How the CIA book club became one of the Cold War's most important weapons

It’s sometimes said that we are living through a new Cold War, in which East and West are once again fighting for global supremacy through a series of proxy conflicts, chiefly, in our era, in Ukraine. Cold War II is not wholly the same as Cold War I: mid-20th century China was not the emerging superpower it is now, and Nato back then enjoyed the unwavering support of the White House. Yet similarities abound, not least the importance of psychological warfare and propaganda. Intelligence services now push messages through an array of digital media; back then, the CIA used the very analogue means of books and publishing. 

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First, a little context. For 45 years after WWII, Europe was divided by the most heavily guarded border on earth, the Iron Curtain. No physical combat could take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the conflict in Europe became a battle for hearts, minds and intellects. Few understood this more clearly than George Minden, head of a covert intelligence operation known as the ‘CIA book programme’.

As Minden knew, the people of every Eastern Bloc country were governed by a tight system of censorship, something akin to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s novel 1984, which sought to control all public dialogue and information. In Poland, this function was performed by the Main Office for the Control of Presentations and Public Performances: if you wanted to print so much as a business card or buy a ream of paper in that country, you needed Main Office permission. Enforced by KGB-style secret police, censorship and propaganda had a stifling effect on life in the bloc. It forced citizens to adopt a kind of Orwellian “doublethink”, where truth could be told in private, at home, but in official spaces you had to pay lip service to a state-sanctioned unreality governed by Marxist-Leninist precepts.  

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The CIA’s programme sought to combat this stultification by sending free-thinking, uncensored literature from the West, since, as Minden once put it, “truth is contagious”, and if they could only deliver it to the oppressed peoples of the Soviet Bloc it was certain to have an effect. Working from its Manhattan headquarters, Minden’s “book club” oversaw the secret movement of 10 million banned titles into the East over a period of four decades. 

They began with mailing books to addresses in East European phone books, targeting the great and the good, intellectuals and the influential. One early recipient of CIA books was Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, who even wrote a postcard of thanks. They developed a system of person-to-person distribution, in which travellers from the East were offered free books at certain distribution hubs in the West, on condition that they took them home in their luggage. As time passed, the smugglers’ methods grew more and more sophisticated.

By the 1980s, books were being carried into the East aboard yachts, hidden in secret compartments built into trucks and vans, and secreted aboard trains. CIA-funded publishers began to produce miniature editions, which could be hidden inside food tins and carried on lorries filled with humanitarian supplies. Sometimes literature had a strong anti-totalitarian message. The CIA promoted Orwell heavily, for instance, along with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Hannah Arendt. But Minden saw that almost any Western literature had new political meaning in the East, and even lifestyle magazines such as Marie Claire or Life showed the ‘captive nations’ the tangible benefits of living in a free world.       

Nowhere were the books welcomed more warmly than in Poland, a liberal country by Soviet standards, where people felt a strong connection to the West. Here, ‘flying libraries’ of uncensored books sprang up, which shared literature covertly among circles of like-minded readers. Such was the demand for these texts that dissidents soon began to reproduce them in the underground, something the CIA encouraged by secretly shipping in printing presses and print materials along with the books. By the end of that decade, illicit literature was so pervasive in Poland that censorship broke down and, having lost control of the narrative, the communist regime soon collapsed. Poland, of course, was the first communist domino to topple in 1989. The rest of the bloc followed.

I’ve written the first narrative account of this CIA programme because I believe it played an important, overlooked role in the defeat of communism, and I believe literary freedom is vital. As Polish dissident Adam Michnik, editor-in-chief of the leading Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, told me, “It was books that were victorious in the fight. We should build a monument to books.” 

The CIA Book Club by Charlie English is out now (William Collins, £25). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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