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Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- 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.'
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Yahoo
Law Student Accused of Murdering Woman in Grisly Axe Attack at University
A female staffer at the University of Warsaw in Poland was murdered in a grisly axe attack on campus, according to the BBC. The staffer, a 53-year-old porter, came "under attack in the main campus building on" the evening of May 7, 2025, BBC reported. Be forewarned that the details in this article are very disturbing. The suspect is a 22-year-old Polish man with unclear motives. He was described as "a third-year law student who was Polish but not from Warsaw," the BBC reported. The woman and suspect were not named. BBC reported that, after entering the campus, the suspect went to "the university's biggest lecture hall, the Auditorium Maximum building." According to Fox News, police found a severed head at the scene. "Police have detained a man who entered the University of Warsaw campus. One person died, another was taken to hospital with injuries," Warsaw police said, according to Fox. It's not clear whether the victim and suspect knew each other. According to a translation of Polsat News, a Polish-language news site, the suspect has been accused of "murder with particular cruelty, attempted murder and desecration of a corpse." Polsat News reported that the victim was attacked with an axe as she closed "the door to the Auditorium Maximum." A guard at the university tried to help her and "was seriously injured," the site reported. The President of Warsaw, Rafal Trzaskowski wrote, according to Polsat News, that he was "shocked to hear about the macabre crime on the University of Warsaw campus." He expressed the "deepest sympathy" to the "family and loved ones of the murdered woman. I also hope that the man who was injured in the attack and was helping will fully recover." The victim was a mother of three, Polsat News reported.
Telegraph
07-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The secret (and unlikely) CIA operation that won the Cold War
The US's Central Intelligence Agency is not usually associated with benevolence. President Truman famously said he would never have agreed to its establishment in 1947 'if I had known it would become the American Gestapo'. Its backing of coups – Iran in 1953, Guatemala the following year, Chile in 1973 – and its funding of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s, as well as covert tactics from political assassination to domestic wiretapping, make for a sorry record. It's all the more startling, then, to read in Charlie English's The CIA Book Club, that for the significant last decade of the Cold War, the CIA ran a large-scale 'books programme' smuggling banned western literature into one of its most significant theatres, Poland – an operation that was far more than benevolent, and eventually determining for democracy's victory in eastern Europe, if not the crumbling of the Soviet Union itself. The story starts two decades earlier. Young people in Poland in the 1960s had communist talking points relentlessly drummed into them, but still shared some of the intellectual confidence of youth in the West. Many had never seen any uncensored literature; they were nevertheless aware their lives were dominated, as throughout the eastern bloc, 'by a 'pretend press' that couldn't report the truth, 'pretend radio and television' that didn't address Poland's many problems, and 'pretend art' that was detached from reality'. When Polish opposition to communism emerged in the mid-1970s, three people became especially important figures. A young woman, Teresa Bogucka, had a Polish-language copy of Orwell's 1984 that her father had smuggled from Paris. Her friends were exhilarated and traumatised by its accuracy in describing their own lives. Teresa had the idea of setting up a 'flying library' of uncensored books. By 1978 she had collected 500 titles. Always circulating, the books could only be found by accident; every time the SB, Poland's secret police, arrested Teresa, they found no evidence of her crimes. From the West's point of view, physical combat across the Iron Curtain was out of the question: nuclear annihilation awaited them. The battle, instead, was for minds and hearts. As early as 1949, the CIA was funding the smuggling of books to Poland using eastern European phone directories to mail books directly to people. In 1975 it created the 'International Literary Centre' (note the British spelling to deflect suspicion), based in Manhattan and run by George Minden. No one understood the assignment better than Minden, a highly educated academic, exiled from his native Romania when his oilfields were confiscated by the Soviets. His mushrooming network of proxies – publishers, philanthropists, other exiles – began to run millions of banned titles into Poland and elsewhere, by authors from Hannah Arendt to Agatha Christie. The third fighter for truth was Mirosław Chojecki, a young Polish publisher who by the spring of 1980 had been arrested 43 times. A nuclear physicist by training, Chojecki was not well read but knew that communism was lying to him. Both his parents had fought in the partisan Polish Home Army, and his willingness to stand up for truth, which led to prison terms and a 33-day hunger strike, became an inspiration to fellow Poles. But history is never a graceful pendulum. The CIA Book Club is at its best telling the detailed – sometimes overly detailed – story of how repression in 1970s Poland brought about the Solidarity trade union in 1980, and Charlie English, a former international news editor, keeps the complexity of this multi-tracked drama well under control. And though martial law ushered in a near-decade of further subjection 18 months later, books, along with printing presses, paper and ink, continued to be secretly imported into Poland in industrial quantities. The results, cumulatively, were decisive. The Polish dissident Adam Michnik maintained that 'it was books that were victorious in the fight… They allowed us to survive and not go mad.' What the CIA itself believed about the role of its 'book club' in bringing down communism is less clear. At Langley the consensus was that its action to arm the Afghan mujahideen, resisting the Soviet Union's invasion at the time, was the conclusive factor in ending the Cold War. But in 1991, when Minden wrote his final report before resigning, the ILC had delivered close to ten million books, magazines and cassettes to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria over 35 years. It had been an operation of substantial cultural, and ultimately political, importance, with little collateral damage, and conducted at a fraction of the cost of running thousands of tons of weapons to militant Islamic fighters in Afghanistan. All one can finally say is that even if the CIA is as reprehensible, trigger-happy and poorly overseen as its detractors have long made out, its startling efforts to win the Cold War with books prove the adage that even a blind squirrel will occasionally turn up a nut. In this case, it was a nut that cracked the nutcracker
