The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature

The astonishing true story of the CIA's program to smuggle tens of millions of books across the Iron Curtain—from George Orwell and Hannah Arendt to Agatha Christie—during the Cold War.

"A book is like a reservoir of freedom."—Adam Michnik, Polish dissident

For nearly five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, forming the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the war was fought psychologically. It was a battle for hearts, minds and intellects. Few understood this more clearly than George Minden, head of a covert intelligence operation known as the “CIA book program”, which aimed to undermine Soviet censorship and inspire revolt by offering different visions of thought and culture.

From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden’s “book club” secretly sent around ten million banned titles into the East. Volumes were smuggled aboard trucks and yachts, dropped from balloons, hidden aboard trains and stowed in travelers' luggage. Nowhere were the books welcomed more warmly than in Poland, where they would circulate covertly among circles of likeminded readers, quietly making the case against Soviet communism. Such was the demand for Minden’s books that dissidents soon began to reproduce these works in the underground. By the late 1980s, illicit literature was so pervasive in Poland that censorship broke down: the Iron Curtain soon followed.

Charlie English narrates this tale of Cold War spy craft, smuggling and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who stood up to the intellectual strait-jacket Stalin had created. People like Mirosław Chojecki, who suffered beatings, jail and exile in pursuit of his clandestine mission, and Minden, the CIA's mastermind, who didn't waver in his belief in the importance of culture and diversity of thought. 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.