Join us for an evening with Stephen Long discussing his fascinating new book A Rich Harvest of Bitter Fruit.

In June 1949, the US and British governments secretly agreed to mount a joint covert action operation to overthrow the communist government in Albania. The top-secret plan would use exiled dissidents to conduct subversive intelligence, paramilitary and propaganda operations to foment an uprising against Albania's authoritarian ruler Enver Hoxha.The Albanian operation is a vital but misunderstood part of Cold War history. A Rich Harvest of Bitter Fruit explains the west's first secret attempt to subvert a communist state behind the iron curtain - this was the test case of anti-communist covert action where the west served its apprenticeship before rolling out this capability on a global scale.

A tale of subterfuge, secrecy and skulduggery, this is a compulsively readable and fascinating examination of one of the most important, and least examined, major flashpoints of the Cold War.

Stephen Long received a PhD in US Foreign Policy and Intelligence from the University of Birmingham in the UK. He has subsequently taught on US foreign policy, the Anglo-American intelligence services, international relations, Cold War history and US-Latin American relations at Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham, Canterbury Christ Church, and in his present position at Xi’an-Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) in Suzhou, China.

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