For many years, there was a straightforward, pat narrative that developed concerning the West’s first covert operations to topple a communist regime. It goes one thing like this: In the course of the late Forties and early Nineteen Fifties, the US and United Kingdom launched a collection of clandestine infiltration missions throughout Albania, parachuting in a collection of brokers to attempt to overthrow Enver Hoxha’s authorities. The operation, nonetheless, was a spectacular, virtually legendary failure—all as a result of British intelligence officer Kim Philby, maybe the Soviet Union’s most infamous mole, tipped off his handlers in Moscow, who in flip warned allies in Tirana.
A long time later, that narrative nonetheless has sure components of fact. Sure, there have been parachute drops throughout Albania through the early Chilly Battle. And sure, the operation was a joint British-U.S. affair. However as political scientist Stephen Lengthy argues in his new ebook, A Wealthy Harvest of Bitter Fruit, virtually all the things else about that story is fake. Because of his archival analysis and dozens of interviews, Lengthy found that these missions had been by no means essentially about toppling Hoxha, nor ending communism in Albania. And in maybe the best corrective, he writes that Philby and the Soviet Union could have performed no function in any respect within the operation’s final failure.
For many years, there was a straightforward, pat narrative that developed concerning the West’s first covert operations to topple a communist regime. It goes one thing like this: In the course of the late Forties and early Nineteen Fifties, the US and United Kingdom launched a collection of clandestine infiltration missions throughout Albania, parachuting in a collection of brokers to attempt to overthrow Enver Hoxha’s authorities. The operation, nonetheless, was a spectacular, virtually legendary failure—all as a result of British intelligence officer Kim Philby, maybe the Soviet Union’s most infamous mole, tipped off his handlers in Moscow, who in flip warned allies in Tirana.
A Wealthy Harvest of Bitter Fruit: CIA and MI6 Covert Motion in Communist Albania on the Daybreak of the Chilly Battle, Stephen Lengthy, Icon Books, 384 pp., £25, June 2026
A long time later, that narrative nonetheless has sure components of fact. Sure, there have been parachute drops throughout Albania through the early Chilly Battle. And sure, the operation was a joint British-U.S. affair. However as political scientist Stephen Lengthy argues in his new ebook, A Wealthy Harvest of Bitter Fruit, virtually all the things else about that story is fake. Because of his archival analysis and dozens of interviews, Lengthy found that these missions had been by no means essentially about toppling Hoxha, nor ending communism in Albania. And in maybe the best corrective, he writes that Philby and the Soviet Union could have performed no function in any respect within the operation’s final failure.
In rescuing the mission from its historic cobwebs, Lengthy has revealed a chapter of early Chilly Battle historical past much more rollicking and disastrous than popularly remembered. And it’s one with a sudden, sweeping relevance, particularly as the US begins analyzing the feasibility of regime change as soon as extra, this time in Iran, Cuba, and past.
Official portrait of future Communist chief of Albania, Envar Hoxha, as a younger officer on January 01, 1950. Common Pictures Group through Getty Pictures
When Hoxha seized energy within the waning days of World Battle II, Albania turned a fractious place. This was not simply true for the anti-Hoxha opposition, which ranged from pro-monarchist forces to pro-Western cohorts to these in favor of nearer ties with fellow communists in neighboring Yugoslavia. It was additionally the case inside Hoxha’s regime itself. Purges and arrests, present trials and sham convictions: Hoxha’s early days noticed the budding dictator turning on buddy and foe alike. This seemed, at the least to exterior observers, that Albania was a “nation in turmoil,” Lengthy writes, simply ready for the best collection of occasions to ship its authorities crumbling to the bottom.
Enter the postwar U.S. and British intelligence companies. Removed from the buttoned-up, bureaucratized spying of the later Chilly Battle interval, the early postwar MI6 and CIA had been an virtually shambolic bunch. With little oversight, particularly on the U.S. facet, these businesses may concoct no matter schemes and plans they fancied; one will get a way from studying Lengthy’s ebook that they had been much less James Bond, extra Monty Python. This method may need been humorous, had it not resulted in so many deaths and wasted assets.
As they watched Albania from afar, U.S. and British officers realized they wanted a greater sense of what was taking place contained in the nation. The thought for an Albania mission wasn’t essentially to topple Hoxha; ought to the Albanian dictator fall, London and Washington had been involved not nearly a Soviet response, but additionally that his neighbors in Italy, Greece, and Yugoslavia would subsequently tear Albania aside. As an alternative, the mission was about assessing simply how brittle his regime actually was and determining what ought to come subsequent.
To assemble info, British and U.S. officers got here up with a plan that, at the least on paper, appeared destined for fulfillment. They recruited dozens of Albanian émigrés scattered throughout refugee camps in Europe and skilled them in Malta and West Germany on all the things from small arms to map-reading to “the artwork of silent killing.” At first, the British directed a collection of amphibious clandestine landings; in later flight missions run by the Individuals, a Polish flight workforce piloted them in an unmarked C-47 into Albanian airspace, the place they parachuted into Albania correct. As soon as there, these Albanian groups would radio again their assessments, collect assist on the bottom, and await additional instruction.
Nearly from the outset, although, nothing went proper. Practically half of the Albanian brokers on the deliberate first soar in 1950 backed out, reportedly as a result of “political infighting” amongst them. Even with the smaller crew, the drop was aborted as a result of heavy rain and snow. A few week later, when U.S. officers tried the launch as soon as extra, brokers themselves wore garments that had been so skinny—“completely insufficient for the extraordinarily chilly and moist wintry climate circumstances,” Lengthy writes—that some “resorted to chopping up their small backup parachutes to wrap round themselves for additional heat.”
From there, issues solely received worse. The Polish aircrew deposited the brokers a full day’s march from the place they had been imagined to land. Any ingredient of secrecy within the drop shortly disappeared; as one agent remembered, “Everybody knew that parachutists had landed as a result of our stuff fell into [a nearby] village.” The brokers hid in a forest for almost per week to evade communist safety sweeps. Lastly rising, they discovered from locals that Albanian safety forces had deliberate an ambush within the authentic drop zone—which means that the mistaken touchdown had truly saved them. With out provides, or any ingredient of shock remaining, the brokers deserted the mission totally, trudging over the Yugoslav border to security.
It was a sample that might play out again and again. As one agent on a later mission recollected, his workforce by some means missed the drop zone by some three and a half miles. Upon touchdown, they realized that their mission chief was “drunk on the pre-mission whiskey that was meant to calm his nerves.” Wandering to the closest village, they as soon as extra hid out from safety forces, surviving on little greater than uncooked corn for 2 weeks. Just like the primary workforce, the one hope was crossing the border, which they finally did, escaping into Greece.
And people had been the fortunate ones. Crew after workforce instantly disappeared after their drops, with U.S. and British handlers by no means listening to from them once more. In only a few brief years, dozens of brokers had been misplaced. As Lengthy particulars, Albanian safety officers had one clear benefit: They knew exactly the place the drop zones had been, lengthy earlier than the groups of brokers launched. All too usually, the Albanian recruits jumped on to their demise.
12 months after 12 months, the outcomes had been the identical. Little info trickled again to Washington and London, all whereas total groups of anti-communist Albanian brokers vanished. As Lengthy paperwork, your complete six-year operation, which led to 1955, had a loss price of 36 %—a staggering quantity, each then and now. Hoxha, in the meantime, lasted for many years extra atop the Albanian regime, dying in 1985 as one of many longest-lasting communist leaders in historical past.
A Wealthy Harvest of Bitter Fruit recounts many of those failures in microscopic element. Providing granular seems at all the things from agent recruitment to bureaucratic tensions between London and Washington, the ebook is a tour de pressure of knowledge on an operation that’s lengthy escaped scrutiny. And this all units the groundwork for essentially the most outstanding discovering of your complete ebook. As Lengthy concludes, the concept that all of this was undone by Philby and his Soviet handlers is fake—and one which lets each Western brokers and the émigrés themselves off the hook.
In spite of everything, Albania was one thing of a geopolitical backwater. A Soviet satellite tv for pc state, certain—however hardly one thing core to Moscow’s broader pursuits, and positively not a spot it will be keen to danger its prime mole over. As one U.S. official remembered, “Why would anyone in his proper thoughts danger an asset comparable to Philby for that function?” Philby seemingly concluded the identical: “Put merely, Albania was not price risking his personal pores and skin over,” Lengthy writes.
As an alternative, in Lengthy’s account, the operation’s rank failures had two culprits. First had been the Albanian recruits themselves. Even in any case their coaching, they had been hardly polished clandestine items. A few of them “couldn’t inform a tank from a subject tractor,” complained one report, and lots of couldn’t assist however disclose what they had been doing, particularly all through the Albanian émigré group. This sort of “open bar speak,” as one U.S. official known as it, shortly received again to communist authorities. On condition that the Albanian brokers had been usually dropped subsequent to the villages they grew up in, it didn’t take a lot sleuthing for Tirana to establish the place the following mission would happen.
But it surely wasn’t simply the Albanian recruits. The CIA officers concerned had been hardly pillars of tradecraft. As one CIA official remembered, a few of his colleagues had been “so flamboyant it was [like] attempting to say St. Peter’s Cathedral was a covert operation.”
A sprawling hubris saturated the mission, blinding CIA officers to the truth that their Albanian counterparts had gotten the higher of them. In a single case, when an Albanian workforce failed seven occasions to reply with the correct reply to a CIA “management problem,” the handlers proceeded as if nothing was flawed, not realizing that the Albanians had been captured. They “had been reluctant to just accept that their most prized agent workforce had fallen into enemy arms,” Lengthy writes. Ultimately, the Individuals began to suspect what had occurred—however as a substitute of pausing the operation, they saved dropping brokers instantly into the Albanian maw, turning an “preliminary setback” into “an irrevocable disaster.”
Albanian state safety brokers maintain a captured CIA officer throughout Operation Priceless in Albania in an undated photograph.Wikimedia Commons
That irrevocable disaster, due to Lengthy, lastly has an correct historic report. If the Albania case research is any indication, all the things we find out about related U.S. campaigns that parachuted brokers into locations comparable to Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, and Ukraine may also be turned on its head upon nearer examination—not least as a result of Philby has additionally been blamed for his or her failures. Till then, one factor is evident: The one ones harvesting the bitter fruit of this mission had been these in London and Washington, and the Albanian anti-communist forces caught within the center.
This can be a lesson U.S. officers would do effectively to take to coronary heart in 2026, particularly amid the disastrous Iran battle. In spite of everything, the regime in Tehran likewise appeared, at the least from the surface, as if it had been able to topple just a few months in the past—solely to hold on, and even strengthen, within the time since. The mullahs could have little in widespread with Hoxha, however each ended up clinging to energy for much longer than Washington imagined.
Paradoxically, the CIA is the one company that appeared conscious of that reality this time round. Within the lead-up to the battle, CIA Director John Ratcliffe stated efforts at regime change inside Iran had been “farcical.” Ratcliffe, in fact, was confirmed right—however his warnings had been of little significance to an administration satisfied of its path to victory. As with Albania, catastrophe in Iran wasn’t as a result of any inside moles or treacherous outsiders. It was merely the fault of a U.S. administration caught up in its personal hubris.
