Latest news with #TheCIABookClub:TheBest-KeptSecretoftheColdWar
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Business Standard
31-07-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Best of BS Opinion: Short circuits and sharp jolts in India's policy wiring
It starts innocently enough. A flickering tube light, a fan that won't start. You figure it's just a loose connection. So you open up the old switchboard, twist a couple of wires, maybe even feel a little proud of your DIY bravado. But then. Zap!! You're on the floor, your fingers tingling, your trust in household electricity forever shaken. That's the thing about systems we think we understand: the shock only comes once you dare to touch them. That is what it feels like today, institutions try to tinker, patch, or redirect the current, but instead of a quiet fix, they get a dangerous surge of resistance, unintended consequences, or just plain misjudgment. Let's dive in. Take the India-US trade talks. After months of cautious optimism, the government's effort to rewire its trade dynamics short-circuited spectacularly, as noted in our first editorial. President Trump slammed Indian exports with a 25 per cent tariff and penalties, using oil imports from Russia as a pretext. What began as a negotiation to avoid escalation, is threatening to end with sparks flying, and not the celebratory kind. Meanwhile, as the government readies the 8th Central Pay Commission, it's facing its own overload. Our second editorial highlights how public sector wage tweaks, meant to keep the grid stable, are burdened by a swelling wage bill and outdated structures. The CPC needs to avoid another power trip and focus on long-term circuitry: merit-based raises, fiscal sustainability, and detangling overqualification traps in the labour market. In a column by Pranjul Bhandari, the power drain is in India's credit system. Despite the RBI flipping every switch with rate cuts, and liquidity infusions, the demand isn't flowing. The current has shifted from supply-side shortages to structural kinks: informal sectors are lighting up, formal sectors dimming, and banks are left with plenty of volts but no takers. And in a piece by Shishir Gupta and Aalhya Sabharwal, the disconnect is painfully visible in the female workforce. India's low female labour force participation rate isn't just about norms — it's also about bad wiring: rigid labour laws, poor education, and a demand-side system that fails to create jobs where women can thrive. Unlike Bangladesh's high-voltage garment sector, India hasn't even plugged into the right socket. Finally, Kanika Datta's review of The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War by Charlie English, offers the rare case where flicking the intellectual switch worked. Smuggling books like Animal Farm into Soviet zones turned out to be a quiet but powerful rebellion. Sometimes, you don't need brute electricity, just a spark of an idea.
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Business Standard
30-07-2025
- Politics
- Business Standard
The CIA Book Club reveals how the West won minds behind the Iron Curtain
How the CIA, instead of pursuing scandalous swashbuckling interventions, smuggled books to weaken the Iron Curtain and offer Eastern Europe a glimpse of an alternative future Kanika Datta The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War Published by HarperCollins 361 pages ₹699 For earnest Indian university students, at least until the eighties, George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago were standard social reading. These and other 'intellectual' books, readily available and easily borrowed, were discussed threadbare during adda sessions, the duration of which depended on the number of classes we felt compelled to miss. It is striking to discover, then, that for contemporaries behind the Iron Curtain, these and many other authors — including Agatha Christie! — were
Sydney Morning Herald
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
The gripping story of how smuggled books helped end the Cold War
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.
The Age
02-07-2025
- Politics
- The Age
The gripping story of how smuggled books helped end the Cold War
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.
Mint
05-06-2025
- Politics
- Mint
How the CIA smuggled Orwell and Le Carré into the eastern bloc
The Economist Published 5 Jun 2025, 06:48 PM IST The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War. By Charlie English. William Collins; 384 pages; £25. To be published in America by Random House in July; $35 Books were smuggled on boats, trains and trucks, concealed in food tins, baby nappies and even the sheet music of travelling musicians. Over three decades before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the CIA funnelled 10m books into the eastern bloc, including George Orwell's '1984', John le Carré's spy thrillers and Virginia Woolf's writing advice. The programme was 'the best-kept secret of the cold war', writes Charlie English, an author, in a new book. George Minden, the leader of the literary-propaganda scheme, described it as 'an offensive of free, honest thinking'. Censors in the eastern bloc banned books for ideological reasons or because they depicted life in the West. Rulings were draconian and absurd. Detective novels by Agatha Christie with no political message were forbidden; a book about carrots was destroyed because it described how they could grow in individuals' gardens, not only in collectives. The state controlled printing presses. Typewriters had to be registered, and a permit was sometimes needed to buy paper. So the CIA sent printing supplies to dissidents. When Poland was under communist rule, the ink, typesetters and photocopiers sent by the agency helped sustain an underground publishing network. One Polish printer has compared this equipment to 'machine guns or tanks during war', enabling the opposition to reproduce banned books and publish their own newspapers. Adam Michnik, a former Polish dissident, told Mr English that illicit tomes saved his country: 'A book was like fresh air. They allowed us to survive and not go mad.' Inside and outside the CIA, the scholarly scheme has received little attention and credit, until now. Mr English concludes that the programme was hugely successful, though it may have been one of 'the most highbrow intelligence operations ever'. You could even call it bookish.
