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Sydney Morning Herald
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
The gripping story of how smuggled books helped end the Cold War
COLD WAR The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War Charlie English HarperCollins, $29.99 In Nazi Germany books considered to be un-German were burnt in public. No such public ritual existed in the Soviet Union, where censorship was secretive and subtle. During the Cold War (1945-1989), the Polish government suppressed culture behind closed doors too. The most populous central European country was then aligned to Moscow, which meant any criticism of the Kremlin was off limits. This Sovietisation of Polish culture was resisted by certain writers, such as Czesław Miłosz, who fled to Paris in the early 1950s. The Polish poet won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, but his writing was banned in his native country. As was the work of many western writers, including George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus and Virginia Woolf. But in communist Poland an underground literary culture still flourished. Books came from the west via various channels and sources. Some were hidden in the toilets of sleeper trains shuttling across Europe. A copy of The Gulag Archipelago, by Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was said to have been concealed in a baby's nappy on a flight to Warsaw. But banned literature wasn't coming into Poland by sheer chance. '[It was] part of a decades-long US intelligence operation [that built] up libraries of illicit books on the far side of the Iron Curtain,' Charlie English explains in The CIA Book Club. The British author begins this captivating story in 1955, when Free Europe Press printed 260,000 copies of Orwell's 1945 political fable Animal Farm, which were sent by balloon into East-Central Europe. But the clandestine mission, the brainchild of Free Europe Committee (FEC), an anti-communist CIA front organisation, wasn't very successful. So Langley, CIA headquarters, came up with a more effective strategy: direct mail. Post was strictly censored behind the Iron Curtain, but some books got through. 'No country responded with greater enthusiasm than Poland,' writes English, a former Guardian journalist. A persistent researcher who writes with flair, he notes that books with more controversial themes were typically sent to privileged intellectuals less likely to be persecuted. Among that list was Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, the Archbishop of Krakow, later elected Pope John Paul II. The world's first Slavic Pope had been receiving books — indirectly at least — from the CIA for years. But like most of the recipients, he had no clue where the books were coming from. The CIA book programme was 'a complex organisation ... consisting of bookshops, publishers, libraries, book exporters, and Russian and East European personalities' living in various European cities, as George Minden once put it. During the mid-1950s the Romanian exile began working for the Free Europe Press Book Centre in New York, which handled the CIA's mailing project.
The Age
02-07-2025
- Politics
- The Age
The gripping story of how smuggled books helped end the Cold War
COLD WAR The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War Charlie English HarperCollins, $29.99 In Nazi Germany books considered to be un-German were burnt in public. No such public ritual existed in the Soviet Union, where censorship was secretive and subtle. During the Cold War (1945-1989), the Polish government suppressed culture behind closed doors too. The most populous central European country was then aligned to Moscow, which meant any criticism of the Kremlin was off limits. This Sovietisation of Polish culture was resisted by certain writers, such as Czesław Miłosz, who fled to Paris in the early 1950s. The Polish poet won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, but his writing was banned in his native country. As was the work of many western writers, including George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus and Virginia Woolf. But in communist Poland an underground literary culture still flourished. Books came from the west via various channels and sources. Some were hidden in the toilets of sleeper trains shuttling across Europe. A copy of The Gulag Archipelago, by Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was said to have been concealed in a baby's nappy on a flight to Warsaw. But banned literature wasn't coming into Poland by sheer chance. '[It was] part of a decades-long US intelligence operation [that built] up libraries of illicit books on the far side of the Iron Curtain,' Charlie English explains in The CIA Book Club. The British author begins this captivating story in 1955, when Free Europe Press printed 260,000 copies of Orwell's 1945 political fable Animal Farm, which were sent by balloon into East-Central Europe. But the clandestine mission, the brainchild of Free Europe Committee (FEC), an anti-communist CIA front organisation, wasn't very successful. So Langley, CIA headquarters, came up with a more effective strategy: direct mail. Post was strictly censored behind the Iron Curtain, but some books got through. 'No country responded with greater enthusiasm than Poland,' writes English, a former Guardian journalist. A persistent researcher who writes with flair, he notes that books with more controversial themes were typically sent to privileged intellectuals less likely to be persecuted. Among that list was Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, the Archbishop of Krakow, later elected Pope John Paul II. The world's first Slavic Pope had been receiving books — indirectly at least — from the CIA for years. But like most of the recipients, he had no clue where the books were coming from. The CIA book programme was 'a complex organisation ... consisting of bookshops, publishers, libraries, book exporters, and Russian and East European personalities' living in various European cities, as George Minden once put it. During the mid-1950s the Romanian exile began working for the Free Europe Press Book Centre in New York, which handled the CIA's mailing project.
New York Times
01-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Winning the Cold War With le Carré and Cosmopolitan Magazine
THE CIA BOOK CLUB: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War With Forbidden Literature, by Charlie English The Central Intelligence Agency's Cold War ledger is notoriously blotted with ink of dubious shades — from exploding cigars, poisoned toothpaste, clandestine LSD experiments and the targeting of elected leaders who leaned too far left for Washington's tastes. Yet amid these grim escapades, the agency waged another, more edifying campaign: smuggling books and articles into the Eastern Bloc, thereby arming local dissidents not with weapons but with ideas. It's a story as fascinating as it is undersung. In 'The CIA Book Club,' the former Guardian journalist Charlie English delivers a riveting account centered on Poland in the turbulent 1980s, when the 'war of ideas' could exact real casualties. At the heart of the story is George Minden, a Romanian aristocrat turned spymaster and head of the C.I.A.'s book program — someone who, as English notes, could have wandered out of a John le Carré novel. Minden was genuinely convinced that a paperback in the right hands could help crack the cement of totalitarian thinking. His aim was to avoid blatant propaganda (the C.I.A.'s default mode) and not merely send books with a pro-capitalist message. In his view, 'all books — political and literary — accomplish the political task of making the ideological isolation of Eastern Europe difficult and thus frustrate one of the communists' main political objectives.' This was spycraft as soulcraft. As the trade union Solidarity established itself as the nerve center of Polish resistance, Minden's longstanding book-running efforts morphed into an operation code-named QRHELPFUL, launched in 1983. It helped the families of prisoners and refugees, sneaked in radios and printing equipment, and fueled a global propaganda push. As one underground Solidarity member put it, 'The printing presses we got from the West during martial law might be compared to machine guns or tanks during war.' Illicit text might be concealed in Tampax boxes or diapers or stashed in the ceilings of train toilets. The logistics mastermind was Miroslaw Chojecki, a nuclear physicist turned underground publisher — Solidarity's 'minister for smuggling.' At the movement's peak, demand for banned books grew so intense that Polish dissidents invented 'flying libraries': samizdat stuffed into rucksacks and passed hand-to-hand, rarely touching the ground for long. Printing presses sometimes lurked behind trapdoors, ready to spring into action at a moment's notice. And the agency's reading list? Nothing if not eclectic: '1984,' 'Animal Farm,' 'Brave New World,' issues of The New York Review of Books — but also le Carré's spy novels, stacks of Cosmopolitan magazines and the Whitney Museum's 'Three Hundred Years of American Painting.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Los Angeles Times
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘CIA Book Club' illuminates Cold War skullduggery and reminds how revolutionary reading can be
Charlie English begins 'The CIA Book Club' by describing a 1970s technical manual: a dull cover, as uninviting as anything. A book that practically begs you to put it back on the shelf and move on. Which was exactly the point. Secreted inside the technobabble dust jacket was a Polish-language copy of George Orwell's '1984,' the boring cover a deliberate misdirection to deter prying eyes. The false front is a bit of skullduggery that harks back to a world where conspiracy to escape detection was a part of everyday life. A world where literature could be revolutionary, 'a reservoir of freedom.' English, formerly a journalist for the Guardian, specializes in writing about how art and literature are used to fight extremism: 'The Storied City,' published in the U.K. as 'The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu,' spotlights librarians who heroically saved priceless manuscripts of West African history from al Qaeda; 'The Gallery of Miracles and Madness' traces the 'insane' artists who influenced the early 20th century Modernism movement and Hitler's attempts to stamp out their art — and them. His new book takes us through five decades of Poles fighting Soviet domination and Communist propaganda with a potent weapon: literature. Even from the vantage point of the 21st century, when we know what became of the USSR, English's book reads like a thriller. There are CIA suits, secret police, faceless bureaucrats and backstabbing traitors lurking in these pages. We face tensions between paramilitary cowboys and prudent intellectuals, between paper-pushing accountants and survivors saving a culture. While reading, I worried about figures like Helena Łuczywo, who edited and published an underground newspaper, and Mirosław Chojecki, who smuggled books and printing supplies into Poland. As with the best spy novels, we know the good guy is going to win while reading 'The CIA Book Club,' but how English gets us there is exciting. His best chapters follow the protests in the Gdańsk shipyards that led to the Solidarity trade union. A better future shimmers on the page when Lech Wałęsa climbs over a fence as an unemployed electrician, taps someone on the shoulder and becomes 'the face of the Polish revolution.' (Ten years later, he became president of Poland, too.) In the violent crackdown that followed the momentary blossoming of freedom after Gdańsk, we feel the heartbreak and fear of the people. We hope again when fighters like Łuczywo begin printing a scant newsletter whose 'main job was just to exist' and remind people they weren't alone. The book is gripping, but it doesn't quite deliver on its subtitled promise to 'win the Cold War with forbidden literature.' The story English has researched and put together focuses almost entirely on Poland's fight for freedom from the USSR. Of course, the CIA's funding of smuggling illicit literature into the Eastern Bloc is an important story, and a nearly forgotten one. As English mentions in the epilogue, while 'the book program's latter-day budget stood at around $2 million to $4 million annually, [the Afghan operation] by 1987 was running at a cost of $700 million a year, taking up 80 percent of the overseas budget of the clandestine service.' Apparently, an operation costing nearly 200 times the other deserves nearly 200 times the credit as well. The result is that the power of inexpensive books was swept under the rug in favor of expensive shows of force. Still, the impressive power of the book club might have been better elucidated if details about its impact in other Eastern Bloc countries were brought into the story. The focus on Poland obscures what was happening in the USSR. English focused on Poland because the country had a long history of underground revolutionary culture; when the USSR turned independent Poland into a client state known as the People's Republic of Poland, the Poles already knew how to go underground to fight back. The lifestyle doublespeak people used to survive under successive dictatorships in Eastern Europe came a little more easily to Poles, who had practiced it before. When the CIA offered funding, they were ready. Still, it would have been nice to see how '1984' inspired people in Ukraine or Moldova or Kyrgyzstan. If books are an answer to dictatorships — and as strong as 'an organization packed with spooks and paramilitaries who fought in warzones' — it would be inspiring to see more of that. Hopefully a sequel is in the planning stages. What this book does incredibly well is document an oral history of Polish resistance that has, until now, only been told in bits and pieces. There is archival research in here, but it is in the nature of dictatorships to destroy evidence of their crimes. Fortunately, English talked to many of the people who were there, publishing underground newspapers and smuggling in illicit literature. What information has been declassified — and much of it hasn't been — bolsters the memories of survivors. One of the most interesting details of 'Book Club' is not that books inspired a nation but which books did. Philosophical tracts and political satires were smuggled in, of course; Poland received its share of 'Animal Farm' and '1984' and 'Brave New World.' But just as important to the Poles living under Soviet dictatorship were art books, fashion magazines, religious texts, lighthearted novels and regular newspapers. More influential than anti-Communist diatribes were the reminders that there was a world outside Soviet propaganda; each book read was a bid to avoid brainwashing, to not become a tool of the state. This literary history is a prescient one. As book bans increase around the United States and peaceful protests are met with state violence here in Los Angeles, a tale of when stories saved the day is inherently hopeful. This book is a reminder that words are powerful and that stories matter. Sometimes the most rebellious thing one can do is read a book. Castellanos Clark, a writer and historian in Los Angeles, is the author of 'Unruly Figures: Twenty Tales of Rebels, Rulebreakers, and Revolutionaries You've (Probably) Never Heard Of.'
Mint
05-06-2025
- Politics
- Mint
How the CIA smuggled Orwell and Le Carré into the eastern bloc
The Economist Published 5 Jun 2025, 06:48 PM IST The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War. By Charlie English. William Collins; 384 pages; £25. To be published in America by Random House in July; $35 Books were smuggled on boats, trains and trucks, concealed in food tins, baby nappies and even the sheet music of travelling musicians. Over three decades before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the CIA funnelled 10m books into the eastern bloc, including George Orwell's '1984', John le Carré's spy thrillers and Virginia Woolf's writing advice. The programme was 'the best-kept secret of the cold war', writes Charlie English, an author, in a new book. George Minden, the leader of the literary-propaganda scheme, described it as 'an offensive of free, honest thinking'. Censors in the eastern bloc banned books for ideological reasons or because they depicted life in the West. Rulings were draconian and absurd. Detective novels by Agatha Christie with no political message were forbidden; a book about carrots was destroyed because it described how they could grow in individuals' gardens, not only in collectives. The state controlled printing presses. Typewriters had to be registered, and a permit was sometimes needed to buy paper. So the CIA sent printing supplies to dissidents. When Poland was under communist rule, the ink, typesetters and photocopiers sent by the agency helped sustain an underground publishing network. One Polish printer has compared this equipment to 'machine guns or tanks during war', enabling the opposition to reproduce banned books and publish their own newspapers. Adam Michnik, a former Polish dissident, told Mr English that illicit tomes saved his country: 'A book was like fresh air. They allowed us to survive and not go mad.' Inside and outside the CIA, the scholarly scheme has received little attention and credit, until now. Mr English concludes that the programme was hugely successful, though it may have been one of 'the most highbrow intelligence operations ever'. You could even call it bookish.
