Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, [1]Don Moore

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, [1]Don Moore–noted [2]author,
traveler, and DXer–for the latest installment of his [3]Photo Album
guest post series:
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Façade of the National Museum of Albania on Skanderbeg Square

[4]Click here to read Part One: Finding Radio Tirana

More of Don’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book [5]Tales of
a Vagabond DXer. Don visited Albania in March 2024.

Albania has a lot to offer foreign visitors. The country has coastal
beaches, beautiful mountains and historical sites hundreds and
thousands of years old. Tirana is a fascinating city filled with good
restaurants and friendly people. It’s inexpensive. The central city is
easy to get around on foot. I’m already planning my next visit.

But the number one reason to visit Albania is to see the sites related
to the Communist era and the Enver Hoxha dictatorship. I don’t think
there is anywhere else where you can get such close insight into what
real life was like inside a brutal police state. Indeed, after visiting
Tirana, I can’t imagine how anyone could praise dictatorships or say
that their own country would be better off under a dictatorship. In
Tirana three sites in particular stand out in this regard. And each of
them has some interesting displays involving the use of radio.

The House of Leaves

The House of Leaves … the name sounds peaceful and innocent. That was
once true. Constructed in 1931, the two-story villa originally served
as the first obstetrics clinic in Albania. Then when the Nazis moved in
after the Italian surrender in 1943, it was chosen as headquarters for
the Gestapo. That might have been a minor blip in the structure’s
history, but the Gestapo had remade the building into just what Enver
Hoxha’s new government needed: a headquarters for their secret police.

The dreaded Sigurimi would occupy the building for nearly five decades.
But that was supposed to be a secret, so no one could say what the
villa really was, even though everyone knew. So it became known as The
House of Leaves from the vines that covered the outer walls. Even then,
the name was mostly whispered among the closest friends. It wasn’t safe
to pay much attention to the building.

After the Communist regime fell in 1991, The House of Leaves mostly sat
unused. Then, in 2014 the Albanian Ministry of Culture announced it
would be turned into a museum telling the story of Sigurimi and its
operations. The Museum of Secret Surveillance opened in 2017 and three
years later was awarded the European Museum of the Year award by the
Council of Europe.

The museum has many rooms focusing on various aspects of Sigurimi’s
work. My favorite was one filled with electronics used to monitor and
record conversations by suspected malcontents.

The key to monitoring someone was placing a radio transmitter bug in
the suspect’s home. The Sigurimi made their own bugs in a workshop in
The House of Leaves. They were particularly proud of the tiniest ones,
which could very easily be hidden.

The bugs were usually placed inside a small piece of wood that could be
placed under a table or chair. The effective range was only about two
hundred meters, so monitoring posts had to be in the same building or
nearby. The Sigurimi would either recruit a neighbor or persuade a
neighbor to host a Sigurimi agent to monitor the recordings. Rinia
brand transistor radios made in Romania were the preferred receiver.
They were inexpensive and could easily be modified to receive the
desired frequency. And they were common enough that possession of one
didn’t mark a person as a government agent. Agents usually listened in
on headphones while also making a recording of the conversation.

In some cases, homemade amplifiers were used to boost the weak signals
produced by the tiny bugs.

Recordings of conversations of interest were taken back to The House of
Leaves for further investigation at monitoring posts such as this one.

The Bunkers

Enver Hoxha knew that tiny Albania could never support an army large
enough to repel an outside invasion. His experience as a guerilla in
World War II, on the other hand, had convinced him that an armed
hostile populace could do the job. Albania was, after all, the only
occupied country to retake its own capital without any outside help. So
Hoxha based Albania’s national defense on making sure that invading the
country would be so difficult and painful that no one would dare
attempt it.

A key part of that policy was constructing concrete bunkers. Hoxha’s
goal was to construct 750,000 of them – approximately one for every
four Albanians at the time. Just how many were actually constructed is
not known, but the number was in the hundreds of thousands. And they
were built everywhere – in farms, in forests, in villages, and in
cities.

Most were the three-meter-wide Qender Zjarri type, just large enough to
give two or three combatants a concealed firing position. Depending on
the location these were built individually or else in small clusters.
Today, a fun activity while traveling by bus through Albania is seeing
how many you can spot. Occasionally these bunkers are used for storage
but there are so many that most are abandoned other than the occasional
visit by local teenagers. Evidently, they’re the cool place for losing
one’s virginity.

The second type of bunker was the eight-meter-wide Pike Zjarri,
intended to serve as local command centers. Being larger, many of these
have been put to other uses. And then there were the big bunkers, huge
complexes of underground rooms and tunnels where officials would take
refuge and continue to run Albania’s government. But today’s Albania is
not concerned with repelling foreign invaders. Instead it welcomes them
in the form of tourists. And so two of the biggest bunker complexes in
Tirana have been turned into museums. And both of them contain some
interesting radio memorabilia.

Enver’s Refuge

The biggest bunker was a vast underground complex built in the 1970s
inside the base of a mountain on the eastern outskirts of Tirana.
Construction was so secret that this bunker’s existence wasn’t even
known publicly until the 1990s. This was where Enver Hoxha and other
top officials would have gone in the event of an invasion or nuclear
attack. It had over one hundred rooms on five levels with its own power
and water systems. The entrance passed through a decontamination
station where anyone entering could wash off the fallout if a nuclear
bomb had already been dropped. (Or so they hoped.)

The inside is a labyrinth of hallways and small rooms used for
everything from communication centers to support services. There is
even a small auditorium where the Albanian legislature could meet.
Enver Hoxha and the prime minister had small spartan private
apartments. Other officials, guards, technicians, and servants slept in
dormitories. Of course, the facility was never used. It’s believed that
Enver Hoxha only visited three times – once when it was completed in
1978 and then two more times for drills.

One of many hallways in the Enver Hoxha’s refuge.

Enver Hoxha’s office in the big bunker. The desk has the same
Chinese-made Red Lantern Model 269 receiver that I saw at the Radio Bar
Tirana.

The Albanian military continued to use the facility for several years
after the Communist government fell in 1991. After that it was locked
up. Then in 2014 a pair of journalists came up with the idea of making
it into a museum which was named Bunk Art. But it’s a history museum,
not an art museum. Some rooms were left unchanged to show the
structure’s original purpose. Others were filled with exhibits on
Albanian history, the Italian invasion, the Communist period, and life
under Communism. And those exhibits include a few interesting radio
items.

According to the display, this was one of two portable transceivers in
possession of Xhevdet Mustafa when he was killed by the Sigurimi on the
beach south of Tirana in 1982. The display didn’t make clear who
Mustafa was working for.

On several occasions in the early 1950s the CIA tried to insert small
bands of Albanian agents into the country, mostly without success. This
Russian-made transceiver was part of the gear that came with a small
group of agents parachuted into Albania in 1953. The group were all
killed or captured when they landed. With help coerced from the
prisoners, the Sigurimi used this radio for several months to trick the
CIA into continuing to air-drop supplies into the mountains.

This black-and-white Albanian-made TV was configured at the factory to
only receive Albanian channels. However, clever Albanians figured out
ways to use small electronic circuits (called kanoce) that overrode
those limits. Albanians along the coast were able to receive TV from
Italy while those in border areas could receive Yugoslav or Greek TV.

The Downtown Bunker

The original Bunk Art proved so popular with Albanians and foreign
visitors that in 2016 it was renamed Bunk Art 1 and a second location,
Bunk Art 2, was opened in the city center. This bunker had been built
under the city streets near The House of Leaves and had been intended
for use by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It consisted of a single
level with several branching hallways lined with small rooms. Today,
it’s a museum telling the story of the Ministry (of which the Sigurimi
was just one part) until its dissolution in 1991.

This bunker was also configured for a long-term stay. The Minister of
Internal Affairs had this private bedroom.

Some Chinese-made radio equipment used by the ministry.

The Broom Bug

On 12 December 1985, the streets of Tirana were crowded with people out
to watch a large patriotic parade which just happened to pass by the
Italian embassy. Two women and four men dressed in fashionable western
clothes and chatting in Italian among themselves snaked their way
through the crowd to the door of the embassy. The Albanian police
monitoring the door didn’t try to stop them. Obviously, they were
Italian tourists or embassy workers. Except they weren’t. The sisters
and brothers of the Popa family had long been persecuted by the
Albanian government as their parents had collaborated with the Italians
during the war. And now the six children wanted political asylum.

The Italians were willing to resettle the family in Italy but the
Albanian government refused to give them permission to leave. Instead
Albania demanded that the siblings be turned over to its police, which
the Italians refused to do. The family would live in the embassy for 4
½ years until the Albanian government finally agreed to let them go. In
the meantime the Albanians kept a strong police and military presence
in the neighborhood surrounding the embassy.

The Sigurimi wanted to know what was going on inside so they recruited
an Albanian maid who worked at the embassy to help them. She was given
five bugs and instructions to hide them in the usual places like behind
paintings and under tables. They knew the Italians would find these and
that was fine. It would give the Italians false confidence that they
had found all the bugs. The real bug was concealed in a special new
broom that the maid brought in and left in a closet next to where the
Popa siblings stayed. Each day she was given a freshly charged battery
to swap with the depleted one inside the broom. The Italians never
discovered the bug-in-a-broom. The Popa siblings were finally allowed
to leave the embassy for Italy on 3 May 1990.

* [6]Excellent video tour of Bunk Art #1 and The House of Leaves
* [7]Official website of The House of Leaves
* [8]Article on mass surveillance under Enver Hoxha
* [9]Official website for the Bunk Art museums
* [10]Wikipedia article on bunkers in Albania
* [11]Description of visit to Bunk Art 1.
* [12]Another description of visit to Bunk Art 1.
* [13]Short video about the bunkers.
* [14]Articles on the bunkers, Bunk Art museums, and The House of
Leaves.

References

Visible links:
1. https://swling.com/blog/tag/don-moore/?swcfpc=1
2. http://www.donmooredxer.com/books/peru.html
3. https://swling.com/blog/tag/don-moores-photo-album/?swcfpc=1
4. https://swling.com/blog/2024/12/don-moores-photo-album-albania-part-one/
5. https://swling.com/blog/2024/12/perfect-gift-or-holiday-read-tales-of-a-vagabond-dxer-by-don-moore/
6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncZDACWSRRE
7. https://muzeugjethi.gov.al/?lang=en
8. https://balkaninsight.com/2018/03/01/digging-for-truth-in-communist-albania-s-secret-files-02-28-2018/
9. https://bunkart.al/
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunkers_in_Albania
11. https://www.exutopia.com/exclusion-zone/bunker-albanian-dictator/
12. https://www.dark-tourism.com/index.php/1457-bunkart1
13. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOJbK-u72i8
14. https://midlifecrisisodyssey.com/category/search-posts-by-country/albania/

Hidden links:
16. https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/01_NationalHeroes.jpeg
17. https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/10_HouseOfLeavesDisplayRoom.jpeg
18. https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/11_SigurimiBugs.jpeg
19. https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/12_SigurimiBugs.jpg.jpeg
20. https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/13_SigurimiBugs.jpeg
21. https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/14_RiniaTransistors.jpeg
22. https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/15_BugAmplifiers.jpeg
23. https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/16_MonitoringPost.jpeg
24. https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/20_SmallBunkers.jpeg
25. https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/30_BunkArtOne_Hallway.jpeg
26. https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/31_EnverHoxhaOffice.jpeg
27. https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/32_SpyRadio1982.jpeg
28. https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/33_SpyRadioDirtyTrick.jpeg
29. https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/34_AlbanianTV.jpeg
30. https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/40_MinisterInternalAffairsBedroom.jpeg
31. https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/41_ChineseRadioEquipment.jpeg
32. https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/50_BroomBug_01.jpeg
33. https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/51_BroomBug_02.jpeg