The CIA Book Club by Charlie English review – ‘It was like fresh air'

The Guardian

14-03-2025

In, I think, November 1978, I got a call from a rather grand British journalist who'd heard that I was about to go to Moscow. 'A Russian friend of mine would dearly like the latest volume of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. I don't suppose you'd smuggle it in for him?' I did, of course, disguising it rather feebly by wrapping it in the dust jacket of the most boring book I owned: Lebanon, A Country in Transition. A customs official at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport flicked through it briefly, but even though the text was in Russian he didn't spot what it was about. Two nights later, near the entrance to Gorky Park, I handed over the book to a shifty character who seemed to be a supplier of forbidden goods to the dissident community. He gave me a small 18th-century icon in exchange for it.
It's only now, all these years later, that I've realised I was almost certainly a rather naive mule for a CIA scheme to smuggle subversive books through the iron curtain. According to Charlie English's vibrant, beautifully researched and exciting The CIA Book Club, the Polish intellectual and political activist Adam Michnik read The Gulag Archipelago in prison; someone had managed to get a copy to him even there, courtesy of a CIA operation codenamed QRHELPFUL. Solzhenitsyn was far from being the only author whose works the CIA smuggled. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm were probably the most popular among the dissidents the books were intended for, but a wide range of other authors including Adam Mickiewicz, Albert Camus, Nadezhda Mandelstam and even Agatha Christie also featured on the QRHELPFUL book list.
The inspiration behind the scheme was a charming-sounding CIA boss called George Minden, who believed, quite rightly, that the freedom to read good literature was as important to the imprisoned minds of the Soviet empire as any other form of freedom. During most of the 1980s the CIA was run by a rather tiresome, boisterous adventurer called Bill Casey, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981. This was one of Casey's more sensible efforts, and it was under him that Minden was able to pump books, photocopiers and even printing presses into the Soviet empire. They helped to keep people there in touch with precisely the kind of western culture the high priests of Marxism-Leninism wanted to block out.
This was especially true in Poland, which is English's main focus. Poles never forgot that their country was essentially part of western Europe, and the flow of French, British and American literature in particular was an important part of keeping that awareness going. Michnik, the dissident who read Solzhenitsyn in prison, speaks for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people behind the iron curtain when he tells English: 'A book was like fresh air. They allowed us to survive and not go mad.'
The rise of the Solidarity trade union, starting in the Gdansk shipyards in 1980, proved to be the beginning of the end for Moscow's empire in Europe. The efforts by the prime minister, General Jaruzelski, to clamp down on the demand for greater freedom only succeeded for a short while. The Soviet Union was being bled white by its war in Afghanistan, its ankylosed political structure was showing its weaknesses, a series of ancient zombies came to power and died out, and a new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was given the impossible job of trying to bring new life into a system that was essentially finished.
But his good intentions and genuine decency were simply not enough. Soon the people of East Germany were following the lead of the Poles in their demand for better, freer lives, and on the night of 9 November 1989 a badly thought through decision by the East German politburo allowed tens of thousands of people to flood through the crossing points in the Berlin Wall. The Soviet empire in Europe was dead. It wasn't killed by smuggled copies of The Gulag Archipelago and Nineteen Eighty-Four, but they unquestionably did their bit to help the process along.
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As you might expect from English's previous The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu, The CIA Book Club is a real pleasure to read – a finely written page-turner full of well-researched stories of smuggling, intrigue and survival. It would make an exceptionally good series for television, and it provides a powerful reminder of the extraordinary events of Poland's struggle for freedom. Suitably for such a literate nation, books played their part in it, and Minden got the result he wanted.
It's always a bad idea for journalists to get too involved with spies: it eats away at their independence. If I had realised I was acting as an agent for Minden's scheme, I would probably have refused to smuggle my Solzhenitsyn into late-70s Russia. But after reading Charlie English I'm glad I did it. There's nothing more important than freedom of mind, and that's what QRHELPFUL provided.
John Simpson is the BBC's world affairs editor. His programme Unspun World is broadcast at 11.05pm on Wednesdays on BBC Two. The CIA Book Club: The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War by Charlie English is published by William Collins (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.