The gripping story of how smuggled books helped end the Cold War

Sydney Morning Herald

02-07-2025

COLD WAR
The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War
Charlie English
HarperCollins, $29.99
In Nazi Germany books considered to be un-German were burnt in public. No such public ritual existed in the Soviet Union, where censorship was secretive and subtle.
During the Cold War (1945-1989), the Polish government suppressed culture behind closed doors too. The most populous central European country was then aligned to Moscow, which meant any criticism of the Kremlin was off limits.
This Sovietisation of Polish culture was resisted by certain writers, such as Czesław Miłosz, who fled to Paris in the early 1950s. The Polish poet won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, but his writing was banned in his native country. As was the work of many western writers, including George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus and Virginia Woolf.
But in communist Poland an underground literary culture still flourished. Books came from the west via various channels and sources. Some were hidden in the toilets of sleeper trains shuttling across Europe. A copy of The Gulag Archipelago, by Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was said to have been concealed in a baby's nappy on a flight to Warsaw. But banned literature wasn't coming into Poland by sheer chance. '[It was] part of a decades-long US intelligence operation [that built] up libraries of illicit books on the far side of the Iron Curtain,' Charlie English explains in The CIA Book Club.
The British author begins this captivating story in 1955, when Free Europe Press printed 260,000 copies of Orwell's 1945 political fable Animal Farm, which were sent by balloon into East-Central Europe. But the clandestine mission, the brainchild of Free Europe Committee (FEC), an anti-communist CIA front organisation, wasn't very successful. So Langley, CIA headquarters, came up with a more effective strategy: direct mail.
Post was strictly censored behind the Iron Curtain, but some books got through. 'No country responded with greater enthusiasm than Poland,' writes English, a former Guardian journalist. A persistent researcher who writes with flair, he notes that books with more controversial themes were typically sent to privileged intellectuals less likely to be persecuted. Among that list was Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, the Archbishop of Krakow, later elected Pope John Paul II. The world's first Slavic Pope had been receiving books — indirectly at least — from the CIA for years. But like most of the recipients, he had no clue where the books were coming from.
The CIA book programme was 'a complex organisation ... consisting of bookshops, publishers, libraries, book exporters, and Russian and East European personalities' living in various European cities, as George Minden once put it. During the mid-1950s the Romanian exile began working for the Free Europe Press Book Centre in New York, which handled the CIA's mailing project.