Reminiscing in 1985 on his activities in the early days of Project Fiend, James McCargar said that he was astounded to hear that the CIA had gotten involved in assassinations. The question of assassinations had come up once in the early days of the Office of Policy Coordination, but the decision had been not to get into that because the Albanians “were so much better at it than we were.” McCargar said that Albanian agents were not authorized to carry out any assassinations inside Albania.11
The opposition certainly did not have any qualms about engaging in such actions. The Russians had a unit at the time, known as Spets Byuro #1 (Special Office #1), assigned to carry out such tasks as sabotage, political murders, and kidnappings. A KGB12 assassin, Bogdan Stashinsky, who defected to the West in 1961, described two hits during the previous few years, against Lev Rebet, a Ukrainian émigré writer, and Stepan Bandera, a leader of the Ukrainian Nationalist movement. In both cases, he had used a gun that fired vaporized poison, which killed almost instantly upon being inhaled. The properties of the killing agent were such that, until the defection of the assassin, both victims were officially believed to have died from heart attacks.13 It is conceivable that Soviet intelligence may have used a similar technique in October 1949 to eliminate Mithat Frashëri, the first president of the NCFA, who was found dead in his hotel room New York of an apparent heart attack.
While the Albanian Sigurimi may not have had the means to act in the United States at the time, they certainly were active in planning and carrying out assassinations and kidnappings in European countries, particularly in Italy and France. A memo to Wisner on December 2, 1949, reported that the Albanian intelligence service had assigned an agent in Italy the task of assassinating Hasan Dosti and Abas Kupi. This agent had also received the mission to assassinate Ismail Vërlaci, leader of the BKI. An attempt had already been made on Vërlaci’s life on November 25, 1949, when he was shot at in front of his house from a passing car but managed to escape the bullets by throwing himself to the ground.14 Two years later, another report described a four-man assassination team that was in Rome to kill important Albanians on the NCFA. In both cases, measures were taken to foil the plots, including “authorizing the Italian Service to handle these Hoxha hirelings.”15
In 1953, Joseph Lieb’s sister received a postcard from Rome saying that her brother had been in the hospital recovering from an appendectomy. The story did not jibe for her because Lieb’s appendix had been removed years before. She traveled to Rome to find her brother recovering from a gunshot wound he had received during an assassination attempt, which he had survived thanks to the quick reaction of his Italian bodyguard.16
Despite the astonishment that McCargar expressed in 1985, there is evidence that the CIA considered, planned, and even carried out “special operations,” including assassinations, with a varied degree of finality during the height of its activities against the Albanian Communist regime. The first example is the assassination in August 1949 of Bardhok Biba, party secretary and deputy for Mirdita, by agents sent to Albania under Plan Fontana, run jointly by the Office of Special Operations and Italian Naval Intelligence. It is possible that the agents acted on their own initiative, although for such a high visibility action they would have consulted their case officers in Italy.
Hamit Matiani and his team carried out a similar action in September 1952 when they killed the party secretary for Gramshi and another senior government official. The CIA station in Athens reported to headquarters that the Communist officials were killed during a firefight with their agents.17 The Albanian government version of the story was that Matiani and his followers executed the two officials in cold blood. At his trial in April 1954, Matiani recounted the events to support this claim, which, of course, could have been because he was under duress or had been brainwashed, as was suspected later.
Another thread of evidence can be found in Michal Burke’s diary entries between December 1950 and January 1951, which contain cryptic notes about special operations targeting Hysni Kapo and Haxhi Lleshi, high-ranking Communist and government leaders at the time. Finally, after a field visit to Athens in June 1951, a Fiend staff officer reported among other things: “Tewfik Kuka will be glad to assassinate anyone if asked to do so, but at the moment the Greeks are using him and don’t want to let us have him for the next couple of months. He is in Albania now and considers himself too old to be brought out, so he will be glad to perform any little assignments that may be thrown his way. . . .”18
All of the examples above are certainly not conclusive and are open to interpretation. But the following case shows unequivocally that assassinations were part of the operations in Project Fiend, and the threshold of approval apparently was even lower than Wisner’s level.
On January 3, 1952, the Albanian Telegraphic Agency broadcast the story of Hamdi Bodgani, a peasant from the Pogradeci district who persuaded three “diversionary agents who had been sent from Italy to Albania” for espionage purposes to come to his house. While the agents slept, he withdrew his family and cattle and summoned the Security Police who burned the house with the agents inside. “Today, a new house is being built for this patriot,” the broadcast concluded.
Officers in the Southeast European branch decided to mount an operation to eliminate Bodgani. They selected an initial team in Greece to carry out the action, but the agents lost enthusiasm for the job. In July 1952, the Athens station sent to headquarters an operational plan and clearance request for a new team of “two enthusiastic volunteers” to serve as the “Coup-de-Main liquidation team.” The team, code name Lightning, was composed of Vangjel Vangjellari, the proposed assassin, and Pavlo Kostandinos, who would serve as his guide and offer any assistance necessary. The team would be infiltrated from Greece and, after traveling to the operational area, observe Bogdani’s daily habits “with a view towards terminating his career.” The cable from Athens continued:
It is proposed that they attempt to ambush him killing him outright rather than to do away with him by employing poison or other less violent means. It is felt that the publicity and propaganda thus gained will be of far greater value. If the mission is successfully completed, its propaganda value will be exploited by HTGRUBBY [cryptonym for the clandestine radio Voice of Free Albania], QKPALING [cryptonym for the NCFA newspaper Shqipëria], as well as by leaflets.19
It isn’t clear whether or not the Lightning team was activated. In a memo to Yatsevitch in December 1952, the Athens staff indicated that a third team, code name Obsession, had been assembled to go after Bodgani but their mission was cancelled when they received reliable reports that the subject had been eliminated, which Athens was endeavoring to verify.20
* * *
E. Howard Hunt’s 1953 assignment in the Southeast European branch was short-lived. In 1954, he was summoned to Washington by C. Tracy Barnes, a former law firm colleague of Wisner who had joined the CIA in 1951, and by the end of 1953 was serving as a special assistant for paramilitary and psychological operations to DCI Dulles. Hunt was read into “the most important clandestine project in the world”21 at the time—the overthrow of Guatemala’s Communist-leaning regime of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. He took over the propaganda and political action side of the project, code name PBSUCCESS.
Hunt was a perfect fit for this operation. During his earlier assignment as station chief in Mexico City, he had followed developments in Guatemala closely. He had run agents across the Mexican border into Guatemala to assess the situation and collect intelligence independently from the CIA station in that country. Based on the information gathered, he had forwarded to headquarters a number of reports with urgent calls for action. In an effort to further collect evidence of Arbenz’s slow drifting to the left, Hunt organized a clandestine break-in at the Guatemalan embassy in Mexico City, during which a team of agents copied all the Guatemalan documents and code books they could find in the ambassador’s safe.22
In many aspects, project PBSUCCESS was a miniature replica of the activities t
hat had been conducted in Project Fiend since 1949 and of the proposed Albanian coup d’état that had been presented to the Psychological Strategy Board in the summer of 1953. The CIA screened Guatemalan anti-Communist leaders in exile and decided to back Colonel Castillo Armas and his group of supporters as the nucleus of the movement against the Arbenz government, which would be known as El Ejército de Liberación, or the Army of Liberation. The agency trained approximately eighty-five Castillo supporters in sabotage and paramilitary activities in Honduras and Nicaragua. They would serve as team leaders for a cadre of 260 shock troopers located in Honduras and El Salvador. Another thirteen radio operators were trained in radio communications and cryptography in Nicaragua between March and June 1954. Approximately eighty-nine tons of equipment were positioned in forward operating bases by black flights along Guatemala’s borders in Honduras and Nicaragua.23
Even more striking are the similarities between the Guatemala and Albanian operations in the area of propaganda and psychological warfare. A political pamphlet, El Combate (The Fight), was published under the direction of CIA officers and distributed weekly. Unmarked aircraft flew over Guatemala City regularly dropping leaflets with calls to the army to turn against Arbenz and support Castillo Armas. The CIA established a clandestine radio broadcasting station, called La Voz de la Liberación (the Voice of Liberation), in Nicaragua and broadcast daily programs dramatizing examples of Communist tyranny and promoting the Liberation movement’s ideologies and aims.24
One of the propaganda ploys was to fabricate reports of Soviet arms shipments to Guatemala. The CIA planned to hide Soviet arms in the jungle that, when “discovered,” would substantiate these reports. In the end, there was no need to take this action because Arbenz decided on his own to purchase five million dollars’ worth of arms from Czechoslovakia.25 A ship carrying two thousand tons of Czech weapons and ammunitions arrived at the Guatemalan Atlantic port of Puerto Barrios on May 20, 1954. It provided substantiation for the CIA propaganda claim that Guatemala under Arbenz had become a Soviet satellite.26
On the same day, the US Navy established air-sea patrols in the Gulf of Honduras with the declared purpose of protecting Honduras from invasion and controlling arms shipments to Guatemala. A formal Navy operation, code-named HARDROCK BAKER, began on May 24 to establish a sea blockade of Guatemala. Submarines and warships patrolled the coast and stopped all ships headed to Guatemala, including British and French ones, in search of arms. The blatant illegality of the blockade made it a powerful weapon of intimidation against the Arbenz government.27 On June 3, the United States airlifted arms to Honduras. Four days later, a contingency evacuation force was ordered to the area. It included an anti-submarine warfare vessel and five amphibious ships with a US Marine battalion landing team aboard.28
The moves were aimed at ratcheting up the psychological pressure on key Guatemalan army officers and causing them to defect to Castillo’s side. However, before abandoning Arbenz, they demanded either official assurance of US government support or an overt military incident that would demonstrate Castillo’s strength. The first option was a nonstarter. Operating under the principle of plausible deniability, the CIA had tried to hide the involvement of the US government from the beginning of the operation. CIA case officers always dealt with Castillo’s group as representatives of a group of rich American investors in the United Fruit Company interested in eliminating Communism from South America.29 A similar cover had been provided by the National Committee for Free Europe and the National Committee for Free Albania, the political front of the Albanian operation.
The overt military action that the Guatemalan army officers had demanded came on the night of June 18, 1954. Four hundred and eighty men trained by the agency and organized in five task forces crossed into Guatemala from Honduras and El Salvador. From the beginning, they ran into more resistance and difficulties than they had planned. The largest task force attacking Porto Barrios suffered a disastrous defeat on June 21. Agency files indicate that at least twenty-seven agents were killed there.30 The turning point for Castillo’s forces came as a result of the intense psychological warfare waged by the clandestine broadcasts and leaflets dropped over population centers, which announced that columns of rebel troops were advancing toward the capital. This news was accentuated by loud and visible air raids on major population centers conducted by agency-trained mercenaries using airplanes procured with CIA funds. They included the June 25 bombing of the Matamoros Fortress in downtown Guatemala City and the sinking of the British freighter, the Springfjord, at port in San Jose, for which the agency had to pay one million dollars in restitution later.31
On June 27, 1954, under pressure and believing that a US invasion of Guatemala was imminent, Arbenz resigned. A three-member military junta seized power temporarily, eventually relinquishing it to Castillo Armas, who was inaugurated as the new president on September 1, 1954. The total cost of the operation for the CIA had been only three million dollars.32 The number of operational casualties reported to President Eisenhower in an after-action briefing was an incredible “only one,” although dozens of Castillo’s supporters had died during the coup.33
Thus, PBSUCCESS entered agency lore as a successful operation. Coming on the heels of operation TPAJAX in Iran, it reinforced the premise put forward initially by Project Fiend that regime change could be brought about rapidly and inexpensively through covert operations, combining paramilitary action with robust psychological and propaganda warfare activities.
* * *
The Albanian formula was dusted off again when the agency began planning the next big covert operation—the overthrow of the Castro regime in Cuba. The task of formulating the overall plan of action fell to Group 5412, named after the 1954 National Security Council Directive 5412, which reaffirmed the CIA’s responsibility for covert actions abroad. It was composed of a team of senior representatives from the Department of State, Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the White House, and the CIA, charged to oversee the CIA’s high-risk covert operations during the 1950s and in the early 1960s.34
Allen Dulles presented the plan to Eisenhower at the White House on March 17, 1960. Its first step was to form a moderate group of Cubans in exile to serve as the opposition to Castro. Then propaganda would be conducted on behalf of the group, including clandestine and semi-clandestine broadcasts into Cuba from radio stations established on Caribbean islands south of Cuba. Concurrently, a resistance and intelligence-gathering network of disaffected elements would be established in Cuba. Preparations for a paramilitary force would begin outside of Cuba, the first stage being to assemble a cadre of leaders for training. After cautioning against leakages and breaches of security, Eisenhower directed Dulles to go ahead with the plan and the operations.35
Richard Bissell, who had replaced Wisner in 1958 as head of the Directorate of Plans, oversaw the detailed planning and execution of the plan, code name JMARC. Bissell was one of the brightest minds in the government establishment at the time. A former economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he earned recognition during World War II for devising a system using index cards to forecast the status of merchant ships hauling troops and supplies “three months in advance with a five percent margin error.”36 He played a key role in the implementation of the Marshall Plan in Europe and then, beginning in late 1954, managed the project that built the U-2 spy plane with astonishing speed (eighteen months from concept to fully operational planes) and for a total cost of nineteen million dollars, three million dollars under budget.37
In the summer of 1953, Wisner had invited Richard Bissell as a consultant to review and provide advice on CIA plans being prepared and executed at the time. During his 1953 review, Bissell came across the plans for a coup d’état in Albania. His active mind was engaged by the complexity of planning such an operation.38 There was something about the scheme to invade Albania that captured his imagination; he was still turning it over his mind when he organized the Cuban
operation in 1960.39
The Cuban plan went through a myriad of changes and mid-course corrections by the time it ended in the Bay of Pigs disaster on April 17, 1961. Yet, throughout the changes, the basic recipe of the CIA’s covert and paramilitary action—formulated in the early days of the OPC with the Albanian plan—remained the same. While the agency thought that operations in Iran and Guatemala had validated that recipe, its fundamental flaws were revealed by the Cuban operation. When the strategy was played out to its full extent, it produced a spectacular failure that caused the United States and its young president enormous embarrassment and cost Bissell his job.
* * *
So, then, what is the legacy of the Project Fiend? What lessons can be drawn today from that experience?
From a narrowly focused perspective, the immediate and visible end of the story was certainly not a happy one. The CIA and MI-6 did not accomplish the goals they had set for the operation. The Sigurimi and the KGB turned the tables on them and used the killed and captured agents for propaganda purposes for years to come. The Albanians who participated in the operations suffered terrible losses. Dozens perished, and several more who were captured spent the rest of their lives in Communist prisons or hard labor camps. The regime uprooted their families and persecuted them for decades, generation after generation. Families of Albanian exiles, especially of the leaders of the National Committee for Free Albania, suffered similar treatment and were often used as hostages to entice them to return to Albania or to stop activities against the Communist regime.
As an example, in November 1952, Skënder Konitza, first secretary of the Albanian Legation and Sigurimi’s legal resident in Rome, approached Hasan Dosti with an offer coming directly from Enver Hoxha. In return for Dosti’s defection, members of his family then enduring persecution would receive preferential treatment. Dosti might even be made president of the Albanian courts if he were to return to Albania. Dosti had the fortitude of mind to reject the offer and suggested to Konitza that the Hoxha regime would do better to follow Tito’s example and break with Moscow.40
Operation Valuable Fiend Page 29