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The CIA book club : the best-kept secret of the Cold War
English, Charlie2025
Book
Total copies: 1
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.
Main title:
The CIA book club : the best-kept secret of the Cold War / Charlie English.
Author:
English, Charlie, author
Imprint:
London : William Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2025.©2025.
Collation:
xix, 361 pages : illustrations, maps, portraits ; 24 cm.
Notes:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:
9780008495138 (paperback)
Dewey class:
909.828
Language:
English
Subject:
Minden, George, 1921-2006International Literacy Center (New York, N.Y.) -- HistoryUnited States. Central Intelligence AgencyCold WarUnderground literature -- PolandUnderground literature -- Soviet UnionCommunist countries -- History -- 20th centuryPoland -- History -- 1980-1989Soviet Union -- History -- 1953-1985Soviet Union -- History -- 1985-1991
BRN:
804836