Albania country
also: Albanian
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Related entities (most co-mentioned)
CIAintelligence service · 17Soviet Unioncountry · 11United Statescountry · 11United Kingdomcountry · 10Enver Hoxhaperson · 10Greececountry · 9Yugoslaviacountry · 7Operation Valuableoperation · 7Inter-Services Intelligenceintelligence service · 6Italycountry · 6Hungarycountry · 6Romaniacountry · 5Romeplace · 4Irancountry · 4King Zog Iperson · 4Ernest Bevinperson · 4Adriatic Seaplace · 4Julian Ameryperson · 4Corfu Channelplace · 4Dwight D. Eisenhowerperson · 3Guatemalacountry · 3National Security Councilorganization · 3Assembly of Captive European Nationsorganization · 3Polandcountry · 3
Claims (10)
CIA carried_out_attack
Albania book_quoted
“We'll get it right next time, although they never get it right. This one is set in the Balkans, the Baltic coastal plain, and it became the scene of the first big CIA paramilitary operation. It was a plan to unseat the communist government …”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner- Presidents’ Secret Wars John Prados Chap 3 @ 1:35
Assembly of Captive European Nations member_of
Albania documented
“ACEN, Assembly of Captive European Nations. ACEN brought together all of these organizations, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania. They also provided representatives to participate in …”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner Transnational Anticommunism& Cold War part 6 @ 26:30
Inter-Services Intelligence carried_out_attack
Albania documented
“died suddenly of a heart attack at a hotel. Robert Lowe, called in by the police to identify the dead Albanian, had to explain his connections. Who's this guy? By coincidence, the same night the British boat Stormy Seas took two parties tot…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner Safe for Democracy Part 5 @ 45:22
David Smiley trained
Albania documented
“Smiley supervised the training. Feelers were put out in other directions as well. Yugoslavia had halted its aid to Greek guerrillas and broken with Stalin in 1948. They might participate.…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner Safe for Democracy Part 5 @ 37:18
E. Howard Hunt spied_on
Albania documented
“Haney soon had his task force and a plan to go. The chief of political action, the CIA euphemism for psychological warfare, was E. Howard Hunt. Like how he shows up in all of these? He had previously worked in Albania. Yeah, we found him th…”
▶ The Colonels Corner President’s Secret Wars chapter 6 @ 39:59
Operation Valuable targeted_for_regime_change
Albania book_quoted
“to infiltrate their local groups, you know, like stay behind, sound familiar? The plan, evidently called Operation Valuable, was discussed internally in British government meetings in 1948. And 1948 is the same time that they're destabilizi…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner- Presidents’ Secret Wars John Prados Chap 3 @ 6:51
CIA targeted_for_regime_change
Albania book_quoted
“By 1949, both of them hostile to Stalin. So Albania's quote-unquote Iron Curtain was much more vulnerable. There were also bases available on the island of Malta and in Italy, just a short jump away. The CIA intended Albania to be the rollb…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner Safe for Democracy Part 5 @ 29:41
Operation Gladio attempted_coup_against
Albania host_asserted
“Like we dropped Gladio units into Albania and they were all killed immediately.…”
▶ ColonelTowner-Watkins-USS Liberty meets Operation Gladio-Regime Change in Egypt @ 58:54
BND carried_out_attack
Albania book_quoted
“which was affiliated with the Spanish Foreign Ministry and had excellent financial and publishing resources at its command. So they're going to begin working with Albania, Hungary and Poland, as well as Slovakia. And weirdly enough, that's …”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner Transnational Communism&Cold War Part 14 @ 42:03
Southern Air Transport operated_in
Albania caller_asserted
“to create blackouts. And so they would land in the pitch black and unload and reload. And he said that was pretty wild. And then he did mention he was in like Bosnia, Albania, the Balkans. So that's pretty much what I got out of it. And the…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner Drugs, Oil and War Part 8 @ 1:14:42
Mentions (78)
▶ 58:54
What you always find is looming in the background, like when we were trying to do it in Algeria and several of the Eastern European countries in the immediate aftermath of the World War II, Russia, Soviet Union had spies everywhere and they…
▶ 18:30
of the American rationale over the next two and a half years that Russians were trying to get into Greece, that they were paying the guerrillas, and that had it not been for the U.S. and the divisive tactics being used, Greece would go comm…
▶ 1:14:42
to create blackouts. And so they would land in the pitch black and unload and reload. And he said that was pretty wild. And then he did mention he was in like Bosnia, Albania, the Balkans. So that's pretty much what I got out of it. And the…
▶ 26:32
the CIA's entertainment industry liaison from 1996 to 2007, and first cousin of actor Tommy Lee Jones, keep it in the family, was thought to be the prototype for Robert De Niro's character Conrad Breen in Wag the Dog. Breen was a CIA spin d…
▶ 1:18:12
and see if we have any other comments in here. Let's see. Albania always seems to be intriguing. Yeah, we just covered Albania, as a matter of fact. In a book that we're doing right now, I have like a book club. This book called The Preside…
▶ 1:18:41
post-World War II Albania and basically us trying to create stay-behind units there and failing miserably? Right. Pavlik. Yeah. Pavlik, who was, of course, that's where, that was a source of, you've got to realize, when you're talking about…
▶ 1:19:11
It was a source of, you know, most of the gold that became lodged within the treasure chests of the Vatican Bank. So, yeah. So our involvement there in the Balkan region is, you know, it dates back quite a long way. And it's presently very …
▶ 1:19:42
Albania produced boat people basically like what we had from Cuba constantly. They were washing ashore off the coast of Brindisi, which I lived just south of there. And there were Albanians coming in as basically illegal aliens to Italy thr…
▶ 1:20:11
Albania in the 1990s. What happened in Albania, you had the problem in what was then Yugoslavia. Yes. And you had the problem of Milosevic and you had the problem of Serbs who were Christians and who controlled these regions. Christians. Yo…
▶ 1:21:08
At that time, during the 1990s, when we were bombing the delights out of Kosovo and places like that, we were killing thousands and thousands and thousands of Christian Serbs. And under the guise that, hey, guess what? The Serbs have initia…
▶ 50:04
Toftke was part of the OSF. His World War II experience had been in organizing armed shipments to guerrillas across the Adriatic Sea from Bari, Italy, which would have been Albania. Isn't that interesting? He later parachuted into France an…
▶ 39:59
Haney soon had his task force and a plan to go. The chief of political action, the CIA euphemism for psychological warfare, was E. Howard Hunt. Like how he shows up in all of these? He had previously worked in Albania. Yeah, we found him th…
▶ 1:35
We'll get it right next time, although they never get it right. This one is set in the Balkans, the Baltic coastal plain, and it became the scene of the first big CIA paramilitary operation. It was a plan to unseat the communist government …
▶ 2:00
And this is a new one. I have not run across what we did in Albania in any of our former research. So this one was very interesting to me, which my experience with Albania, which I'll just go ahead and share with you guys up front, was when…
▶ 2:31
Sorry, I'm distracted. They were like the boat people for Cuba, for Italy. So it was not unusual on my way to work to find, I don't know, like hundreds of people because I lived right by the Adriatic Sea and across the Adriatic Sea is Alban…
▶ 3:27
military people that's car was broke down or whatever because there was not a whole lot going on in san vito italy um that wasn't related to the military so anytime there was like an influx of albanian quote-unquote refugees you would get t…
▶ 4:49
the day. So if you want to stop by the shops downtown, it wasn't a big deal. So I'm very familiar with the politics of Albania only because we heard them all the time because every time somebody was overthrown or there was a terror attack o…
▶ 5:16
There had been a plan to unseat the government of Albania under the typical designation of it being communist. The geography was a key element in making the campaign possible. Bases were available just a short distance away, to include our …
▶ 5:46
Stalin by 1949. And no, I was not over there during that time. So Albania's Iron Curtain, quote unquote Iron Curtain, was isolated from the rest of the Soviet bloc. The destabilization of Albania was to be a spoiling action in the Cold War,…
▶ 6:16
It was going to be a show thing. There's not really a communist significant presence, but we're going to, quote unquote, roll it back. And then it's going to be a feather in our cap because we're pushing back against the, quote unquote, Iro…
▶ 7:16
The British difficulties with Albania had started in 1946 with incidences in which the British warships were fired upon. Later, two destroyers had been mined and sunk in a three mile wide Corfu channel along the Albanian coast. And Corfu is…
▶ 7:46
and advised Enver Hoxha, H-O-X-H-A, with their SOE during the war, by 1949, they were prepared to overthrow him. So, again, notice a pattern here. He was their guy during the war. But after the war, they want to get rid of him. We saw that …
▶ 8:14
in a whole bunch of different places. In February 1949, the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, B-E-B-I-N, agreed on the plan to, quote-unquote, detach Albania. The Hoxha government, meanwhile, further encouraged British hostility by r…
▶ 13:29
Fillers were put out in all directions in Yugoslavia, which had halted its aid to Greek quote-unquote guerrillas, but those are actually the freedom fighters that the British and later us were trying to overthrow, the nationalists. And Yugo…
▶ 13:57
had approached the U.S. through the CIA channels for military aid and were depending on this assistance to forestall any interaction with the Soviets, they did not want to piss off the Soviets. And that's what they felt would happen if they…
▶ 14:31
The most important collaborators for this Albanian mission was Albanian immigrants that was found throughout Europe. So one of them was Julian Amari, A-M-E-R-Y, and Neil McLean, M-C-L-E-A-N, who had worked in Albania for...…
▶ 15:01
the British SOE during the war. Again, more gladiatorial people. So the politics of Operation Valuable were indeed Byzantine. The most accessible Albanian leaders were those of the Bali Kombatar, or in English, National Front. They were cen…
▶ 16:30
Zog, Z-O-G. Originally, the monarch had been a tribal entity in central Albania. He had seized power in 1924 in a coup and made himself king in 1927. So, Zog had led his own political movement, and when he learned that the West had dealt fi…
▶ 16:59
He was so furious that he asked the Western delegates to leave his room. Julian Amari saved the day by arguing that the time was not right for reestablishing the monarchy and that King Zog needed allies if he wished to ever achieve that goa…
▶ 19:29
Frasheri, F-R-A-S-H-E-R-I, suddenly died of a heart attack in the Lexington Hotel. OPC Officer Lowe was called in to identify who the dead Albanian was and what his connection was. By coincidence, that same night in the Adriatic, a British …
▶ 19:57
took two parties totaling 20 Albanian partisans across the channel from Carfu, and the SIS nickname for these guys were called the Pixies. Four of the paramilitary men were killed. The other ones escaped into Greece. Albanian government sec…
▶ 20:27
was that one of its top men was a Soviet spy. Kim Philby happened to be working on this entire initiative. American and British leaders discussed Operation Valuable at the highest levels during Ernest Bevin's September 1949 trip to Washingt…
▶ 20:56
purely internal Albanian uprising at this time is not indicated and if undertaken would have little chance of success. Although presumably the CIA analysts were not aware of Operation Valuable, they nonetheless noted nine weaknesses of the …
▶ 21:21
the strength in Soviet control measures along with continued improvement in the army strength numbers. Most significantly, the report concluded the possibility of foreign intervention in conjunction with widespread popular unrest and anti-g…
▶ 21:52
enforced since 1948, which included the intent to place maximum strain on the Soviet structure of power and control, particularly in relationships with Moscow in any nearby country. In NSC Directive 58, there was a basic policy paper on Eas…
▶ 22:53
In his conversation with Atkinson on Balkan policy, Ernest Bevin inquired whether the U.S. basically agreed with the overthrow of the Hoxha government. Atkinson replied they did. Are there, wondered Secretary Bevin, any kings around that co…
▶ 23:21
This is evident in a December 1949 CIA report, which worried that the loyalty to King Zog might be eclipsed by other elements of national factions. And this is a quote from it.…
▶ 1:11:53
Every single time they inserted a unit back into Ukraine, they were decimated. The same thing happened to Ukraine that happened in Hungary, that happened in Albania, that happened in Poland. They would just like literally kill them as soon …
▶ 57:05
overthrowing the governments. And that's all they care about. They don't care how sloppy it is. They don't care how many people get killed. They just, and they would have continued on just, and that's why Operation Gladio, when we looked at…
▶ 55:26
And option B was continuing previous policies. Few have noticed that Eisenhower did not select a pure strategy, containment. Kennan's option A, he mixed with elements of Task Force C, in particular, covert action. That this was the decision…
▶ 55:54
where participants discussing solarium results explicitly raised the possibility for actions in Guatemala, Iran, and Albania. Alan Dulles noted that he had already sent a CIA paper on Albania to the Psychological Strategy Board. Dulles also…
▶ 56:26
Only in the case of Albania did President Eisenhower inject a cautionary note, quote, because of the question of who gets it and who gets hurt, unquote. Both the Guatemala and Iran covert actions were carried out. What an interesting meetin…
▶ 1:01:48
Army's counterintelligence corps after the war. He switched to the CIA afterwards. It was Richardson who in the denouncement of the Albanian project had shut down the operating bases. And the Albanian project is where they were trying to se…
▶ 15:36
The secret war on the western flank of South Vietnam, among the rugged mountains in the high plains of Laos, represented an effort to isolate the battlefield in the south. Paramilitary action and political manipulation in Laos attained heig…
▶ 11:08
But much of his field experience had been in Thailand, running the drug operations there. Douglas Blaufarb, B-L-A-U-F-A-R-B. Blaufarb came to the CIA from a career at Voice of America and the U.S. Information Services, both CIA fronts. He c…
▶ 8:12
He was raised in Albania and Iraq, and his dad was a member of the State Department. Both had served in Italy. Hart had been born in Minneapolis across the river from William Colby's twin city, St. Paul. And by all accounts, the Asian baron…
▶ 51:33
The Albania operation, which we've covered in other books, where Wisner kept sending team after team after team of people into Albania and every single one of them were murdered. And he didn't stop. They don't care. They were trying to set …
▶ 29:07
that witnessed the first big CIA paramilitary operation. This plan, in conjunction with the British, aimed to unseat the communist government of Albania, a small state on the eastern Adriatic Sea. It's literally right across the Adriatic fr…
▶ 29:41
By 1949, both of them hostile to Stalin. So Albania's quote-unquote Iron Curtain was much more vulnerable. There were also bases available on the island of Malta and in Italy, just a short jump away. The CIA intended Albania to be the rollb…
▶ 30:13
So they're thinking that's going to be a strategic advantage. CIA had intelligence that Soviet sailors and advisors were setting up a naval base there. The notion of creating an internal opposition to depose Enver Aksa, wartime resistant le…
▶ 30:42
These were joint operations. A small band of commandos were to be infiltrated to set up local guerrilla groups, which could be coordinated and supported from the outside. The plan was called Operation Valuable and the CIA knew it as BG Fien…
▶ 31:14
with incidents two years earlier in which the British warship was fired upon. Later, a pair of destroyers were mined and sunk in the Corfu Channel along the Albanian coast. Although the British Special Operations Executive, the SOE, had arm…
▶ 31:41
In February, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin agreed to the plan to detach Albania from the Soviet bloc. The Hoxha government, meanwhile, further encouraged British hostility by refusing to accept an International Court of Justice dec…
▶ 32:10
In March, William Hayter, a senior British intelligence officer, led a delegation of SIS and foreign office officials to Washington to ask for support for Operation Valuable and to present a broad range of alternatives for prosecuting the C…
▶ 34:12
We've got State Department people moving to the CIA and we have OSS turned journalist turned CIA running covert operations. I'm totally shocked. Okay, the British initially provided almost all the manpower. It was the Brits who had the peop…
▶ 37:18
Smiley supervised the training. Feelers were put out in other directions as well. Yugoslavia had halted its aid to Greek guerrillas and broken with Stalin in 1948. They might participate.…
▶ 37:34
Although the Yugoslavs had approached the U.S. through CIA channels for military aid and depended on this assistance to forestall any intervention by Russia, they decided they did not wish to increase Soviet hostility by acting against Alba…
▶ 40:54
He'd provide his own cover. Michael Burke moved to Rome and pretended to open a new film company. How convenient. In Rome, Burke began seeing Albanian exiles of different political persuasions with U.S. dollars to induce them to bury their …
▶ 41:25
area during World War II. They wanted to sound out their old contacts in Rome, Athens, and Cairo. The exiles, Burke recalled, were more a rallying point than a valid basis for political revolution. Nonetheless, they wanted them interviewed.…
▶ 42:25
At meetings in Rome in June and July of 49, Birkin Amory nonetheless brought Bali into the operation. You know, because we love our Nazis. The Western spies flew to Cairo and called on exiled King Zog, originally a tribal figure in central …
▶ 45:22
died suddenly of a heart attack at a hotel. Robert Lowe, called in by the police to identify the dead Albanian, had to explain his connections. Who's this guy? By coincidence, the same night the British boat Stormy Seas took two parties tot…
▶ 45:53
as SIS had called the Albanians during training on Malta. This first foray met with total disaster. Four of the paramilitary men were killed, the other escaped into Greece. Albanian government security forces had evidently known the exact t…
▶ 48:00
unaware that they were actually going ahead with it. They're just giving them intel saying it's dumb and the leadership is going, we don't care. The CIA analyst noted nine weaknesses of the Hoxha government while highlighting greatly streng…
▶ 48:30
That continued the improvement of the 65,000-man army and the 15,000-strong security forces. There's literally no way without a full-scale ground invasion they're overthrowing the government. An Albanian campaign fit squarely in the U.S. po…
▶ 50:29
put in charge if you're ever going to do the operation, because that's what really matters. Control, not freedom. So as a result of the question, the answer was the settlements of differences among the exiled Albanians to provide leadership…
▶ 53:50
A group in September of 1950 managed to survive for two months inside Albania, but could not raise any resistance. The most successful pixie was Hemat Majani, a CIA favorite called Tiger. He made 15 insertions. He habitually moved over land…
▶ 57:14
Rome station chief still believed in the adventure. Richardson sat him down over drinks and told him that it was over. He said, I don't know what they'll say about it in London. Richardson assured him they already knew. Fighting in Albania …
▶ 1:01:12
the covert action. Truman's NSC ordered State and Pentagon to collaborate on a paper that would turn the Dulles-Jackson-Corea report into a set of recommendations, completed and adopted by the NSC that July. One of these was that the CIA es…
▶ 36:56
Kellogg, Brown, and Root contractors were dispatched to Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Hungary, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Somalia, Zaire, Haiti, a large swath of Southwest Asia, all to support U.S. Army operations. The Balkans, on the wh…
▶ 32:43
because they used it against the Soviet Union almost immediately, that the stay-behind network that Dillon had already created and was already using against the Eastern European countries to destabilize them, like we read in Albania and sev…
▶ 40:38
And what's interesting about that is if you guys remember when we were talking about Galen being put in charge of the BND and like Albania where they tried to, Galen kept telling Alan Dulles that his stay behind units that he had set up wer…
▶ 41:29
There's a whole lot of documentation that basically says, like, for example, when we read that book about Albania, one of the very first operations where we were going in supposedly based on Galen's intelligence, that there were still exist…
▶ 6:27
In November 1947, under the chairmanship of Monsir Bela Varga, V-A-R-G-A, the Hungarian National Committee was established, followed by a Romanian one. And then a Council of Free Czechoslovakia was organized in 49. Also, an Albanian one was…
▶ 26:30
ACEN, Assembly of Captive European Nations. ACEN brought together all of these organizations, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania. They also provided representatives to participate in …
▶ 27:04
So it was going to basically be functioned like as a UN, but only for those countries. As it ends up, this ASIN organization is how they got the quote-unquote intel to do all of the insertions into Albania, Hungary, Romania. And you guys re…
▶ 27:29
And several different venues, how they were going to insert stay behind units into all of those countries. They use this organization for the intelligence in order to do that. And if you remember, they all got captured or killed. Only one g…
▶ 42:03
which was affiliated with the Spanish Foreign Ministry and had excellent financial and publishing resources at its command. So they're going to begin working with Albania, Hungary and Poland, as well as Slovakia. And weirdly enough, that's …
▶ 43:10
especially in Ukraine and Albania, where they thought, according to the intelligence they were getting from Galen, which were all lies and made up bullshit, that there were people behind those lines that and he provided them names and locat…