A Rich Harvest of Bitter Fruit: CIA, MI6, and Covert Action in Cold War Albania | Stephen Long
About this episode
Historian Stephen Long discusses the CIA and MI6's covert operations in Cold War Albania and their disastrous outcomes.
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 diverging British and American strategic objectives, and the 1952 Apple mission's disastrous double cross. He traces how Albania's failures quietly shaped the covert interventions to come — in Iran, in Guatemala — and what the human cost demands of the institutions that ordered it.Subscribe and share to stay ahead in the world of intelligence, global issues, and current affairs.Order A Rich Harvest of Bitter Fruit…
More episodes of Secrets and Spies Podcast: Espionage | Global Issues | Current Affairs
- Gabbard Resigns, Trump Meets Xi, and China's Capitol Hill Spy Pitch | Espresso Martini
- S10 Ep45: America’s War Powers Crisis with Brian Finucane
- S10 Ep44: A Spy at War with Charles Beaumont
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Secrets and Spies Podcast: Espionage | Global Issues | Current Affairs podcast page.