I traced a copy of George Orwell’s “1984” to the library of the social sciences department at Warsaw University, a literary treasure trove heavy with the scent of dust and old paper, and so jammed with shelves that in places the only way to move around was sideways. For months I had been searching for this particular volume, a book that had played, in my view, a small but significant role in winning the Cold War.
There are myriad reasons the Eastern Bloc collapsed in 1989. The economic stagnation of the East and the war in Afghanistan are two of the most commonly cited. But literature also played its part, thanks to a long-running U.S. operation conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency that covertly moved millions of books through the Iron Curtain in a bid to undermine Communist Party censorship.
While it is hard to quantify the program’s effect in absolute terms, its history offers valuable lessons for today, not least since some of the very same titles and authors the C.I.A. sent East during the Cold War — including “1984”— are now deemed objectionable by a network of conservative groups across the United States.
First published in English in 1949, Orwell’s novel describes the dystopian world of Oceania, a totalitarian state where the protagonist, Winston Smith, works in a huge government department called the Ministry of Truth. The ministry is ironically named: Its role is not to safeguard the truth but to destroy it, to edit history to fit the present needs of the party and its leader, Big Brother, since, as the slogan runs, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
In the real Soviet system, every country had its equivalent of the Ministry of Truth, modeled on the Moscow template. In Poland, the largest Eastern European nation outside the Soviet Union, this censorship and propaganda apparatus was called the Main Office for the Control of Presentations and Public Performances, and its headquarters occupied most of a city block in downtown Warsaw.
From art to advertising, television to theater, the Main Office reached into all aspects of Polish life. It had employees in every TV and radio station, every film studio and every publishing house. Every typewriter in Poland had to be registered, access to every photocopier was restricted, and a permit was needed even to buy a ream of paper. Books that did not conform to the censor’s rules were pulped.
The result was intellectual stultification, what the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz called a logocracy, a society where words and language were manipulated to fit the propaganda needs of the regime. In the logocracy, the Warsaw Pact was said to protect Poland from attack by “revisionist” German neo-Nazis and “Western imperialists,” even though the main imperialist threat came from the East.
Troublesome people, inconvenient facts and awkward areas of journalistic inquiry were removed from public life. It was forbidden to reference the fraught history of Russo-Polish relations, for instance, or the secret police massacres of Polish officers at Katyn, or mention the fact that Poland had a giant alcoholism problem. People existed in a world of Orwellian “doublethink,” believing certain things to be true at home, but adopting a very different, party-sanctioned “truth” outside it.
Orwell was made a “nonperson” in the Soviet Union, after the publication of his satire of the Russian Revolution, “Animal Farm,” in 1945. It was dangerous even to mention the author’s name in print there, and when “1984” was published it was banned in the Eastern Bloc in all languages. But when copies of the novel did slip through the Iron Curtain, they had enormous power. The book was “difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess,” Milosz wrote, but Orwell — who had never visited Eastern Europe — fascinated people there because of “his insight into details they know well.”
What some Eastern European readers of contraband copies of “1984” suspected, but very few knew for sure, was that these and millions of other uncensored texts were not reaching them entirely by chance, but were part of a decades-long U.S. intelligence operation called the “C.I.A. book program,” based for much of its existence in the nondescript office building at 475 Park Avenue South in Midtown Manhattan. There, a small team of C.I.A. employees organized the infiltration of 10 million books and periodicals into the Eastern Bloc, sending literature by every imaginable means: in trucks fitted with secret compartments, on yachts that traversed the stormy Baltic, in the mail, or slipped into the luggage of countless travelers from Eastern Europe who dropped in at C.I.A. distribution hubs in the West.
The C.I.A. program operated across the Eastern Bloc and assigned specialist editors for each country, from Hungary to the mighty Soviet Union itself. But it was in Poland that the books were most warmly received, partly because the Warsaw regime was more liberal than others in Eastern Europe and partly because Poland had a long tradition of underground literature dating back to tsarist times. From the late 1970s, banned books would also be reproduced in huge quantities by underground printers in Poland, often on presses bought and smuggled by associates of the C.I.A. program, amplifying the literature’s effect.
The first Polish translation of “1984” was published in France in 1953, by the Polish émigré Jerzy Giedroyc, a C.I.A. asset known to the agency by the cryptonym QRBERETTA. It was a copy of this edition that I found that day at Warsaw University. In 1957, this copy was given with a few other contraband titles to a Polish art critic who had been allowed to travel to Paris, who carried it back to Poland through the border. Inside the Eastern Bloc, the book spent the next three decades performing the task for which it had been published: quietly undermining Soviet Communism from within.
By the mid-1980s, Poland was flooded with uncensored publications, some smuggled in, many printed underground. The system of Communist Party censorship started to break down, and in losing its grip on information, the Polish state lost its grip on the people too. The Communists were forced to hold semi-free elections in June of 1989, which were won by the opposition movement, Solidarity. After Poland came the deluge: A year later, all of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe had been replaced by democratically elected governments.
In the mid-2020s, “1984” is again being restricted, this time by conservative, Trump-aligned politicians in the United States. In May 2023, the Republican governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, signed into law Senate File 496, which according to the governor “puts parents in the driver’s seat” when it comes to their children’s education. In fact SF 496 forces Iowa schools to remove from their libraries thousands of books of which cultural conservatives disapprove.
Mostly, SF 496, which is the subject of an ongoing legal battle, bans books that feature L.G.B.T.Q.+ characters or progressive themes such as feminism or are written by people of color. But the legislation also sweeps up several authors whose works lampoon totalitarianism and that were sent east by the C.I.A. book program, including Aldous Huxley, Kurt Vonnegut and Orwell, whose “1984” and “Animal Farm” are both on banned lists.
SF 496 is but one cog in the growing apparatus of American censorship, as conservative action groups seek to ban books around the country. PEN America has documented close to 16,000 bans (instances in which a book has been withdrawn or access to it has been restricted because of its content) in schools since 2021, with 10,046 in the 2023-24 school year alone. The censorship efforts are mostly driven by Republican state legislators and parental-rights groups. Florida takes the lead, with more than 4,561 book bans recorded in that school year — including in one case a graphic novel adaptation of “1984” — via a combination of new state laws and parental pressure. Next come Iowa (with 3,671 book bans that year), Texas (538), Wisconsin (408), Virginia (121) and Kentucky (100).
Banning books doesn’t stop at the local level.This year, after Mr. Trump signed three executive orders aimed at combating “wokeness,” the Department of Defense’s education agency removed and reviewed more than 500 titles from its school system, including, according to one report, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” which the C.I.A. had sent to the Eastern Bloc. Federal funding agencies have compiled a list of more than 350 banned words and phrases, including “women,” “diversity” and “ethnicity.”
In the Cold War, the United States chose “freedom” — democratic freedom, freedom of speech, intellectual freedom and freedom of choice — as its key point of difference with the Soviet enemy. Since the end of World War II, U.S. presidents from both parties have wrapped themselves in the rhetoric of the “free world” that they led. When Ronald Reagan — who spearheaded the Cold War “freedom” agenda and oversaw an upswing in C.I.A. literary programs — spoke to the British Parliament in 1982, he invoked “the march of freedom and democracy,” which would “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history.” It was no coincidence that George Minden, the leader of the C.I.A. book program, once described his operation as “an offensive of free, honest thinking.”
Mr. Trump, JD Vance, Ron DeSantis and their fellow travelers expound the virtues of the First Amendment while dismantling guardrails against disinformation and working to suppress political ideas they oppose. Book bans aren’t their only tool. They also block access for independent journalists, intimidate news organizations and defund outlets they perceive as hostile to the MAGA agenda, including NPR, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America.
There are two lessons from the history of the C.I.A. book program that the book banners would do well to heed. One is that censorship — whether by Communists, fascists or democratic governments — tends to create demand for the works it targets. (That, and Mr. Trump’s Orwellian tactics, may explain why “1984” has been surging up the book charts in recent years.)
The other is that the totalitarians lost the Cold War, and freedom of thought won the day. The former Polish dissident Adam Michnik, whose own works were promoted by the C.I.A., presumably without his knowledge, said: “It was books that were victorious in the fight. We should build a monument to books.”
Charlie English is the author of “The CIA Book Club.”
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