Stephen Long, The CIA and the Soviet Bloc: Political Warfare, the Origins of the CIA and Countering Communism in Europe. London: I. B. Tauris, 2014. 336 pp. £68.00 Unavailable

After meeting with British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in September 1949, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson approved a joint Anglo-American covert action to overthrow the Communist government of Enver Hoxha in Albania. Code-named BGFIEND and OBOPUS by the United States and VALUABLE by the British, the plan called for teams of Albanian expatriates trained as commandos to enter Albania by land, sea, and air and somehow ignite an indigenous movement committed to and capable of ousting Hoxha. Frank Wisner, the founding director of the covert arm (blandly called the Office of Policy Coordination, OPC) of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was particularly enthusiastic. He identified BGFIEND as “a clinical experiment to see whether larger roll-back operations would be feasible elsewhere” (p. 174) within the Soviet bloc. By the time the experiment was terminated in 1954, it had failed disastrously. Betrayed by H. R. “Kim” Philby, Moscow's mole in...