A Spy Among Friends (19 page)

Six months earlier Bido Kuka had been recruited for Operation Valuable in a displaced persons camp outside Rome. Kuka was a ‘Ballist’, a member of the Balli Kombëtar, the Albanian nationalist group who had fought the Nazis during the war, and then the communists after it. With the communist takeover of Albania hundreds of Ballists had been arrested, tortured and killed, and Kuka had fled, with other nationalists, to Italy. Since then he had spent three miserable years in Fraschetti camp, nursing his loathing of communism, rehearsing the Balli Kombëtar motto ‘Albania for the Albanians, Death to the Traitors’, and plotting his return. When he was approached by a fellow émigré and asked to join a new guerrilla unit for secret anti-communist operations inside Albania, he did not hesitate. As another recruit put it: ‘There was no question of refusing. When your life is devoted to your country you are prepared to do anything to help it.’ On 14 July 1949, Kuka and a fellow Ballist named Sami Lepenica boarded a military plane in Rome, and flew to the British island of Malta in the Mediterranean. They had no travel documents. A British Army officer, flapping a red handkerchief by way of a recognition signal, marched them past the customs barrier, and into a car. An hour later the bemused Albanians arrived at the gateway to a large castle, surrounded by a moat: Fort Bingemma, a Victorian citadel on the island’s southwest corner, selected by British intelligence as the ideal place from which to launch an anti-communist counter-revolution.

Over the next three months, Kuka and some thirty other Albanian recruits underwent intensive training under the watchful (if slightly mad) eye of Lieutenant-Colonel David de Crespigny Smiley, an aristocratic British Army officer with a legendary taste for derring-do. During the war Smiley had fought the Italians in Abyssinia as part of the Somaliland Camel Corps, foiled a German-backed coup to unseat the King of Iraq, fought alongside Siamese guerrillas and liberated 4,000 Allied prisoners (‘all absolutely stark naked except for a ball bag’), from the Japanese camp at Ubon. But it was in Albania that he earned his reputation for raw courage: in 1943 he parachuted into northern Greece, and set about blowing up bridges, ambushing German troops, and training guerrillas. He emerged from the war with a deep love of Albania, a loathing for Hoxha and the communists, a Military Cross, and facial scars from a prematurely exploding briefcase. When MI6 needed someone to equip, train and infiltrate anti-communist fighters into Albania, Smiley was the obvious choice. He was imperialist, fearless, romantic and unwary, and in all these respects, he was a neat reflection of Operation Valuable.

The training programme was brief but intensive, and conducted amid rigid secrecy. A series of British instructors, including an eccentric Oxford don, provided instruction in map-reading, unarmed combat, machine-gun marksmanship, and operating a radio with a pedal generator. Since the instructors spoke no Albanian, and the Albanians spoke not a word of English, training was conducted in sign language. This explains why Kuka’s conception of his mission was somewhat vague: get into Albania, head for his hometown near the Greek border, sound out the possibilities for armed insurrection, then get out and report back. None of the recruits were officers, and few had any military training. Life in the camps had left some with malnutrition, and all were quite small. The British, with more than a hint of condescension, called them ‘the pixies’.

In late September, Bido Kuka and eight other recruits were taken to Otranto on the Italian coast, fifty-five miles across the Adriatic from Albania. Disguised as local fishermen, they were loaded into a fishing vessel, and at a rendezvous point twenty miles off the Albanian coast, they were transferred to the
Stormie Seas
, a forty-three-ton schooner painted to resemble a pleasure boat but containing a mighty ninety-horsepower engine, concealed fuel tanks and enough munitions to start a small war. The
Stormie Seas
was commanded by Sam Barclay and John Leatham, two intrepid former Royal Navy officers who had spent the previous year running supplies from Athens to Salonika for the forces fighting the Greek communist guerrillas. MI6 offered them the sum of £50 to transport the insurgents to the Albanian coast, which Leatham thought was more than generous: ‘We were looking only for free adventure and a living.’

Shortly after 9 p.m. on 3 October, 200 yards off the Karaburun peninsula, the heavily armed ‘pixies’ clambered into two rubber boats and headed towards a cove, rowed by two stout former marines, ‘Lofty’ Cooling and Derby Allen. The Karaburun was barely inhabited, a wild place of goat tracks and thorny scrub. Having dropped off the men and their equipment, the Englishmen rowed back to the
Stormie Seas
. Looking back at the retreating coast, they saw a light flash suddenly at the cliff top, and then go out again. The nine pixies were already heading up the cliff. The going was slow in the deep darkness. As dawn broke, they split into two parties. Bido Kuka and four others, including his friend Ramis Matuka and his cousin Ahmet, headed south towards his home region, while the remaining four, led by Sami Lepenica, headed north. As they separated, Kuka was struck by a sudden foreboding, the sensation, intense but unfocused, ‘that the communists were ready and waiting for them’.

After a day spent hiding in a cave, Kuka and his men set off again at nightfall. In the morning they approached the village of Gjorm, a wartime centre of resistance and home to many Balli Kombëtar sympathisers. As they drew near, a young girl ran towards them shouting: ‘Brothers, you’re all going to be killed!’ Breathlessly, she explained that the other group had already been ambushed by government forces: three of the four had been killed, including Lepenica, and the fourth had vanished. Two days earlier no less a personage than Beqir Balluku, the Albanian army chief of staff, had arrived with hundreds of troops, and the Karaburun ridge was crawling with government forces, scouring every village, track, cave and gully for the ‘fascist terrorists’. Local shepherds had been instructed to report anything suspicious, on pain of death. The Albanian guerrillas thanked the girl, gratefully seized the bread and milk she offered, and ran.

_*

At the very moment Bido Kuka was scrambling for his life through the Albanian mountains, Kim Philby was steaming towards New York aboard the RMS
Caronia
, the most luxurious ocean liner afloat. His many friends in MI5 and MI6 had given him a ‘memorable send-off’. The
Caronia
was barely a year old; a spectacular floating hotel nicknamed the ‘Green Goddess’ on account of her pale green livery. She was fitted with every modern luxury, including sumptuous Art Deco interiors, an open-air lido and terraced decks. The only class of travel was first. Described as ‘a private club afloat’, the liner had 400 catering staff for 700 passengers. On arriving in his panelled cabin with private bathroom, Philby had found a crate of champagne awaiting him, a gift from a ‘disgustingly rich friend’, Victor Rothschild. Philby might have disapproved of Rothschild’s riches, but he thoroughly approved of his champagne. The seven-day voyage was made all the more pleasant by the company of the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, an affable clubland acquaintance of Philby’s with a walrus moustache and a terrific thirst. Philby and Lancaster settled into the cocktail bar, and started drinking their way to America. ‘I began to feel that I would enjoy my first transatlantic crossing,’ wrote Philby.

The
Caronia
docked in New York on 7 October. The FBI sent out a motor launch to meet Philby; like Bido Kuka, he was whisked through customs without any of the usual formalities. That night he stayed in a high-rise hotel overlooking Central Park, before catching the train to Washington DC. Alongside the track the sumac shrubs were still in flower, but autumn was in the air and the leaves were beginning to turn. Philby’s first glimpse of the American landscape took his breath away. The fall, he later wrote, is ‘one of the few glories of America which Americans have never exaggerated because exaggeration is impossible’.

At Union Station, he was met by Peter Dwyer of MI6, the outgoing station chief, and immediately plunged into a whirlwind of introductions and meetings, with officials of the CIA, FBI, the State Department and the Canadian secret service. All were delighted to shake hands with this urbane Englishman whose impressive reputation preceded him – but none more than James Jesus Angleton, his former protégé, now a powerful figure in the CIA. Angleton had prepared the ground, telling his American colleagues about Philby’s wartime work and how much he ‘admired him as a “professional”’. The Anglo-American intelligence relationship was still close in 1949, and no two spies symbolised that intimacy more than Kim Philby and James Angleton.

Angleton remained, in many ways, an Englishman. ‘I was brought up in England in my formative years,’ he said, many years later, ‘and I must confess that I learned, at least I was disciplined to learn, certain features of life, and what I regarded as duty.’ Honour, loyalty, handmade suits, strong drinks, deep leather armchairs in smoky clubs: this was the kind of England that Angleton had come to know, and admire, through Philby and Elliott. There was an element within American intelligence that took a more hard-eyed view of Britain’s continuing claims to greatness, a younger generation unmoved by the nostalgic bonds of war, but Angleton was not of that stamp. His time in Ryder Street had left a permanent imprint on him, personally and professionally. Philby had introduced him to the arcane mysteries of the Double Cross system, the strange, endlessly reflecting conundrum of counter-intelligence, and the very British idea that only a few, a select few, can be truly trusted. Philby was Angleton’s souvenir of war, a time of duty, unshakeable alliance and dependability. Angleton paraded his English friend around Washington like a trophy.

While Philby was clinking glasses in Washington, on the other side of the world, David Smiley waited, with mounting unease, for the Albanian guerrillas to make contact. Twice a day, morning and evening, the MI6 radio operator stationed in a large mansion on the coast of Corfu tuned in at the agreed time, but a week had passed with no word from the pixies. Finally a hasty message was picked up, sent from the caves above Gjorm where Kuka and his team were in hiding: ‘Things have gone wrong . . . three men killed . . . police know everything about us.’ The Albanians were terrified: the bulky generator gave out a high-pitched whining sound when pedalled at full speed, the noise bouncing off the hills and threatening to reveal them. They were running out of food, and dared not descend to the village to beg or steal more. Bido Kuka persuaded the others to make a break for it and try to reach his home village of Nivica just twenty-five miles to the south. The route passed though inhospitable terrain and the government forces were doubtless still out in force, but from Nivica it was only thirty-five miles to the Greek border.

A four-day trek, walking at night, skirting patrols and hiding during daylight, brought them to the home Kuka had last seen three years earlier. He was welcomed, but cautiously. When Kuka explained that they were the vanguard of a British-backed force that would overthrow Hoxha, the villagers were sceptical: Why were they so few in number? Where were the British? Where were the guns? Kuka sensed that even here, they faced mortal danger. The group declined offers to spend the night in the village. They retreated instead to the mountains, and agreed to push on for the border as fast as possible, in two groups: Bido Kuka, Ramis Matuka and a third man headed south; his cousin Ahmet and the fifth man took a more direct route. Patrols were everywhere; three times, Kuka’s group narrowly avoided capture. They were still a dozen miles from the border, trudging through a narrow ravine, when a voice boomed out of the darkness demanding that they identify themselves or be shot down. ‘Who are you?’ called Kuka, cocking his machine gun. ‘Police,’ came the answer. The three men opened fire. The police, dug in above them, returned fire. Ramis Matuka fell dead. Kuka and his last companion, firing wildly, fled into the woods.

Three days later, exhausted and famished, Kuka and his comrade finally reached the Greek border. They were immediately arrested, jailed by the Greek police and interrogated. Kuka stuck to his story that he was ‘Enver Zenelli’, the name on his forged Albanian identity card. ‘We said we were ordinary Albanians fleeing the country.’ The Greek border guards were disbelieving, ‘and would have shot them for tuppence’. After several weeks, a British officer appeared. Kuka uttered the code phrase agreed back in Malta: ‘The sun has risen.’ Finally they were free. The survivors were flown to Athens, lodged in a safe house, and debriefed by two British intelligence officers.

By any objective estimate, the first phase of Operation Valuable had been a debacle. Of the nine guerrillas who landed in October, four were dead, one almost certainly captured, one had vanished, the others had barely escaped with their lives, and ‘several Albanian civilians had also been arrested and killed’, accused of aiding the guerrillas. A second landing group, arriving soon after the first, had fared little better. The Albanian forces were primed and waiting, clearly aware of the incursion, if not of its precise timing and location.

With understatement verging on fantasy, MI6 described the first phase of the operation merely as ‘disappointing’. The loss of half the initial force was a setback but not a disaster, and the death toll was ‘judged by wartime standards to be acceptable’. Colonel Smiley vowed to press ahead, with fresh incursions, better-trained guerrillas, and greater US involvement. Albania would not be won overnight, and ‘it would be wrong to abandon such an important exercise’, particularly now that MI6 had one of its highest fliers installed in Washington, ready and more than willing to liaise with the Americans on the next stage of Operation Valuable.