The CIA Book Club by Charlie English review – chapter and verse as a weapon of war

The Guardian

03-03-2025

In March 1984 Polish customs officers noticed a suspicious truck. It had arrived on an overnight ferry from Copenhagen, docking at the Baltic port of Świnoujście. The truck's interior was smaller than its exterior. Workmen broke through a walled-off inside panel. To their surprise, they found a cache of books – 800 of them – and illicit printing presses. And forbidden walkie-talkies. 'Oh shit! Reactionary propaganda!' the officer exclaimed.
The shipment was to be delivered to the Polish opposition movement Solidarity. The country's communist leader, Gen Wojciech Jaruzelski, had banned Solidarity three years earlier. The forbidden books included critiques of the socialist system and pamphlets on human rights. Other works smuggled behind the iron curtain included Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, philosophical texts by Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt, and copies of the Manchester Guardian Weekly.
The organisation that funded this highbrow delivery service was none other than the CIA. For 35 years it sent books, magazines and video cassettes to the Warsaw Pact nations of eastern Europe, as well as to the USSR. The methods used were ingenious. They included travellers hiding material in their luggage, as well as balloons, yachts and a baby's nappy, taken on a flight to Warsaw and containing Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.
As Charlie English argues, in his entertaining and vivid new work, The CIA Book Club, this programme was a success. It played a part in defeating Polish communism and in hastening the demise of similar regimes in Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. And it was cheap. It cost $2-4m annually. During the same cold war period the CIA was splurging $700m on supporting Mujahideen fighters in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.
For Poland's dissidents the printing presses sent by the west were the equivalent of guns or tanks. As one put it, literature nourished the soul and gave Poles a sense of a bigger human context. Books encouraged dissent. The editor Adam Michnik – who played a leading role in Solidarity's struggle and spent much of the 1980s in jail – said that after reading a book 'your spine would be straightening up'. He observed: 'You knew then you could tell the state 'No'.'
The Polish democracy activists helped by the CIA were not stooges. They selected which titles to distribute, many of them written by people who had lived in the eastern bloc. A key person was Mirosław Chojecki, whom English dubs Solidarity's minister for smuggling. Chojecki was a talented publisher who had numerous run-ins with the secret police. They arrested him more than 40 times, but failed to stop his underground operation.
When strikes broke out in 1980 at the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk, the authorities cut the phones. Chojecki brought out a special newsletter, Bulletin, in support of the workers. The country's communist rulers blinked, with Solidarity recognised. Fifteen months later, though, and under pressure from Moscow, Jaruzelski imposed martial law. Solidarity officials were rounded up. Chojecki was out of the country and, for the next decade, produced dissident literature from Paris.
English writes thrillingly about the activists inside Poland, and their efforts to defy the clampdown. Women played a crucial role. In 1982 the journalist Helena Łuczywo launched the Mazovia Weekly, a vital source of information in dark times. She and her colleagues slept in safe-houses, carried fake IDs, and used contacts to source banned offset presses. The Polish security services were deeply chauvinist. They assumed – wrongly – that the reporters they were hunting were men.
For the next few years Solidarity's cause looked hopeless. At the same time, Chojecki's distribution network flourished. By the mid-1980s books were being sent into Poland on routes stretching from Stockholm to Turin. Illicit print sites sprung up in lofts and kitchen cellars, under a trap door concealed by a fridge. The regime had triumphs too. Spies infiltrated Solidarity and intercepted international deliveries, calling them 'provocations'.
CIA records from this giddy period remain classified. Senior US politicians were privately supportive, including president Jimmy Carter and his Polish-American national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. The clandestine book programme had a codename, QRHELPFUL. Its results were impressive. George Minden, the CIA officer in charge, estimated that almost 10 million items were smuggled east, with 316,020 books dispatched in the programme's final year.
English has interviewed the surviving dissidents, whose cat-and mouse struggle led in 1989 to the regime's collapse. I would have liked to read more on the books themselves and reaction from underground readers. Who, for example, decided to include Virginia Woolf's advice on writing? What did communist-era Poles make of Agatha Christie? This is a gripping account of an intriguing and little-known cold war moment. In contrast to our own fascist-tinged times, liberal ideas won.
Luke Harding's Invasion: Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival, shortlisted for the Orwell prize, is published by Guardian Faber
The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War by Charlie English is published by Harper Collins (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply