Book Extract| The CIA Book Club by Charlie English

The balloons infuriated the communists, as they were meant to do. Eastern governments scrambled fighter planes to shoot them down, and sent police to arrest anyone caught with the subversive literature. But the operations were not a success. The delivery was too scattershot, the balloons were a threat to air traffic and the propaganda was too crude, so after five years they were scrapped. By this time, Free Europe Press had devised a new delivery system: direct mail. They would send anti-communist material to names and addresses culled from East European phone books. Although Soviet Bloc countries censored the post, they couldn’t catch everything, and some of the material got through. The main problem was that the propaganda was received with no more enthusiasm than the leaflets that fell from the sky. But when the mail programme experimented with books, the response was very different. People wanted to keep the books. Sometimes they sent a letter of thanks or a request for more. There was an opportunity here, and no one saw it more clearly than an ambitious young employee in the FEC’s New York office, George Minden.
Minden was an ideal FEC recruit: an East European exile with reason to detest the Soviets. Born in 1920 in Bucharest, to a British father and aristocratic Romanian mother, he had been highly educated, graduating top of his year at law school. In 1938, when he turned eighteen, he inherited vast tracts of land that straddled some of Europe’s largest oil reserves, making him one of the richest men in the country overnight. The oilfields were bitterly fought over in the war – twice he found himself on the receiving end of American bombs – and in 1945 Romania lay in Stalin’s territory. The communists seized Minden’s wealth, and he was forced to flee with his wife Margarete and their two young children, carrying nothing but a few precious items hidden in the shoulder pads of his suit. They arrived in Britain as refugees, and prepared to start life over again, but George and Margarete’s marriage would not survive the upheaval, and he soon left for Spain, where he hustled for a living, selling cars and running a language school. In Madrid he met Marilyn Miller from Pittsburgh, who became his second wife, and in 1955 they moved to New York, where George joined the Free Europe Committee. A year later, he was running the FEC’s Romania desk. Two years after that, he was promoted to head the Free Europe Press Book Center, which handled the mailing project.

The mail programme had been created to ‘reduce the efficiency of the communist administration by weakening the loyalty of the Party and state cadres’, according to its founding text, and to ‘demonstrate the superior achievements’ of the West. Minden disliked this propagandistic tone. As he saw it, the enemy wasn’t Eastern inferiority but the intellectual straitjacket imposed by Moscow. The Americans should offer something to fill the vacuum of ideas in the bloc, a sort of literary humanitarian aid, the bookish equivalent of the food packages sent east by CARE. He proposed ‘an offensive of free, honest thinking and accurate information’ to counteract the Soviet stultification, since ‘truth is contagious’. They should target the influencers, academics and literary figures who felt starved of the oxygen of debate. The overarching goal was to reassure the people of the East, to ‘give proof of continual Western interest’. Through their gifts of literature, they would try to express ‘the feeling of communion in this world, integration into the spiritual life of our age, and the knowledge that they have not been abandoned’.

In 1959, Minden was vetted and security-cleared, category one,and briefed on the true identity of his bosses, the CIA, known in New York as the ‘Executive Committee’ and ‘our friends down south’. Under his supervision, more and more books were sent in the mail. They included overtly political works such as 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Albert Camus’ essay The Rebel, as well as material with no obvious anti-communist message. The Whitney Museum’s Three Hundred Years of American Painting was an early hit, as were lifestyle magazines such as the French-language Marie Claire and the German Madame. These publications, Minden understood, had a wholly different meaning in the totalitarian East, where every aspect of life was controlled by the state, from art to music to fashion. As he would write in 1969: ‘All book distribution is politically significant because all books – political and literary – accomplish the political task of making the ideological isolation of Eastern Europe difficult and thus frustrate one of the communists’ main political objectives. For the communists, too, all Western books, whether political or non-political, are politically significant and feared as such.’

As the programme developed, they began to send catalogues, inviting recipients to take their pick, and hired agents in London and Paris to negotiate special rates with publishers, who often fulfilled the orders themselves, helping to mask the literature’s real source and speed it through the mail censors. By 1962, at least 500 organizations 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 and Unwin, Chatto and Windus, Faber and Faber, Macmillan, Gollancz, Bertelsmann and Hachette. No country responded with greater enthusiasm to these gifts than Poland, the largest of the ‘captive nations’ and the most liberal. Poles sent more replies and requests to Minden’s unit than any other nationality.

In the late 1950s, the brief political thaw that followed Stalin’s death meant many Poles could visit the West for the first time. Why not try giving them books to take home? The first person-to-person giveaways were run from 1958 by the young Free Europe Press employee Andy Stypułkowski, who began handing out literature to Polish travellers who visited his suburban house in Chiswick, west London. Carrying banned books through the Iron Curtain required courage and chutzpah, but frontier confiscations proved to be rare. The CIA gave Stypułkowski’s operation the cover name Polonia Book Fund Ltd, and as word of the giveaways spread in Poland, more and more people showed up at the Stypułkowskis’ home. Andy began to expand his distribution to bookstores, churches, libraries and community centres all over Western Europe. Soon, CIA-bought books were being passed out anywhere Poles could be found: in Scottish ports where Polish fishing boats tied up; at French basketball tournaments where Polish teams competed; at concert performances of touring Polish choirs in London. It helped that a black market in uncensored books developed in the East, feeding demand. By 1963, the Polonia Book Fund had given away 101,000 copies of books to 37,000 Polish visitors, at an annual cost to the CIA of £60,000.

That year, Polonia and its person-to-person programme were wrapped into Minden’s unit targeting Eastern Europe, now known as the FEC’s Press and Special Projects Division. Its tactical aim, Minden wrote at the time, was ‘to place as high a number as possible of books containing vital information in all fields of knowledge in the hands of those best suited by their position to a) receive books coming from abroad and b) act as centers of knowledge-spreading with a minimum risk to themselves’. The ultimate goal, however, was broader, to reach ‘the news-eager masses’ of the East who were starved of the printed word. To this end, he hoped to be able to build up circulating libraries of books behind the Iron Curtain, which would help keep the isolated people of the Soviet Bloc ‘in touch with the Free World’s thinking’. Only then, he believed, could they ‘have the facts that their Russian and national oppressors try to hide from them’.

In the late 1960s, against the backdrop of the Vietnam war, CIA activities were increasingly scrutinized by the media and public officials. In 1971, after its covert funding was revealed, most of the FEC’s activities were shut down and the radio networks were brought under Congressional oversight. But the books programme would remain secret. At first it was put under a pre-existing CIA cover, the International Advisory Committee. Then, in 1975, it merged with a parallel books programme set up to target the USSR, Bedford Publications Ltd, and took a new identity: the International Literary Centre (ILC).

From this moment on, Minden controlled covert CIA literary influencing programmes across the Eastern Bloc, from Prague to Vladivostok.

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Charlie English, The CIA Book Club: The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War,‎ William Collins/ HarperCollins India, 2025. Pb. Pp.384

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.

The book extract that has been published here is after the description of an experiment conducted by the CIA with two different types of balloons, upon which they had hitched gauges and hoses, and tested hydrogen nozzles. Thes ‘pillows’ were launched first, giant polyethylene bags – each printed with the word Svoboda, meaning ‘freedom’ in Czech – which were deliberately permeable so they would gradually lose buoyancy and sink slowly back to earth. Each pillow was loaded with a cargo of leaflets, weighed to check that it would fly, and released into the warm German night. Next came the ‘goomies’, rubber balloons designed to climb high into the atmosphere before exploding in the thin air around 30,000 feet. The CIA employees had chosen a site, 10 miles from the Iron Curtain, since it was due west of Prague. If the weather held, then the wind at 18,000 feet would be blowing eastwards at a steady 50mph. It did. By dawn the sky to the east was a scene from a science-fiction film, filled with 3,000 bobbling gas bags heading across the frontier into Czechoslovakia. Leaflets rained down on the Eastern Bloc, four million of them in all, each of which carried a message:

TO THE PEOPLE OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA A NEW WIND IS BLOWING
A NEW HOPE IS STIRRING

Friends of Freedom in other lands have found a new way to reach you.
They know that you also want freedom.

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