The CIA Book Club by Charlie English: Defeat Communism with a good book
The CIA Book Club Charlie English (William Collins £25, 384pp)
During the Cold War, millions of banned literary classics were smuggled through the Iron Curtain. Animal Farm arrived by balloon. The Gulag Archipelago went through checkpoints in nappies. Others arrived in hidey-holes on the ParisMoscow Sleeper, yet more were crammed in false-bottomed lorries. Popular classics including Gone With The Wind also made it through, along with Cosmopolitan.
Russian satirical cartoon of book banning
This book-smuggling business was the bright idea of the CIA, which set out to bring down Communism not through military means, which might provoke nuclear Armageddon, but through the ‘soft power’ of literature. The theory went that if ordinary citizens in Poland, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia were exposed to banned books, they would start to grasp the extent of the censorship in their countries.
In this gripping book Charlie English concentrates on the way in which the CIA’s International Literary Centre (ILC) paved the way for the fall of Communism in Poland. At several points in the 1980s, the Solidarity movement, led by Lech Walesa, had come close to toppling the government and its oppressive regime of martial law. All it would take, believed the CIA boffins (several of whom were themselves Eastern emigres), was one more push and Poland might finally become a liberal democracy.
When readers in Warsaw finally got hold of copies of Animal Farm and 1984 courtesy of the CIA they were thunderstruck by their accuracy. One woman remembered, ‘we were living in Orwell’s world. Everybody was afraid of everybody else. What Orwell wrote came true.’ Another dissident concurred: ‘It was books that were victorious in the fight… They allowed us to survive and not go mad.’
The CIA Book Club is available now from the Mail Bookshop
The plan worked because of the courage of those Poles who risked their freedom, and their lives. They circulated the banned books and also generated newspapers, pamphlets and posters using printing presses the CIA had smuggled in. Otherwise, if you wanted a business card, piece of sheet music or theatre programme, you needed approval from the censor.
Although Charlie English has not been granted access to CIA files, he is still able to piece together an extraordinarily detailed account of how the Book Club set about capturing hearts and minds. He tells the story of Helena Luczywo, who launched Mazovia Weekly, a vital source of information when many other progressive publications had been shut down. Luczywo and her female colleagues slept in safe houses, manufactured fake IDs and managed to source spare parts for their banned printing presses. It never crossed the minds of the chauvinistic Polish security services that such resourceful resistance workers might be women.
When Communism collapsed in 1989, the CIA reckoned that it had smuggled in ten million items. What’s more, the Book Club offered great value for money, since it cost only $2-4million annually. Compare this to the hundreds of millions that the CIA was simultaneously sending to Mujahideen fighters in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, and it is clear that a lightweight copy of Animal Farm, attached to a hydrogen balloon and lobbed over the Iron Curtain, represented an absolute bargain.
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