Winning the Cold War With le Carré and Cosmopolitan Magazine

New York Times

11 hours ago

THE CIA BOOK CLUB: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War With Forbidden Literature, by Charlie English
The Central Intelligence Agency's Cold War ledger is notoriously blotted with ink of dubious shades — from exploding cigars, poisoned toothpaste, clandestine LSD experiments and the targeting of elected leaders who leaned too far left for Washington's tastes. Yet amid these grim escapades, the agency waged another, more edifying campaign: smuggling books and articles into the Eastern Bloc, thereby arming local dissidents not with weapons but with ideas.
It's a story as fascinating as it is undersung. In 'The CIA Book Club,' the former Guardian journalist Charlie English delivers a riveting account centered on Poland in the turbulent 1980s, when the 'war of ideas' could exact real casualties.
At the heart of the story is George Minden, a Romanian aristocrat turned spymaster and head of the C.I.A.'s book program — someone who, as English notes, could have wandered out of a John le Carré novel. Minden was genuinely convinced that a paperback in the right hands could help crack the cement of totalitarian thinking. His aim was to avoid blatant propaganda (the C.I.A.'s default mode) and not merely send books with a pro-capitalist message. In his view, 'all books — political and literary — accomplish the political task of making the ideological isolation of Eastern Europe difficult and thus frustrate one of the communists' main political objectives.' This was spycraft as soulcraft.
As the trade union Solidarity established itself as the nerve center of Polish resistance, Minden's longstanding book-running efforts morphed into an operation code-named QRHELPFUL, launched in 1983. It helped the families of prisoners and refugees, sneaked in radios and printing equipment, and fueled a global propaganda push. As one underground Solidarity member put it, 'The printing presses we got from the West during martial law might be compared to machine guns or tanks during war.' Illicit text might be concealed in Tampax boxes or diapers or stashed in the ceilings of train toilets.
The logistics mastermind was Miroslaw Chojecki, a nuclear physicist turned underground publisher — Solidarity's 'minister for smuggling.' At the movement's peak, demand for banned books grew so intense that Polish dissidents invented 'flying libraries': samizdat stuffed into rucksacks and passed hand-to-hand, rarely touching the ground for long. Printing presses sometimes lurked behind trapdoors, ready to spring into action at a moment's notice.
And the agency's reading list? Nothing if not eclectic: '1984,' 'Animal Farm,' 'Brave New World,' issues of The New York Review of Books — but also le Carré's spy novels, stacks of Cosmopolitan magazines and the Whitney Museum's 'Three Hundred Years of American Painting.'
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