By Arben Llalla
Memorie.al / It was the time when, on the Greek-Albanian border in the region of Çamëria, several secret offices and bases of the CIA operated to prepare escaped Albanians for the overthrow of Enver Hoxha’s communist regime. The camps where escaped Albanians were trained were secretly supported also by the intelligence service of Greece. During the years 1949-1956, around 35 thousand Greeks of the communist army had taken refuge in Albania, who came after the Greek civil war of 1945-1949. The Greeks of the communist army were seen as a great danger for the overthrow of the Greek government, which was strongly supported in those years by England and the USA.
It was April 1952, when the aircraft of the Greek army piloted by Nikos Akrivojanis landed on the territory of Albania. The Greek pilot claimed he was an escapee from Greece, while the Albanian court sentenced him to prison for espionage. For several years Nikos Akrivojannis was called a traitor, but over the years he was rehabilitated, after it was proven that he had been on a Greek intelligence and counter-intelligence mission in cooperation with the CIA.
Nikos Akrivojannis came from a Greek family from Thessaloniki, and his father had been a high-ranking military officer of Eleftherios Venizelos’s regime. Akrivojannis trained for two years in the secret camps of the CIA from 1950-1952; there he received a communist education, the Marxist-Leninist political approach. The code name as a CIA agent of Nikos Akrivojannis was “Lokris”. After the trial, Nikos was sent to the camps, where there were also other Greek prisoners, who had been taken captive during the provocations of August 1949.
According to the Greek historian Stavros Dajos, during the interrogation and the trial no information emerged regarding the secret mission of the pilot Nikos Akrivojannis. He was first sent to a camp in Lushnja, where many other Greeks were also held. In the camp, Nikos Akrivojannis created a secret organization of prisoners with the aim of escaping, but he was spied on by another compatriot to the Albanian authorities, so he was caught during the attempt on 13 December 1953.
Furthermore, he was sentenced to death by the Court of Berat in July and was executed by firing squad on 14 August 1954. Thus ended the Greek pilot Nikos Akrivojannis, who was entrusted with a secret mission by the Greek security service and the CIA, but who in Greece, was officially tried for national treason, while in Albania he was sentenced for espionage. / Memorie.al
