The CIA Book Club

The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War

Charlie English

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English

HARPER360
01 April 2025

History; Social & cultural history; The Cold War; Espionage & secret services; Military intelligence; Publishing industry

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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.

By: Charlie English
Imprint: HARPER360
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 153mm, Spine: 30mm
Weight: 360g
ISBN: 9780008495138
ISBN 10: 0008495130
Pages: 384
Publication Date: 01 April 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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

Reviews for The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK SMUGGLERS OF TIMBUKTU ‘An exemplary work of investigative journalism that is also a wonderfully colourful book of history and travel’ William Dalrymple, Observer, Books of the Year ‘This spellbinding record of Timbuktu’s intellectual heritage blends accounts of European explorers to the ancient city with contemporary reportage’ New Yorker ‘A piece of postmodern historiography of quite extraordinary sophistication and ingenuity [written with] exceptional delicacy and restraint’ TLS ‘Part reportage, part history, part romance and wholly gripping a riveting read’ Sunday Times