A Rich Harvest of Bitter Fruit: CIA, MI6, and Covert Action in Cold War Albania | Stephen Long

Podcast: Secrets and Spies Podcast: Espionage | Global Issues | Current Affairs · Secrets & Spies

Opublikowano: 2026-06-04

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, CIA and MI6 launched an audacious series of clandestine operations to infiltrate and destabilize Communist Albania — and lost nearly every agent they sent in. Historian Stephen Long, Assistant Professor in International Relations at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and author of A Rich Harvest of Bitter Fruit, reconstructs how the Albanian Sigurimi, one of Eastern Europe's most formidable counterintelligence services, turned the West's covert action program into a catastrophe — aided, from the inside, by British Russian spy Kim Philby. Long examines the fractured exile networks that became the human raw material for these missions, the...