By John Fraser

This book proves the wisdom of the timeless adages that the pen is mightier than the sword and that the truth will set you free.

For three decades, the CIA ran a highly secretive operation to smuggle literature, magazines and art books across the Iron Curtain into the countries of the Warsaw Pact.

This was to stimulate thought and dialogue, and to provide ideas and inspiration to people who were trapped in countries where they were being force-fed communist ideology and were starved of free speech and debate.

“What some suspected, but very few knew for sure, was that the uncensored literature flooding the country wasn’t reaching Poles by chance,” Charlie English writes in The CIA Book Club.

“It was sent as part of a decades-long US intelligence operation known in Washington as the ‘CIA book program’, and part of the programme’s strategy was to build up circulating libraries of illicit books on the far side of the Iron Curtain.

“As well as glossy lifestyle magazines such as Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan, the CIA sent copies of the New York Review of Books and Manchester Guardian Weekly, works by the Nobel winners Boris Pasternak, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky; philosophical texts by Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus and Bertrand Russell; literary fiction from Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut; writing advice from Virginia Woolf; the plays of Václav Havel and Bertolt Brecht; and the spy thrillers of John le Carré, to name a few.”

He suggests that the number of items smuggled into the Eastern Bloc over the 30 years was almost 10-million.

“Books arrived by every possible means: smuggled in trucks, aboard yachts, sent by balloon, in the post or in travellers’ luggage. Mini-editions were hidden in the sheet music of touring musicians, packed into food tins or Tampax boxes. In one instance, a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was carried on a flight to Warsaw hidden in a baby’s nappy,” English informs us.

“From the late 1970s, banned books and pamphlets were also reproduced in huge quantities by underground printers in Poland, on presses smuggled in from the West, amplifying the literature’s effect.

“Increasingly, the underground would publish home-grown titles, too, and by the mid-1980s, the so-called ‘second circulation’ of illicit literature in Poland grew so large that the system of communist censorship began to break down.”

As the operation was most intense in Poland, The CIA Book Club gives a detailed insight into the lives of several Poles who actively countered the propaganda onslaught of their oppressors, with insightful accounts of those who assisted in the distribution of smuggled books as well as in carrying out illegal printing activities.

“By 1962, at least 500 organisations were sending books on the CIA’s behalf, including some of the most prestigious names in publishing: Doubleday, Barnes & Noble, the Oxford English Dictionary, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Allen & Unwin, Chatto & Windus, Faber & Faber, Macmillan, Gollancz, Bertelsmann and Hachette,” he records.

“No country responded with greater enthusiasm to these gifts than Poland, the largest of the ‘captive nations’ and the most liberal.”

Collection points in cities such as Paris were also arranged for the provision of books to visiting Poles, to be taken back to their native country, also funded by the CIA.

The period covered by The CIA Book Club was a turning point in Polish history, as it endured the depths of repression, followed by the emergence of Solidarity, then a new wave of oppression, before, finally, freedom.

English gives a detailed account of the organisation of the literature distribution operation from both sides of the Iron Curtain.

It was largely successful, but he also gives an account of one smuggling run that went badly wrong because the organisers had been infiltrated by the Polish secret police. The planners threw caution to the wind and weapons were included in a huge shipment, whose capture handed a propaganda victory to the Polish state.

However, the overall hit rate for the smugglers was high.

English counters the very valid concern that the programme to provide banned literature to people in the Eastern Bloc was an exercise in cultural imperialism — noting that in the later years of the programme, the most popular works that were distributed were often by Soviet or East European writers, chosen and edited by people who lived in the bloc, or by émigrés.

Decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, almost all files about this clandestine operation remain classified, as do those documenting the CIA’s wider operation in support of the Polish opposition.

It is, of course, impossible to accurately quantify the impact of the CIA Book Club operation, but it surely must have helped to keep the flames of free thought alive in territories where the political classes did their very best to subjugate and subdue the masses.

“Some of the censor’s rulings made little sense even within the bizarre logic of the Party: an anthology of Grimms’ fairy tales could be published by one house but not by another, a book about growing carrots was destroyed for implying that vegetables could sprout in individuals’ gardens as well as in those run by collectives,” English notes.

He provides valuable insight into the sort of repressive society to which the CIA Book Club operation chose to send its eye-opening books and magazines.

Its focus on Poland means that we learn far less about activities in the other countries that were targeted, but this can be justified as Poland was the country where the most action seems to have taken place.

Above all, the book provides a valuable reminder of the power and importance of free thought and the flow of ideas, and that books matter.

This review was first published in Business Day.