Book review: How the CIA smuggled banned literature behind the Iron Curtain

It’s not surprising that the seemingly innocuous act of reading has struck as much fear into the hearts of authoritarian regimes as the possibility of violent rebellion against them by the people. Over a century after Kafka wrote his letter, our attention spans are dwindling under the strain of screen addiction, and the public’s brain is rotting, by all accounts. But governments continue to work on a war footing to stem the flow of “subversive" books that may “corrupt" the minds of citizens.

A recent report published by the American Library Association shows that last year, 72% of the demands to ban books in the US came from politicians, pressure groups, elected officials, board of directors and other governing body members. A few months ago, in a bizarre turn of events, a misplaced official ban order reversed the fortunes of Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel, Satanic Verses, making it available in India for the first time since 1988. It was a refreshing contrast to the many attempts to ban books that have plagued the reputation of successive dispensations in the republic, most famously among them the court case against American scholar Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History, first published in 2009 by Penguin Viking in India.

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While it is harder to execute foolproof book bans in the age of porous information flow via the world wide web, the stubbornly persistent desire to do so on the part of authorities continues to affirm the primal power of reading that Kafka spoke of. As Polish dissident Adam Michnik tells journalist Charlie English in his fine new book, The CIA Book Club: The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War (HarperCollins India), “We should build a monument to books. I am convinced it was books that were victorious in the fight (against communism). A book is like a reservoir of freedom, of independent thought, a reservoir of human dignity. A book was like fresh air. They allowed us to survive and not go bad."

In an ironic contrast to its current repressive politics, it was America and its secret service unit, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), that took a leading role in smuggling banned books into the communist regimes behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s. Of course, the US mission wasn’t devoid of its self-interest to extend its geopolitical supremacy, but it was nonetheless one of the most innovative tools of diplomacy ever used in a concerted and structured manner in the history of the modern world.

English’s scholarly deep dive, which is written as excitingly as a novel by John Le Carre, looks especially at Poland, a key member of the erstwhile USSR’s Eastern Bloc, which remained largely cut off from the free flow of information from the West until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Under the rule of its communist leader Wojciech Jaruzelski, Polish dissenters like Michnik faced a slew of dire consequences in the 1980s, including arrest, detention in labour camps, or outright murder. The state machinery kept the press on a tight leash, with no semblance of any freedom of expression available to the public.

Ingenious smuggling plans 

The main instigator behind the CIA’s literary warfare was George Minden, who cultivated a band of Polish nationals in exile to infiltrate the closed portals of Eastern Europe with books by writers such as George Orwell, Adam Mickiewicz, Albert Camus, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and even Agatha Christie. The most famous among Minden’s associates in this intellectual war was Miroslaw Chojecki, an underground publisher dubbed “the minister for smuggling", who not only became the beneficiary of the CIA’s deep pockets but also America’s hospitality. Whether Chojecki and his comrades, who joined this mission in the years to come, were fully aware of the CIA’s hand behind the operations is unclear. But it is unlikely that such a sharp group of men wouldn’t have made some informed guesses.

While Chojecki and other expatriate Polish men devised ingenious means to transport books, paper, and printing technology into Poland via Sweden, sometimes flouting the hawk-eyed scrutiny of the GDR, his colleagues back home embarked on other battles against the state, often at the risk of their lives. Chief among the latter were a group of women, led by valiant reporters and editors like Joanna Szczesna and Helena Luczywo, who published Mazovia Weekly, one of the rare, intrepidly political, anti-government journals of the 1980s.

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The production of this paper took an immense toll on these women, who had to operate under the strain of tight budgets, limited materials, and an atmosphere of unremitting suspicion, where “healthy and safety rules" prevented even members on the same side of the political divide from exchanging confidences. Part of the reason why the secret police never managed to crack down on the editors of such an explosive publication was, as Szczesna told English, a warped, sexist world view. “They thought the Mazovia Weekly was being prepared by men all the time," she said. “And that women were somewhere at the end of the process to do with distribution, some minor (aspect of it)."

As the women got together to expose the ugly face of repression —to ensure that the mass protests and strikes by workers were being broadcast to the wider world—their male comrades, who included leaders like Grzegorz Boguta, Konrad Bielinsk and Bogdan Borusewicz, hatched elaborate subterfuges to cart illegal intellectual ammunitions across the borders. From packing forbidden materials into concealed refrigerator walls to microfilming texts into jacket linings, they tried ingenious means to get news from the ‘free world’ into the seemingly impervious Iron Curtain. As a strategy to weaken the totalitarian regime, it proved no less valuable than mobilising the masses with weapons.

Early on in the book, Teresa Bogucka, who lives in Warsaw, tells English the impact Orwell’s novel 1984 had on her when she read it as a precocious 11-year-old. “I was absolutely traumatised by it," she says about the book, which was smuggled by her art historian father Janusz Bogucki, who had made a furtive trip to the West in 1957, when the borders were briefly opened after Stalin’s death. The very fact that generations later, Poles in the 1980s were moved as much by such smuggled books—and that there are still regimes around the world that consider books to be threats to their existence—is a testimony to the enduring power of reading to fuel revolutionary change.