‘Inexpensive to us and yet very valuable to the impoverished Albanian people’: Covert Foreign Aid and the Anglo-American Subversion of Albania, 1951-55

In 1949, Washington and London launched the inaugural Cold War covert action in the Soviet bloc against Albania. Regarded internally as a ‘test case’, the CIA and MI6 used food and material aid in Operation BGFiend/Valuable to subvert Enver Hoxha’s regime, supplementing print and radio propaganda. The US, in particular, attempted to weaponise covert aid, inverting the defensive qualities of its overt counterpart. Although Western officials believed in aid’s potential at the outset, tactical and geopolitical challenges damaged its reputation as an effective subversive weapon. This had a long-term impact as aid was discarded in later covert action operations.