On April 28, the team was flown to Kastoria, a small Greek town about ten miles from the Albanian border that served as the forward staging area for infiltration teams. The infiltration was scheduled for the first of May in order to take advantage of the May Day atmosphere, when the Communist security patrols would be celebrating and perhaps paying less attention to their duties. The team received the final mission briefing, covering security forces and mined areas in the border region, safe houses and friendly contacts along the route. The team code name in Albanian, Mollë, would serve as the password in the event any team members recrossed into Greece. Any runners sent out by the team would use the code words, Mollë Speciale, to identify themselves to the Greek border guards. Team members received Albanian identity cards with false biographic information on them.
The CIA case officers who had worked to prepare the team of agents for the mission had a very good feeling about them. Ulmer wrote to Washington: “Apple is by far the best team we have ever dispatched. Its members are way above the caliber of the Wahoos [Albanians] we have had to deal with in the past and every effort should be made to recruit more of this type from the same source if possible. They were a pleasure to work with and gave no trouble whatsoever, which is a far cry from the teams we have dealt with in the past.”4
On May first, Gordon Mason turned the team over to the Greek services that were responsible for escorting the agents to the border. CIA officers never went closer than a few miles of the Albanian border for fear that they might be caught in the skirmishes that regularly occurred between Albanian and Greek border guards or even worse snatched by the Albanians and transferred across the border. Two Albanian guides, Sherif Pleshti and Hysen Kapllani, would take the team to the Albanian border.
The team began its trek toward the border in the evening. After walking for three and a half hours, and just before crossing into Albania, Branica began suffering from pains in the chest. The team conferred on the condition of its ailing member and decided that he should remain behind because he would probably delay their progress. Upon his return to Kastoria, Branica was sent to the holding area in Athens where he was examined and found to have a serious coronary condition that could prove fatal with overexertion. Because of his age—he was forty-eight years old—his poor physical condition, and his heart problem, the Americans didn’t want to permit him to participate further in the operation, even though his loss was considered substantial, for he was said to be well known in the Mati area and was supposed to have made all the contacts there.5 Nevertheless, Branica was anxious to rejoin the team, and he asked to be parachuted in with the first supply drop.6
The team infiltrated between the towns of Bozhigradi and Erseka and proceeded toward the operational area, traveling only at night. During the day they remained in hiding in secluded areas or with friends. According to prearranged plans, the covert plane flew on the night of May 8, one week later, and dropped one container with supplies in the area between Elbasani and Gramshi. At the reception field, the plane crew saw light signals from powerful flashlights of a type not furnished to Apple. Repeated attempts to contact the team by radio were not successful, and Athens staff feared the Communist security forces had captured them.7
On May 27, the team finally established wireless contact and informed the base that they had arrived at the operations area and all was well; further, the team acknowledged receipt of the May 8 supply drop.8 The base immediately radioed the case officer challenge phrase: “How many rifles have you?” The purpose of the challenge was to determine whether the opposition controlled the team. At their next W/T communication on June 3, Apple replied with the prearranged answer indicating they were not controlled: “We want blankets.” Although not again rechallenged, the team for some reason repeated this safety phrase on June 12, 15 (on this date they sent it in English, contrary to instructions), 18 (again in English), 24, and 27.9
The news of Apple’s safe arrival in their operational area after the ominous silence of the first few weeks generated relief in Washington. The fact that the team had continued on its mission in accordance with prearranged instructions—despite being handicapped by the loss of an important team member at the very outset, and despite their inability to make wireless contact or resupply on the scheduled nights in May—was seen as indicative not only of the high morale and competence of the team but also of the thoroughness and efficacy of the Fiend staff in Athens that had prepared them.
In a congratulatory message sent in June, CIA headquarters praised the field for the attention given to all the ingredients of success in the preparation and activation of the mission. Yatsevitch wrote: “The care and minuteness in planning is evident from the May-Day entry to capitalize on BGGYPSY [cryptonym for Communist] celebrations, to the immediate reaction to a possibly controlled team. Now with the W/T contact established and a body and supply drop on the way, there is a basis of hope that this Apple Tree will bear a rich harvest of bitter fruit for BGGYPSY palates.”10
* * *
On May 28, Shehi, the team leader, ordered three members of the team, Matiani, Gjyla, and Sakollari, to return to Greece because of the difficulties in obtaining food supplies in the operating area sufficient to support a large team. The three men separated from Shehi and Premçi on the same day and exfiltrated to Greece on June 15.11 The debriefing of the returned agents offered some eye-opening information about the situation in Albania.
The many infiltration teams with different sponsors confused the population, who felt that unless the various groups united, they were doing more harm than good to their country. The Albanian government generated effective propaganda from the situation by claiming that the National Committee for Free Albania, working out of Greece and Italy, wanted to turn Northern Epirus over to the Greeks and bring the rest of the country under Italian control again. Agents captured in the past had been forced to reveal the names of local sympathizers who had aided and sheltered them. These sympathizers had suffered draconian punishments, which included the imprisonment or deportation to forced labor camps of their entire family circle. As a consequence, many people were predisposed to report to the authorities any infiltrators who contacted them. The government had also drafted local villagers into civil protection units to guard against infiltration or agents and to pick up any leaflets or supplies dropped.12
On the other hand, the team also reported that the majority of the Communists were disappointed with the Hoxha regime and were ready to work with any organization that planned to overthrow the government. Less than one fourth of the police force was loyal to the government, they said. Ninety people out of a hundred were ready to act if there were some serious attempt to overthrow the government, but they wanted reassurance that there would be no territorial concession to Greece, Italy, or Yugoslavia.13 These encouraging assessments by the team were certainly exaggerated, given the realities that existed on the ground. It seems probable the agents made up the information in order to tell their debriefers what they wanted to hear.
While all along the plan had been for Matiani and Sakollari to return, Ulmer and Mason in Athens were surprised that Gjyla returned as well. They assumed that Shehi had sent him back in order to report progress to Zog directly, without the Americans as intermediaries. Later, Sakollari recalled that Gjyla had little or no sense of security and, furthermore, had an inflated sense of his own importance. He explained that Shehi, while being a more able person, lacked the strength to control Gjyla effectively and that was the primary reason for returning him to Greece with Matiani and Sakollari. Another reason was Gjyla’s inability to make the contacts he had claimed he was able to make before he infiltrated. Even his own relatives in the Martaneshi area had been too scared to help when he approached them.14
With regards to Shehi, Sakollari remembered that he, too, had shown little awareness of the security precautions needed to safeguard his mission in Albania. On at least one occasion, it was the direct intervention of Matiani and Sakollari that saved the team
from capture when Shehi was attempting to make contact with a friend. Sakollari explained that Shehi did not fully realize the vast changes that had taken place in Albania since he had left in 1939. Thus, the departure of Matiani and Sakollari left Shehi without any experienced men who could ensure the safety of his team.15
Two examples of Shehi’s carelessness after Matiani’s departure are the noticeable increase in the volume of radio communication and the excessive number of contacts with local people. When Matiani was with the team, over a period of twenty-eight days they sent only three W/T messages with a total of sixteen words. In twenty-eight days following Matiani’s departure, the team sent nine messages ranging in length from eighteen to sixty words each. During that same period, on June 12, the team reported “We have found five friends who are now working for us.” On June 18, they sent “Twelve persons are working for us.”16
The Sigurimi exploited both these weaknesses to draw the team into a trap on the night of June 28–29 in what would be the opening gambit of a sixteen-month long playback operation they conducted against the CIA.
* * *
The Sigurimi had first been alerted of the presence of the team by the covert aircraft flight on the night of May 8. They searched the area and determined that it had been a supply drop rather than a body drop. Shortly after, they received reports of footprints at the border, indicating that a group of five to six men had infiltrated from Greece at the beginning of May. On May 15, a shepherd reported seeing men in military clothes and armed with German automatic guns in a forest in the Martaneshi area.
The Sigurimi tied these three events together and concluded that a team had infiltrated at the beginning of May, had been supplied from air on May 8, and was making its way to the north-central part of Albania. They alerted their agents in the area to report any suspicious activities. Using equipment and guidance from a team of Soviet advisers led by Lieutenant General Dimitri Kurbatov, chief counselor to the minister of interior,17 the Sigurimi was able to detect radio transmissions coming out of the region and triangulate their source in the area between the mine of Bulqiza and Lake Vajkali. Shehi was a native of this area and had moved there with Premçi after Matiani and the rest of the team had departed for Greece.18
On June 4, Myslim Shehi, a Communist from the area and informer of the Sigurimi known by the pseudonym Mexhi, reported that his distant relative, Zenel Shehi, had contacted him on behalf of King Zog and wished to use him in an important mission assigned to him by the King himself. The report garnered immediate attention and was elevated to the highest levels in the Sigurimi hierarchy who understood that this group was unlike other groups that Sigurimi dealt with on a regular basis.
Shehi was not tainted by collaboration with the Italians or Germans during the war, as most of the infiltrated agents were; he claimed to speak for the king; and he had been sent to agitate in the region where the king hailed from and where he still had a considerable influence. Further information from Mexhi revealed that the Americans were behind Shehi’s group and that Hamit Matiani had escorted him personally from Greece. The Sigurimi decided to mount an operation to capture the group and to turn it against their control center. They gave the operation the code name Liqeni i Vajkalit after the nearby lake where the team was located.19
Kadri Hazbiu, vice–minister of interior and head of the Sigurimi, personally directed the planning and the execution of the operation. Born in 1922, Hazbiu became a Communist at an early age and participated actively in partisan formations during the war. In 1945, only twenty-three years old, he became chief of intelligence in the Albanian army and in 1947 went to the Soviet Union for specialized training by Soviet intelligence. In 1950, he was appointed deputy to Mehmet Shehu, minister of interior at the time, and was put in charge of the Sigurimi.
Since 1949, the Sigurimi had maintained a special task force focused on locating and eliminating anti-government resistance groups throughout the country. It was composed of a handful of selected operatives who typically passed for resistance fighters, penetrated the bands and embedded with them for months, collecting intelligence on their movements, safe havens, and supporters. They placed the information in prearranged secret locations, or dead drops, which the Sigurimi checked frequently; or they passed it through a network of couriers, also known as cutouts—trusted intermediaries whose knowledge of the links in the communication chain was purposefully kept to a minimum in order to maintain secrecy.20
Hazbiu selected a team of five members from the task force and assigned them the mission to capture Shehi and Premçi alive, taking special care not to hurt arms or hands; and they should do this in complete secrecy without alerting the population at large or any contacts Shehi may have established about their capture. In this operation, they would present themselves not as opponents of the regime but as disgruntled Communists, members of Mexhi’s organization, who had remained loyal to King Zog and were dissatisfied with the Hoxha government.21
Once Hazbiu’s group was in place, Mexhi got back in touch with Shehi to inform him that he had several friends who were dissatisfied with the regime—potentially more could be convinced. Shehi asked Mexhi to arrange a meeting and relayed the information to the CIA case officers in Athens in his messages of June 12 and 18, together with a request for clothing and food for seven people for three months. The meeting occurred on the night of June 28–29 in a remote uninhabited house in the mountains near Bulqiza. Many years later, Mark Dodani, one of the members of the Sigurimi task force, told the story of how he and four other Sigurimi officers, the informer Mexhi, Shehi, and Premçi spent several hours into the night conversing and raising toasts to the health of Zog. Toward dawn, as Shehi and Premçi loaded themselves with their equipment and prepared to take leave, the Sigurimi men jumped on them and after a brief scuffle immobilized them.22
King Zog later provided a different version of Zenel Shehi’s betrayal and capture. In a letter to the CIA on May 1, 1954, Colonel Selmani, writing for Zog, said that Shehi’s mission had been to contact three Communists whom Zog believed had remained his sympathizers: Haxhi Lleshi, his uncle Aqif Lleshi, and Myslim Peza, their influential friend. Aqif Lleshi and Myslim Peza came to a complete understanding with Shehi and promised to help him contact Haxhi Lleshi and ensure his adherence as well. Unfortunately, Haxhi Lleshi seized this as a chance of ingratiating himself to the Communist regime. A cousin of Zenel Shehi, Myslim Shehi, lured Zenel to the house of another cousin by marriage, Muharrem Gjurra, under the guise of making contact with Haxhi Lleshi there. That’s where the Sigurimi forces caught him. For this action, the Communists rewarded Haxhi Lleshi by making him chairman of the Presidium of the National Assembly in Tirana.23
Zog did not provide any further details to substantiate his story, so it is hard to determine how much of this account was speculation on his part. But it is a fact that Haxhi Lleshi was indeed appointed chairman of the Presidium of the National Assembly on August 1, 1953. He kept this position, equivalent to the Albania’s head of state, until 1982. Whatever the true story of the betrayal may have been, the fact remains that on June 29, the Sigurimi had in their hands not only Shehi and Premçi but all their equipment, radio set, crypto pads, and notebooks.
* * *
Hazbiu moved swiftly to the next stage of the operation, which was to debrief thoroughly the two captured agents and convince them to collaborate in his playback scheme. Sigurimi histories say that both Shehi and Premçi agreed to cooperate relatively quickly. So quickly, in fact, that they aroused the suspicion of their captors, who feared that Premçi would send a signal to his control officer in Athens as soon as he had access to the radio. They pressured Premçi to reveal the danger codes agreed upon with the control, but he told them there weren’t any. The Sigurimi assigned a radio operator to become familiar with Premçi’s style of transmitting Morse code and to monitor the encryption and transmission of all his messages. They exchanged several trial messages, which they recorded and played back to Premçi. The Sigurimi
made it clear that all future exchanges with the control center in Athens would be similarly monitored and that he would suffer severe consequences if he didn’t send exactly what was prescribed by his handlers.
The Sigurimi gave a lot of thought to how they were going to phrase their messages. Despite the information they had extracted from Shehu and Premçi, they could not be sure of the context of the previous messages and could easily say something that would trigger the Americans’ suspicions. Hazbiu assigned a senior officer by the name of Pilo Shanto with the sole responsibility of crafting the messages and feeding them to Premçi for transmission. Shanto later wrote a memoir describing the details of the operation from the Sigurimi point of view.
Figuring out what to say in the first couple of messages was particularly agonizing, because a false step could blow up the entire operation from the outset. After lengthy discussions, Hazbiu ordered that the first messages provide some generic information about the area, including some language to explain why the team had not been in contact for the past several days.
On July 3, the Sigurimi sent the first two messages to the Athens control center. They took Premçi and his radio set on location in Bulqiza just in case the Americans were tracking the origin of the signal. They paid attention even to details, such as Shehi’s style of speech and his northern Albanian dialect, to ensure that the messages were as authentic as possible.
Operation Valuable Fiend Page 21