of the recruits were officers, and few had any military training. Life in the camps had left some with malnutrition, and all were quite small. The British, with more than a hint of condescension, called them ‘the pixies’.