Who destroyed the secret service?

By Artur Ajazi

There is much talk today, especially from the shattered opposition, that “national security was breached, SHISH was destroyed, Albanians’ data were exposed”.

Endless speeches and curses from Sali Berisha, who remains the chief destroyer of the secret service in Albania. It was 1992, when the Democratic Party came to power with a “blank cheque”, with “imaginary, bombastic promises”, so much so that most Albanians were saying “now our sufferings are over, the party of plenty and prosperity has come to power”.

But they would be disappointed very soon, when, on a special “top secret” order from Sali Berisha, 2,400 trained employees were thrown onto the street within 24 hours — agents of various kinds who had built a perfect network of informants inside and outside the country, providing plentiful material for national security. I am not talking about those “Sigurimi men” who dealt in wiretapping citizens, but about those trained boys who carried out such difficult tasks in various profiles of the secret service.

The destruction of every line and structure built by former specialists trained abroad as well was the most fatal blow to the secret service. Within 60 days, they were replaced with mediocrities with eight grades of schooling, DP militants, teachers with no connection at all to the secret service. Suffice it to mention that even the head of SHIK was a mathematics and physics teacher. Sali Berisha had made it his mission to destroy not only the economy, but also the army, the police and especially the secret service. Under the motto “let us remove the Sigurimi men from SHIK”, Berisha was in fact carrying out the necessary purges, according to a plan and a mission served up by his patrons.

The destruction of the secret service, of the intelligence and counter-intelligence officers, the severing of every line and link with our informants abroad, was fatal. The unrest and drama of 1997, when the state was destroyed within 24 hours, were precisely a consequence of the destruction of the secret service. SHIK’s agents — 50 percent teachers and 50 percent mediocrities come down from Albania’s mountains and villages — had no idea at all and had failed to obtain any information about the situation that had been created. Berisha used those unfortunates to suppress the protests in Vlora, Fier, Berat, Kavaja, Cërrik and elsewhere, where most of them lost their lives out of ignorance.

The black year of 1997 was the clearest indicator of what Berisha’s paper state had been reduced to. It was the most vivid proof of what becomes of the fates of the state and the nation when power falls into the hands of incompetents and illiterates. The Democratic Party and Sali Berisha, not excluding the executors of his orders, remain sinners unpunished by law and justice for the destruction of Albania — and the destruction of the secret service, of course, remains their greatest crime. This is not about “defending the State Sigurimi”.

We are talking about Albania’s real secret service, which has a legal duty to national security.