LD077: In June 1949, the CIA and MI6 secretly agreed to overthrow Albania's communist dictator Enver Hoxha. The operation — codenamed BGFiend — would use exiled Albanian dissidents, paramilitary infiltration, propaganda broadcasts from a yacht in the Adriatic, and a network of émigré communities in Rome, Athens, and West Germany. It ran for four years. It failed almost completely. Historian Stephen Long spent seven years in the CIA's declassified archive working through 6,700 pages of operational files — files that also contained British intelligence reports MI6 never intended anyone to see. What he found upends the standard explanation. BGFiend wasn't killed by Kim Philby. It was penetrated from the start by Italian naval intelligence, which had fully mapped the operation's émigré networks before the first agent crossed the border. The Albanian security service — the Sigurimi — was young but learning fast, supported by a ruthless political leadership and an informant network that reached down to the village level. Agents were dropped by parachute with minimal training, often miles from their target locations. They hid by day, moved at night, and were hunted by pursuit brigades, civilian militia, border guards, and regular police simultaneously. When Apple team radio operator Prenzi was captured, he did everything he could to signal that the operation was blown — including transmitting with his left hand after breaking his right arm escaping from prison. The CIA didn't want to believe it. Nine more men went in. Long argues BGFiend wasn't reckless — it was the West's painful apprenticeship in covert action, a template for everything that followed, from Poland to Ukraine to the Bay of Pigs. The lessons were eventually learned. Just not in time to save the men already in the field.
Stephen Long is author of A Rich Harvest of Bitter Fruit: CIA and MI6 Covert Action in Communist Albania at the Dawn of the Cold War (Icon Books, 2026) https://www.iconbooks.com
Further Reading
Rory Cormac, How to Stage a Coup: And Ten Other Lessons from the World of Secret Statecraft (Atlantic Books, 2022)
https://www.atlantic-books.co.uk
Richard J. Aldrich, GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain's Most Secret Intelligence Agency (Harper Press, 2010)
https://www.harpercollins.co.uk
Richard H. Immerman, The Hidden Hand: A Brief History of the CIA (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday, 2007)
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com
David Smiley, Albanian Assignment (Chatto & Windus, 1984)
https://www.worldcat.org/title/albanian-assignment
On the Sigurimi and Albania
Blendi Fevziu, Enver Hoxha: The Iron Fist of Albania (I.B. Tauris, 2016)
Albanian Authority for Access to Information on Ex-Sigurimi Files