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.”
English makes clear that the C.I.A. wasn’t just trafficking in high-minded dissent. Anything that might tickle a reader’s curiosity behind the Iron Curtain was fodder. As Timothy Garton Ash observed in his classic “The Polish Revolution,” “people paid high prices for these forbidden fruits; they devoured them in a night and then passed them on to their friends, so the circle of readers was far larger than the few thousand copies which were somehow run off on the hidden duplicators.”
English reconstructs the agency’s web of literary subversion with a reporter’s eye for the telling, and occasionally comic, detail. The risks were immense, the tradecraft sometimes desperate. A French driver, Jacky Challot, apprehended at a Polish customs post, tried to flush a piece of paper with contact information down an excrement-encrusted toilet. It wouldn’t flush. So he fished it out, tore it up and swallowed it.
Inevitably, this literary fifth column ran into opposition within the C.I.A. itself. The men of the operations directorate — particularly the specialists in “dirty little wars” — scoffed at the idea that books could topple regimes. “Real men don’t sell books,” they grumbled. Why was the C.I.A. wasting money on Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry? But the program was cheap, by Langley’s standards — a tiny fraction of what the agency was pouring into arming the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan.
The book’s catchy title risks implying that the C.I.A. ran the show, but the crucial variable, as English makes clear, was the resisters themselves — figures like Chojecki, arrested at least 44 times, and Helena Luczywo, a pioneering editor of the underground press. Their courage stands in sharp relief against the sometimes sinister, sometimes farcical Polish censorship apparatus: Every typewriter in Poland had to be registered; you needed a permit to buy a ream of paper. Even a volume about carrots might be banned if it hinted at the joys of gardening outside the collective.
Today, when “subversive” is the standard accolade for a campus poet, English’s book is a bracing reminder that, not so long ago, forbidden literature really could help tip the balance of history. He persuasively argues that the ferment in Poland, fueled in part by Minden’s cultural contraband, was a catalyst for the chain reaction that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of other Eastern Bloc governments. “Soft power” wasn’t so soft.
That’s why the publication of “The CIA Book Club” feels perfectly, painfully timely. As President Trump takes a sledgehammer to U.S.A.I.D., Voice of America and Radio Free Europe — institutions of cultural diplomacy once backed by both parties — this chronicle reads like a requiem. ]George Minden types were convinced of the geopolitical force of ideals such as free expression and the rule of law because they actually believed in them. “Truth is contagious,” Minden said. Our new stewards of statecraft, by contrast, seem to see the world in purely transactional terms, and to assume everyone else does. too. English’s book is a reminder of what’s lost when a government no longer believes in the power of its own ideals.
THE CIA BOOK CLUB: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War With Forbidden Literature | By Charlie English | Random House | 341 pp. | $35
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