In 1948, a group of Soviet military officers and East German engineers visited Albania’s Sazan (then known as Saseno) Island, a 2.2-square-mile lump of granite strategically positioned between a Soviet Navy base on Albania’s mainland and the heel of the Italian boot. According to declassified C.I.A. reports, the Russians and their Cold War allies spent the next decade digging a complex series of underground bunkers and tunnels capable of withstanding nuclear attack, building fortified submarine pens to protect at least a dozen warships, and covering the jagged, rocky terrain with anti-aircraft guns, long-range-missile batteries, minefields, and trenches.
It was a perfect spot to blockade the Adriatic Sea in case of World War III, and, as the C.I.A. noted, with more than 90 percent of the island’s coast consisting of sheer rock walls reaching nearly 1,100 feet high, Sazan was virtually impervious to attack.
Today, Sazan is uninhabited. The almost-vertical hillsides are covered by scrubby trees and bushes, and the valleys in between are filled with impassable underbrush. It has no natural water supply, its few flat surfaces hide poorly designated minefields, and it’s home to so many poisonous snakes that the Albanian government prohibits camping.
In other words, it’s the perfect location for Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners to invest in a luxury resort for wealthy travelers to relax amid scenery reminiscent of the video game Call of Duty.
“The North Korea of Europe”
Kushner has big plans for tiny Albania and its almost three million people, and not all of the plans are crazy. Due to its Communist history and Cold War designation as “the North Korea of Europe,” Albania is one of the last undeveloped spots in Western Europe. The Adriatic coastline rivals those of nearby Greece, Montenegro, and Croatia, with beautiful beaches, and the water is crystal clear, in large part because Enver Hoxha’s regime developed few industries. Nearly 1,000 years of occupation by various Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, and Italians helped to produce the best fusion cuisine in the Balkans. And beyond the beaches, the mountain range known locally as the “Accursed Mountains” is some of the most rugged and untouched real estate in Europe, a destination for climbers, hikers, and outdoor-sports enthusiasts.
Albania is hoping to join the E.U. in 2030, and tourist visits grew exponentially in the last five years, to more than 11 million in 2024 from 2.5 million in 2019. But while the tourism industry rapidly expands, it has yet to be widely embraced as an investment destination by traditional investors.
“Albania is one of the better stories in the Balkans because you can see progress towards rule of law, investor protection, and political stability,” said a real-estate analyst in Tiranë, who asked not to be named for fear of offending clients. “That’s the good news. The problems remain serious. Albania’s got deeply entrenched and systematic corruption in terms of infrastructure and political influence. And there’s concerns by mainstream-institutional investors about the perceived culture of money-laundering and organized crime.”
Or as a prominent Albanian investigative journalist said of the competing political parties, “There’s no good guys here on either side. Politics is a death sport among the elite families. The only real reforms are pursuing political enemies for corruption. Sure, they’re guilty, but the pursuit is always political in nature.”
A “Closed Military Zone” Opens
With billions in Saudi-funded investment and a father-in-law in the White House perfectly comfortable with death-sport politics, targeted investigations of rivals, and questionable real-estate deals, Kushner obviously saw Albania as more of an opportunity than a risk.
In July 2023, Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Richard Grenell, former special envoy to Serbia and Kosovo and current envoy for “special missions,” joined Albanian prime minister Edi Rama at a local museum, which reportedly marked the start of the discussions. Kushner formally announced a deal during an interview with Bloomberg in March 2024, unveiling plans for three development projects estimated to cost several billion dollars.
The first project, a resort and series of residences located along the coast north of the port city of Vlorë—and a new airport currently under construction—is drawing ire from environmentalists concerned about the impact on local wetlands and wildlife. But these concerns were quickly dismissed by the Rama administration. Albania’s roads are terrible, and the coast badly needs an airport to open up the region to tourists unwilling to brave the regional-bus system.
But the inclusion of a resort on Sazan Island raised the most questions. The first came from the Albanian military, which protested that the island was still a “closed military zone.” At least it was until the Rama administration forced a re-designation.
“Under Hoxha, you couldn’t even talk about Sazan. Nobody could go there unless they were in the military,” says Agim, a taxi driver in his late 60s who served as a conscript soldier briefly assigned to the island in the early 1980s.
“There’s tunnels and bunkers so far under the ground [that] the atom bomb couldn’t damage them,” he said. “Life was terrible on Sazan. All the water tasted terrible because it was brought to the island by boat. Everything came by boat. There was little food or water. No electricity, except for some military use.”
While small boats carrying tourists stop by the island for short trips, it’s more for gawking at the hundreds of abandoned Cold War–era bunkers than braving the rocky beach next to a rusting pier used by the tiny, joint Italian-Albanian customs station. With the exception of that short stretch of pebbles next to the police outpost, the only access to the ocean comes via falling off a cliff to your likely death.
During his Bloomberg interview, Kushner revealed renderings of the planned resort. The retro-futuristic cabins dotting the side of a mountain certainly look luxurious and cool. But how do you actually get to them?
Just to note, these imaginary cabanas are positioned in perhaps the most accessible part of the island. And even if you did manage to find the right underground tunnel, you’re still facing the not insignificant problem that everything—such as water and food—must be sent by boat. Where garbage and sewage would go is yet another mystery. What the Bond movies never show are the actual logistics of operating an inaccessible lair.
Not for the Merely Rich
To manage the development, Kushner has partnered with the luxury-hospitality company Aman Resorts. Aman specializes in small, often remote, and very expensive hotels. According to a recent search, a junior suite at the Aman hotel in New York will set you back about $2,700 a night.
Aman’s properties aren’t for the merely rich; they cater to a clientele that makes rich people jealous. That could explain the small size of the Sazan project—some reports have it at only 40 units—and the seeming indifference to logistical difficulties. If you have to ask the price of delivering your drinking water and room-service sushi by helicopter, you can’t afford a night at the typical Aman property.
Aman’s owned by the Russian-Swiss oligarch Vladislav Doronin, who first made his fortune in the early 1990s, just after the breakup of the Soviet Union, working with the then fugitive commodities trader Marc Rich.
“Marc Rich ended up being a mentor to all these young kids who came out of the Communist Party establishment, and who made billions off these schemes themselves,” Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov told the New York Post in 2001. “He’d strike a deal with the local party boss, or the director of a state-owned company. He’d say, ‘OK, you will sell me the [commodity] at 5 to 10 percent of the world market price.” (Three years later, Klebnikov was assassinated in Moscow. The case remains unsolved.)
In 2001, outgoing U.S. president Bill Clinton pardoned Rich, who fled to Switzerland to avoid trial on charges of tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering, and making oil deals with Iran during the hostage crisis.
In 2014, Doronin took over Aman Resorts from its founder, backed by more than $300 million from Capital Group, the Rich-affiliated Swiss-based commodities hedge fund, and the company began an aggressive expansion that continues today with more than a dozen new resorts under development, including Sazan.
Beyond some environmental concerns related to the proposed airport in Vlorë, Affinity hasn’t faced much pushback from Albanian regulators, who approved the investment last January after Trump’s re-election, or from the Albanian public. But a similar, half-billion-dollar deal in Belgrade, to develop the wreckage of buildings damaged by the U.S. during the 1999 Kosovo war into a hotel-and-residence complex, has run into opposition despite the strong support of the pro-Trump government of Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić.
Vučić, while publicly supportive of the project, has been forced to open a criminal investigation into whether the Serbian government illegally changed the status of the site from that of a monument to suffering at the hands of American imperialism, into condominiums and a hotel owned by the U.S. president’s son-in-law.
In Albania, the connection between Grenell and his previous experience in the Balkans appears to have helped smooth over any concerns, but Aman’s former head of security, retired F.B.I. counter-intelligence agent Charles McGonigal, was sentenced to 78 months in prison. The charges included conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions and money-laundering during his time at the F.B.I. on behalf of both Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and a former Albanian intelligence agent with close ties to Rama.
It’s a heady mix of connections to Russian oligarchs, a treasonous F.B.I. agent, luxury-real-estate deals, and the U.S. president’s son-in-law, but Rama shows a remarkable ability to navigate such company across ideological divides. Just last week, he gave a toast at the wedding of Alex Soros and longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
Whether a difficult-to-access island covered in landmines and Cold War bunkers is remotely viable for a luxury resort remains to be seen. But perhaps Kushner and his Saudi backers believe the partnership offers broader benefits than simple financial returns.
Mitchell Prothero is an Albania-based journalist covering organized crime, corruption, and terrorism. He hosted the podcast Gateway on European cocaine cartels for Project Brazen
