How the CIA smuggled Orwell and Le Carré into the eastern bloc

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.