From Auron Tare
Two weeks ago in Tirana, the British embassy, with a simple but very significant ceremony, honored a sergeant lost somewhere in the mountains of southern Albania during World War II.
The tribute to Private Peter Twiddy, even after so many years from this World War, truly shows the respect that civilized nations have for their heroes.
Two weeks ago, Pilo Shanto, a figure little known to the Albanian public, but a very important personality for the Albanian State and for Albanian Cold War history, left this world.
Pilo Shanto, in the 50s, was one of the main figures of Albanian foreign intelligence (part of the secret service), who with rare professionalism created and implemented several radio games against the most important world intelligence agencies, the Anglo-American ones.
So successful were these operations from a professional point of view that, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the protagonists of these battles in the "losing" camp spoke with great respect for their former opponents.
Shanto was part of a generation that believed in an ideology that failed in half the world, but even though part of this ideology, he was an Albanian patriot who fought on an invisible front to protect Albanian territorial integrity.
Ironically, he spent his old age in Virginia, very close to the American spy offices at Langley.
He left this world forgotten, and unfortunately the country for which he gave so much neither honored nor mentioned him, as if to support the idea that Albania always forgets its heroes.
- Colonel Pilo Shanto
- RAF machine gunner, Sergeant Peter Twiddy
- The Albanian Army Band escorting the British soldier to his final resting place in the hills of the Lake.
