The CIA Book Club

The astonishing story of the ten million books that were smuggled across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

For almost five decades after the Second World War, Europe was divided by the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. The Iron Curtain, a near-impenetrable barrier of wire and wall, tank traps, minefields, watchtowers and men with dogs, stretched for 4,300 miles from the Arctic to the Black Sea. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the conflict would be fought in the psychological sphere. It was a battle for hearts, minds and intellects.

No one understood this more clearly than George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the ‘CIA books programme’, which aimed to win the Cold War with literature.

From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden’s global CIA ‘book club’ would infiltrate millions of banned titles into the Eastern Bloc, written by a vast and eclectic list of authors, including Hannah Arendt and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell and Agatha Christie. Volumes were smuggled on trucks and aboard yachts, dropped from balloons, and hidden in the luggage of hundreds of thousands of individual travellers. Once inside Soviet bloc, each book would circulate secretly among dozens of like-minded readers, quietly turning them into dissidents. Latterly, underground print shops began to reproduce the books, too. By the late 1980s, illicit literature in Poland was so pervasive that the system of communist censorship broke down, and the Iron Curtain soon followed.

Charlie English tells this true story of spycraft, smuggling and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who risked their lives to stand up to the intellectual strait-jacket Stalin created. People like Miroslaw Chojecki, an underground Polish publisher who endured beatings, force-feeding and exile in service of this mission. And Minden, the CIA’s mastermind, who didn’t waver in his belief that truth, culture, and diversity of thought could help free the ‘captive nations’ of Eastern Europe. This is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. Books, it shows, can set you free.

Review

A Book of the Year in the Daily Telegraph and Economist

'Vibrant, beautifully researched and exciting… a real pleasure to read – a finely written page-turner full of well-researched stories of smuggling, intrigue and survival'

Guardian

'Charlie English tells the tale of a 1980s secret operation in communist-controlled Poland… . A vivid and moving story. English is terrific at evoking the atmosphere of Poland in the 1970s and 1980s―not just the regime’s narrowed horizons and suffocating repression, but the excitement of the Solidarity trade union movement and the idealism of the young dissidents'

The Times, Dominic Sandbrook

'This covert CIA programme to undermine censorship in the Soviet bloc is the subject of Charlie English’s impressively detailed account… English does a first-rate job in piecing together this patchily known story in efficient, pacy prose'

Spectator

'Entertaining and vivid… This is a gripping account of an intriguing and little-known Cold War moment'

Observer

'Gripping…an extraordinarily detailed account of how the [CIA] Book Club set about capturing hearts and minds'

Daily Mail

'Spring-loaded with tradecraft, English’s account feels like it’s torn from the pages of Ian Fleming … An indelible reminder … that words matter, and that perhaps the most patriotic thing one can do is read'

Washington Post

'A story as fascinating as it is undersung … a riveting account centered on Poland in the turbulent 1980s, when the ‘war of ideas’ could exact real casualties. This was spycraft as soulcraft… . The publication of The CIA Book Club feels perfectly, painfully timely… . A reminder of what’s lost when a government no longer believes in the power of its own ideals'

New York Times Book Review

'A fascinating account of a world-changing covert operation and a first-rate contribution to the history of the CIA'

Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes

About the Author

Charlie English is the former head of international news at the Guardian. A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he is the author of several widely acclaimed histories including The Snow Tourist, The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu and The Gallery of Miracles and Madness. He lives in London.