Old and New Insights on the History of Intelligence and Diplomacy in the Balkans

List of Figures

Figure 7.1: Representatives of the Bulgarian revolutionary and political circles (Date unknown).

Figure 7.2: The main figures of the Bulgarian-Turkish Internal Thracian Revolutionary Organization, Thrace, 1922.

Figure 9.1: The Little Entente (Date unknown).

Figure 9.2: Meeting of Czechoslovak Diplomacy Representatives, Yugoslav Embassy in Prague, 1947.

Figure 10.1: Keller’s inaugural visit to Tirana on October 13, 1970.

Figure 10.2: “Women in Albanian military”, 1980.

Introduction: The Connection between Intelligence and Diplomacy from a Regional Perspective

While International Relations (I.R.) theories and Diplomatic History have been among the most developed areas in Social Sciences and Humanities, Intelligence Studies started initially in the United Kingdom and U.S.A. less than fifty years ago as a part of Security Studies. As Matthew Crosston points out in a recent work, “there is no doubt that Intelligence Studies will always be a close cousin to Security Studies, with both researching many of the same problems and concerned about similar dangers and riddles”.¹ Thus, a significant part of I.R. studies in the postwar years became International Security Studies (I.S.S.). As Barry Buzan indicated, I.S.S. was viewed in the beginning as an independent field of study. However, it later became an I.R. “sub-field” and one of its core elements.² I.S.S. was also viewed as directly aligned with Strategic Studies and parallel to ←1 | 2→Military, Defense, and War studies. Moreover, Intelligence History was usually described as an interdisciplinary hybrid area between Military and Diplomatic History.³ It was within the border zone somewhere “between war and peace”. However, as Oxford professor in Intelligence History Christopher Andrew underlined, scholars of international relations must take greater account to study the role of intelligence, which is all but absent in most contemporary international relations theory.⁴

Contemporary historiography on International Security and Intelligence Studies had its most intensive development in what is called the Anglosphere, especially within a variety of existing I.R. research schools (like neorealism, liberal revisionism, social constructivism, etc.).⁵ In the last decade, some multidisciplinary volumes revealed the European context of Intelligence History as various intelligence and national security services across the continent engaged in bilateral and multilateral interaction and cooperation.⁶ Several multinational scholarly projects revealed the extent of collaboration between Central and East European communist security services during the Cold War era.⁷ However, a similar regional approach for the Balkans has not yet been done. This is the first obvious contribution of the present volume, filling this obvious gap in the existing literature.

While the study of diplomacy has been a centuries-long subject of academic discussion, sustained but still somewhat inconsistent scholarship on intelligence began only in the late 1950s. At the beginning, most of the works were at the descriptive level and from a biographical perspective and focused on a single country. Any mentions of an intelligence–diplomacy connection and their explicit interactions were more peripheral than central.⁸ Only since the mid-1980s did scholars like M. Herman, S. Breckinridge, A. Codevilla, A. Bozeman, ←2 | 3→K. Hamilton, R. Langhorne, and James Der Derian raise questions about the relationship of intelligence to policy and diplomacy. At the time, more often than not, intelligence was seen as a direct rival to diplomacy.⁹ In the 2000s, issues in conducting intelligence and relating it to diplomacy became more prominent. The bulk of this work was from American and British authors (see for example M. Howard, G.R. Berridge, John D. Stempel, Len Scott).¹⁰ Two major contemporary compendiums on intelligence, including the relationship between intelligence, policy, and diplomacy, sum up the state of the field: Loch K. Johnson and J. J. Wirtz, Strategic Intelligence: Windows into a Secret World¹¹ and Strategic Intelligence, edited by Loch K. Johnson.¹²

The first significant Intelligence History publications in Central and Eastern Europe appeared only in the post-Cold War era. These regional studies require the elaboration of some basic terms and methodology to better frame this present study. When viewing Intelligence as a “normal function of government” and a key instrument in policy formation of states¹³, it is easy to find similarities and differences between Intelligence and Diplomacy. In the last two decades there have been a few efforts to publish original periodic journals covering regional intelligence and security history in Southeastern Europe. The first such journal was launched in 2000 in Zagreb (National Security and the Future) under the editorship of the first head of the Croatian intelligence service, Prof. Miroslav Tudjman. In 2009, a new professional journal appeared in Bucharest under the auspices of the National Intelligence Academy, the Romanian Intelligence Studies Review, which has had an English edition since 2014. Another regional exemplar was published ←3 | 4→in Athens under the auspices of an independent expert institution R.I.E.A.S. (Research Institute for European and American Studies) in 2014, initially known as the Journal of Mediterranean and Balkan Intelligence, but since renamed in 2018 to the Journal of European and American Intelligence Studies.

From a geographic perspective, the papers selected correspond with the main goal of the volume, to view the Balkans both as object and subject in a regional ←4 | 5→European perspective. We had to exclude some topics, such as the evolution of intelligence organizational structures and analysis, multilevel regional diplomacy, and Great Power influence, and in part a theoretical dimension, which is logical since the size and scope of the present volume needed to stay consistent and not too unwieldy in terms of size. As Winston Churchill said and as this book shows, the Balkans have always produced more history than it could consume. We believe one chief reason for that is because of how intelligence and diplomacy have always been intertwined, creating a nexus of political, ethnic, economic, and strategic importance that far exceeds what the region should rightfully be able to produce. In this respect, the potential of an eventual second volume about the Russian influence in the Balkans is quite promising. Perhaps even the idea of developing a Balkan Network for Intelligence and Diplomatic History can emerge from the present volume’s success.

The volume is divided into two balanced parts. Part I is People Who Shaped Intelligence and Diplomacy in the Balkans, comprised of six semi-biographical chapters with a focus on a little researched area: “the impact of culture on intelligence gathering and perceptions, where qualitative understanding of individual and group interpretations is essential to expanding upon existing work”.¹⁴ Special attention was paid to the human factor, with several studies focused on quite prominent national individuals in the field of diplomacy and intelligence: Stojan Novakovič, Adam Czartoryski, Josip Djerdja, and Jovan Dučić. Specific references were made to archives from various national archival departments, such as the diplomatic reports of Venetian dragomans kept in the State Archives of Zadar, Croatia; Stojan Novakovič’s personal collection from the Serbian Archives; diaries and memoirs from the Czartoryski Archives and the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow; the Josip Djerdja reports from the Archives of Yugoslavia and the Diplomatic Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Serbia; and the Jovan Dučić reports from the Archives of Yugoslavia.

Part II is entitled The “Shades” of Intelligence and Diplomatic Activities in the Balkans, presenting six more chapters, mainly focused on the development of bilateral relations between Balkan states and their contacts and collaborations with other European countries. These were largely researched from national archives such as the Bulgarian and Czech National Archives, the Great Britain Foreign Office Archives, the Archive of the T. G. Masaryk Institute from Prague, the Swiss Federal Archives, the U.N. and League of Nations Archives in Geneva, the Archives of Contemporary History from Zurich, and the Historical Archives of the Albanian Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs in Tirana. Taken together, the volume’s two parts present readers with little-known documentation of both people and engagements that in fact had significant impact ←5 | 6→on intelligence/diplomatic history across this critically important region from the fifteenth all the way to the twenty-first century.

Tomasz Jacek LIS focuses his research on a unique story of European diplomacy and intelligence in the nineteenth century. Though an independent Polish state did not exist in the mid-nineteenth century, the activity of Prince Adam Czartoryski in exile in France (after serving as Russian foreign minister) was considered service in favor of his fatherland. Even official Polish historiography nowadays describes the residence of Czartoryski in Hotel Lambert in Paris as the temporary but official location of the Polish foreign ministry.¹⁵ At the same time, the Polish Prince and his noble collaborators established an intelligence network in the Balkans, operating from Constantinople, that worked for France and Great Britain against Russian and Austrian activities in the Balkans. Later, some of them offered their services in favor of the Ottoman Empire. The most popular was Michal Czajkowski (known as Mehmet Sadık Paşa), who fascinatingly created, at the beginning of the Crimean War in 1853, the first regular Christian military unit inside the Muslim Ottoman army (a Cossack regiment) to fight against the Russians.¹⁶

←6 | 7→The last two chapters of Part I examine episodes of twentieth-century Yugoslav diplomacy. Božica SLAVKOVIĆ MIRIĆ studies a significant period in postwar Yugoslav-Albanian bilateral relations (1945–48), with the special role played in its intensive development by Ambassador Josip Djerdja. The research is based on newly revealed documents from political and diplomatic archives in Belgrade. Danilo BOSNIĆ and Djordje MILIĆ present the profile of “poet-diplomat” Jovan Dučić, who performed his diplomatic duties in one of the most difficult moments in the history of interwar Yugoslavia. During his long-term diplomatic career, Dučić had 13 missions in eight European countries, including serving as head of the Yugoslav mission in Italy (1933–37) and Romania (1937–39).