Kim Philby, parachute drops, and what really happened in communist Albania.
Foreign Policy
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For decades, there was an easy, pat narrative that developed about the West’s first covert operations to topple a communist regime. It goes something like this: During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the United States and United Kingdom launched a series of clandestine infiltration missions across Albania, parachuting in a series of agents to try to overthrow Enver Hoxha’s government. The operation, however, was a spectacular, almost legendary failure—all because British intelligence officer Kim Philby, perhaps the Soviet Union’s most notorious mole, tipped off his handlers in Moscow, who in turn warned allies in Tirana.
Decades later, that narrative still has certain elements of truth. Yes, there were parachute drops across Albania during the early Cold War. And yes, the operation was a joint British-U.S. affair. But as political scientist Stephen Long argues in his new book, A Rich Harvest of Bitter Fruit, almost everything else about that story is false. Thanks to his archival research and dozens of interviews, Long discovered that these missions were never necessarily about toppling Hoxha, nor ending communism in Albania. And in perhaps the greatest corrective, he writes that Philby and the Soviet Union may have played no role whatsoever in the operation’s ultimate failure.
For decades, there was an easy, pat narrative that developed about the West’s first covert operations to topple a communist regime. It goes something like this: During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the United States and United Kingdom launched a series of clandestine infiltration missions across Albania, parachuting in a series of agents to try to overthrow Enver Hoxha’s government. The operation, however, was a spectacular, almost legendary failure—all because British intelligence officer Kim Philby, perhaps the Soviet Union’s most notorious mole, tipped off his handlers in Moscow, who in turn warned allies in Tirana.
Decades later, that narrative still has certain elements of truth. Yes, there were parachute drops across Albania during the early Cold War. And yes, the operation was a joint British-U.S. affair. But as political scientist Stephen Long argues in his new book, A Rich Harvest of Bitter Fruit, almost everything else about that story is false. Thanks to his archival research and dozens of interviews, Long discovered that these missions were never necessarily about toppling Hoxha, nor ending communism in Albania. And in perhaps the greatest corrective, he writes that Philby and the Soviet Union may have played no role whatsoever in the operation’s ultimate failure.
In rescuing the mission from its historic cobwebs, Long has revealed a chapter of early Cold War history far more rollicking and disastrous than popularly remembered. And it is one with a sudden, sweeping relevance, especially as the United States begins examining the feasibility of regime change once more, this time in Iran, Cuba, and beyond.
A black and white portrait of Albanian leader Envar Hoxha as a young officer, dressed in military outfit.
Official portrait of future Communist leader of Albania, Envar Hoxha, as a young officer on January 01, 1950. Universal Images Group via Getty Images
When Hoxha seized power in the waning days of World War II, Albania became a fractious place. This was not just true for the anti-Hoxha opposition, which ranged from pro-monarchist forces to pro-Western cohorts to those in favor of closer ties with fellow communists in neighboring Yugoslavia. It was also the case within Hoxha’s regime itself. Purges and arrests, show trials and sham convictions: Hoxha’s early days saw the budding dictator turning on friend and foe alike. This gave the impression, at least to outside observers, that Albania was a “country in turmoil,” Long writes, just waiting for the right series of events to send its government crumbling to the ground.
Enter the postwar U.S. and British intelligence services. Far from the buttoned-up, bureaucratized spying of the later Cold War period, the early postwar MI6 and CIA were an almost shambolic bunch. With little oversight, especially on the U.S. side, these agencies could concoct whatever schemes and plans they fancied; one gets a sense from reading Long’s book that they were less James Bond, more Monty Python. This approach might have been funny, had it not resulted in so many deaths and wasted resources.
As they watched Albania from afar, U.S. and British officials realized they needed a better sense of what was happening inside the country. The idea for an Albania mission wasn’t necessarily to topple Hoxha; should the Albanian dictator fall, London and Washington were concerned not just about a Soviet response, but also that his neighbors in Italy, Greece, and Yugoslavia would subsequently tear Albania apart. Instead, the mission was about assessing just how brittle his regime truly was and figuring out what should come next.
To gather information, British and U.S. officials came up with a plan that, at least on paper, appeared destined for success. They recruited dozens of Albanian émigrés scattered across refugee camps in Europe and trained them in Malta and West Germany on everything from small arms to map-reading to “the art of silent killing.” At first, the British directed a series of amphibious clandestine landings; in later flight missions run by the Americans, a Polish flight team piloted them in an unmarked C-47 into Albanian airspace, where they parachuted into Albania proper. Once there, these Albanian teams would radio back their assessments, gather support on the ground, and await further instruction.
Almost from the outset, though, nothing went right. Nearly half of the Albanian agents on the planned first jump in 1950 backed out, reportedly due to “political infighting” among them. Even with the smaller crew, the drop was aborted due to heavy rain and snow. About a week later, when U.S. officials tried the launch once more, agents themselves wore clothes that were so thin—“utterly inadequate for the extremely cold and wet wintry weather conditions,” Long writes—that some “resorted to cutting up their small backup parachutes to wrap around themselves for extra warmth.”
From there, things only got worse. The Polish aircrew deposited the agents a full day’s march from where they were supposed to land. Any element of secrecy in the drop quickly disappeared; as one agent remembered, “Everyone knew that parachutists had landed because our stuff fell into [a nearby] village.” The agents hid in a forest for nearly a week to evade communist security sweeps. Finally emerging, they learned from locals that Albanian security forces had planned an ambush in the original drop zone—meaning that the mistaken landing had actually saved them. Without supplies, or any element of surprise remaining, the agents abandoned the mission entirely, trudging over the Yugoslav border to safety.
It was a pattern that would play out over and over. As one agent on a later mission recollected, his team somehow missed the drop zone by some three and a half miles. Upon landing, they realized that their mission leader was “drunk on the pre-mission whiskey that was meant to calm his nerves.” Wandering to the nearest village, they once more hid out from security forces, surviving on little more than raw corn for two weeks. Similar to the first team, the only hope was crossing the border, which they eventually did, escaping into Greece.
And those were the lucky ones. Team after team immediately disappeared after their drops, with U.S. and British handlers never hearing from them again. In just a few short years, dozens of agents were lost. As Long details, Albanian security officials had one clear advantage: They knew precisely where the drop zones were, long before the teams of agents launched. All too often, the Albanian recruits jumped directly to their demise.
Year after year, the results were the same. Little information trickled back to Washington and London, all while entire teams of anti-communist Albanian agents vanished. As Long documents, the entire six-year operation, which ended in 1955, had a loss rate of 36 percent—a staggering number, both then and now. Hoxha, meanwhile, lasted for decades more atop the Albanian regime, dying in 1985 as one of the longest-lasting communist leaders in history.
A Rich Harvest of Bitter Fruit recounts many of these failures in microscopic detail. Offering granular looks at everything from agent recruitment to bureaucratic tensions between London and Washington, the book is a tour de force of information on an operation that’s long escaped scrutiny. And this all sets the groundwork for the most remarkable finding of the entire book. As Long concludes, the idea that all of this was undone by Philby and his Soviet handlers is false—and one that lets both Western agents and the émigrés themselves off the hook.
After all, Albania was something of a geopolitical backwater. A Soviet satellite state, sure—but hardly something core to Moscow’s broader interests, and certainly not a place it would be willing to risk its top mole over. As one U.S. official remembered, “Why would anybody in his right mind risk an asset such as Philby for that purpose?” Philby likely concluded the same: “Put simply, Albania was not worth risking his own skin over,” Long writes.
Instead, in Long’s account, the operation’s rank failures had two culprits. First were the Albanian recruits themselves. Even after all their training, they were hardly polished clandestine units. Some of them “couldn’t tell a tank from a field tractor,” complained one report, and many couldn’t help but divulge what they were doing, especially throughout the Albanian émigré community. This kind of “open bar talk,” as one U.S. official called it, quickly got back to communist authorities. Given that the Albanian agents were often dropped next to the villages they grew up in, it didn’t take much sleuthing for Tirana to identify where the next mission would take place.
But it wasn’t just the Albanian recruits. The CIA officers involved were hardly pillars of tradecraft. As one CIA official remembered, some of his colleagues were “so flamboyant it was [like] trying to say St. Peter’s Cathedral was a covert operation.”
A sprawling hubris saturated the mission, blinding CIA officers to the fact that their Albanian counterparts had gotten the better of them. In one case, when an Albanian team failed seven times to respond with the proper answer to a CIA “control challenge,” the handlers proceeded as if nothing was wrong, not realizing that the Albanians had been captured. They “were reluctant to accept that their most prized agent team had fallen into enemy hands,” Long writes. Eventually, the Americans started to suspect what had happened—but instead of pausing the operation, they kept dropping agents directly into the Albanian maw, turning an “initial setback” into “an irrevocable catastrophe.”
A black-and-white historical photograph depicts a man surrounded by armed men in uniforms in an outdoor, rocky setting. The central man wears a light-colored suit jacket and a soft cap, looking downward with his hands clasped together near his waist. To his right, a man in a military uniform and cap reaches his arm out to hold the back of the central man's neck while inspecting a small handheld device. Flanking them on the far left and far right are two other men in uniform holding firearms. Another person is partially visible, peeking out from behind the group in the background.
Albanian state security agents hold a captured CIA officer during Operation Valuable in Albania in an undated photo.Wikimedia Commons
That irrevocable catastrophe, thanks to Long, finally has an accurate historic record. If the Albania case study is any indication, everything we know about similar U.S. campaigns that parachuted agents into places such as Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, and Ukraine might also be turned on its head upon closer examination—not least because Philby has also been blamed for their failures. Until then, one thing is clear: The only ones harvesting the bitter fruit of this mission were those in London and Washington, and the Albanian anti-communist forces caught in the middle.
This is a lesson U.S. officials would do well to take to heart in 2026, especially amid the disastrous Iran war. After all, the regime in Tehran likewise looked, at least from the outside, as if it were ready to topple a few months ago—only to hang on, and even strengthen, in the time since. The mullahs may have little in common with Hoxha, but both ended up clinging to power for far longer than Washington imagined.
Ironically, the CIA is the one agency that seemed aware of that fact this time around. In the lead-up to the war, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said efforts at regime change within Iran were “farcical.” Ratcliffe, of course, was proven correct—but his warnings were of little importance to an administration convinced of its path to victory. As with Albania, disaster in Iran wasn’t due to any inside moles or treacherous outsiders. It was simply the fault of a U.S. administration caught up in its own hubris.
