Soe in Albania

One of the most controversial themes to emerge from post-war accounts of the Special Operations Executive has been that of mismanagement at SOE’s Cairo and Bari Headquarters. This is the idea that SOE staff officers there, some with left-wing or communist sympathies, had somehow undermined the work of British officers working with groups of Balkan nationalists, and so helped the communist partisans of Yugoslavia and Albania to seize power. It has also been suggested that certain officers had been agents of the Soviet NKVD and that, had Allied policy favoured non-communists instead of being unfairly influenced towards supporting Tito’s and Enver Hoxha’s Partisans, these countries would never have become communist. First expressed in memoirs, since reprinted elsewhere, and argued with varying degrees of conviction, these claims were only speculation: rumour and anecdotal evidence stood in for hard fact. ¹ Partly by relating some of SOE’s recently released files to the issue, this chapter constitutes a brief reappraisal of the debate that still surrounds its Albanian operations. These records shed important new light on the precise workings of SOE’s Albanian Section in Bari, the port on Italy’s Adriatic coast from where SOE’s Yugoslav and Albanian operations were directed for much of 1944. Clarifying the Section’s role in the development of British policy towards Albania, the files support little of the above conjecture. Before exploring this, however, a short overview of SOE’s activities in Albania is necessary to place the ‘conspiracy theory’, as it has been termed, in its proper context. ²