About the Book
For almost five decades after the Second World War, Europe was divided by the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. The Iron Curtain, a near-impenetrable barrier of wire and wall, tank traps, minefields, watchtowers and men with dogs, stretched for 4,300 miles from the Arctic to the Black Sea. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the conflict would be fought in the psychological sphere. It was a battle for hearts, minds and intellects.
No one understood this more clearly than George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the ‘CIA books programme’, which aimed to win the Cold War with literature.
From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden’s global CIA ‘book club’ would infiltrate millions of banned titles into the Eastern Bloc, written by a vast and eclectic list of authors, including Hannah Arendt and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell and Agatha Christie. Volumes were smuggled on trucks and aboard yachts, dropped from balloons, and hidden in the luggage of hundreds of thousands of individual travellers. Once inside Soviet bloc, each book would circulate secretly among dozens of like-minded readers, quietly turning them into dissidents. Latterly, underground print shops began to reproduce the books, too. By the late 1980s, illicit literature in Poland was so pervasive that the system of communist censorship broke down, and the Iron Curtain soon followed.
Format: Hardcover (384 pages) Publisher: William Collins
Publication date: 13th March 2025 Genre: Nonfiction, History
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My Review
The fact the CIA was involved in smuggling books beyond the Iron Curtain to Poland and other Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe was a revelation to me. And that they supported the underground printing operations of activists working to counter the disinformation of the Polish government and get around its strict censorship laws. That’s hardly surprising because the operation has been described as the ‘best kept secret’ of the Cold War. In fact many of the participants never knew the source of the funding that enabled the programme to carry on.
Although I’m of an age to recall the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, I hadn’t realised the extent of the regime’s attempts to suppress the dissemination of non-state approved information. Not only were many books banned, every typewriter had to be registered, access to every photocopier was restricted and a permit was needed to buy paper in any quantity. If Poles wanted to create a business card, a rubber stamp or even a sheet of music it had to be approved by a censor. Some of the censorship decisions were positively bizarre. The author cites the example of a book about growing carrots that was destroyed for implying vegetables could grow in individuals’ gardens as well as in those run by collectives.
Disseminating information about what was really going on could end you up in jail, probably after a severe beating up by the secret police. One of the people highlighted in the book is Miroslaw Chojecki, an underground Polish publisher who endured just such treatment, as well as force-feeding when he embarked on a hunger strike in prison. Forced into exile in the West, he continued to be involved in directing increasingly daring smuggling operations.
The other key character is George Minden, the CIA’s mastermind behind the programme who continued to believe, in the face of opposition from his own superiors at times, in the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. As the author describes it, a sort of literary humanitarian aid, the bookish equivalent of food parcels.
The details of some of the smuggling operations are astounding with printing presses, books and other material cunningly concealed in vehicles to evade border checks or carried by individuals travelling between Poland and other countries. However, some more outlandish ideas such as smuggling miniature books in Tampax boxes were rejected. Even once inside the country, distribution was a highly dangerous affair requiring much ingenuity by those involved. Information was on a strictly ‘need to know’ basis with many in the network never learning the identity of others involved further up or down the chain. Precautions had to be taken against telephone lines being tapped or locations bugged. Members of the underground publishing network were forced to adopt elaborate precautions to avoid detection (referred to as ‘health and safety’ procedures) many of which could have come straight out of a John le Carre novel, or the film French Connection.
When it came to underground printing operations, the author explains even more ingenuity was required. ‘Rex-Rotary and A. B. Dick presses sat behind fake walls, false chimneys and heavy wardrobes, in loft spaces above rural barns and in kitchen cellars beneath trapdoors hidden by a fridge. The output of these machines was carried around in rucksacks, and suitcases, or tied to men’s backs beneath their coats, and dead-dropped in tree holes, under drain covers or beneath church pews.’
The book has an incredible amount of detail and it’s clear the author has been meticulous in his research. As an illustration, I was only at 80% on my Kindle copy when I reached the epilogue, the rest of the book being bibliography, notes, etc. I found the book had so much detail that I had to dip in and out of it over a few weeks. There are a lot of people mentioned, not all of whom play a prominent role in the story. Much of the book is taken up with the evolution of the Solidarity movement, a journey not without its setbacks including a period of brutal suppression by the Soviet-backed Polish government. The book taught me a lot about the history of the period and made me appreciate why Poland, given its history, has good reason to fear Russian aggression even today.
The CIA Book Club demonstrates in a very readable way how the written word can be a weapon in the fight for freedom and how banning books in order to suppress freedom of thought and speech is ultimately always doomed to fail.
I received a review copy courtesy of William Collins via NetGalley. The CIA Book Club fits the History cayegory of the Nonfiction Reader Challenge hosted by Shellyrae at Book’d Out.
In three words: Fascinating, well-researched, detailed
Try something similar: The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu by Charlie English
About the Author
Charlie English is a British non-fiction author and former head of international news at the Guardian. He has written three books, including The Snow Tourist (2008) and The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu, aka The Storied City (2017). His third, The Gallery of Miracles and Madness, was published in August 2021. He lives in London with his family.
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