Katana VentraIP

Operation Valuable

The Anglo-American intervention in Communist Albania, codenamed Operation Valuable, was a significant Cold War military conflict conducted by the United Kingdom and the United States, in collaboration with Western allies. This covert operation aimed to overthrow the government led by Enver Hoxha. The intervention sought to counter Communist influence and reinstate a leadership aligned with the Western powers. The operation involved strategic military actions, incorporating air, naval, and ground assets in pursuit of its objectives.[14]

MI6 and the CIA launched a joint subversive operation, using Albanian expatriates as agents. Other anti-communist Albanians and many nationalists worked as agents for Greek and Italian intelligence services, some supported by the Anglo-American secret services. Many of the agents were caught, put on trial, and either shot or condemned to long prison terms at penal labour.

Background

Albania was in an unenviable position after World War II.[15] Greece claimed Albanian lands.[15] The Western Allies recognized neither King Zog nor a republican government-in-exile, nor did they ever raise the question of Albania or its borders at major wartime conferences.[15] No reliable statistics on Albania's wartime losses exist, but the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration reported about 30,000 Albanian dead from the war, 200 destroyed villages, 18,000 destroyed houses, and about 100,000 people made homeless.[15] Albanian official statistics claim higher losses.[15]


British plans for the overthrow of Hoxha and the Communist regime in Albania had existed since 1946.[16] The Russia Committee, established in 1946 by the British Foreign Office, was created to oppose the extension of Soviet control by promoting civil strife in Russia's Western border nations.[17]

Banda Mustafaj

– similar operation in Cuba

Bay of Pigs invasion

Prados, John (2006). . Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. ISBN 978-1-61578-011-2. OCLC 812925034.

Safe for democracy : the secret wars of the CIA

(1985). Betrayed. New York: Times Books. ISBN 0-8129-1188-1. OCLC 2215298.

Nicholas Bethell

Colonel LVO, OBE, MC, "Irregular Regular", Michael Russell, Norwich, 1994 (ISBN 0-85955-202-0). The Mémoirs of a Royal Horse Guards officer, SOE agent in Albania and Thailand, and later MI6 agent in Poland, Malta, Oman and Yemen. He trained the Pixies in Malta in 1949. Translated in French by Thierry Le Breton, Au cœur de l’action clandestine. Des Commandos au MI6, L’Esprit du Livre Editions, France, 2008 (ISBN 978-2-915960-27-3). With numerous photographs.

David Smiley

Dorril, Stephen. MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations, Fourth Estate, University of Michigan: 2000 ( 978-1-857020-93-9)

ISBN

Bruce Page; David Leitch; Phillip Knightley (1968). . New York: Doubleday. OCLC 165938.

The Philby Conspiracy

Paul Hockenos (2003). Homeland calling: exile patriotism and the Balkan wars. Ithaca, N.Y: . ISBN 0-8014-4158-7. OCLC 52165767.

Cornell University Press

Noble, Andrew. “Bullets and Broadcasting: Methods of Subversion and Subterfuge in the CIA War against the Iron Curtain.” MA dissert. University of Nevada, 2009

Stavrou, Nikolaos A. “Searching for a Brother Lost in Albania’s Gulag”. Mediterranean Quarterly 19, no. 2 (2008): 47-81