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6 unusual facts about Albanian Subversion


Albanian Subversion

For two years after this landing, small groups of British-trained Albanians left every so often from training camps in Malta and Britain and Germany.

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Senior British intelligence officer William Hayter, who chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), came to Washington, D.C. in March with a group of Secret Intelligence Service members and Foreign Office staff that included Gladwyn Jebb, Earl Jellicoe, and Peter Dwyer of SIS and a Balkans specialist.

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The plan called for parachute drops of royalists into the Mati region in Central Albania.

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They were dropped into the mountains of Mati throughout 1947, but failed to impress the inhabitants of the region into a larger revolt.

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Based on wrong assessments about Albania, and thinking that the country was ready to shake off its Stalinist regime, the British SIS and the American CIA launched a joint subversive operation, using as agents Albanian expatriates.

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The original plan was that, if Britain could parachute enough well-trained agents, they could organize a massive popular revolt, which then the allies would supply by air drops.



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