{ "item_title" : "The CIA Book Club", "item_author" : [" Charlie English "], "item_description" : "A story as fascinating as it is undersung . . . a riveting account (The New York Times Book Review, Best Books of 2025 So Far) of the CIA's secret program to smuggle millions of books through the Iron Curtain during the Cold War Brimming with poetic detail, spring-loaded with tradecraft, English's account feels like it's torn from the pages of Ian Fleming. . . . An indelible reminder that words matter, and that perhaps the most patriotic thing one can do is read.--The Washington Post A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, THE ECONOMIST, KIRKUS REVIEWS For nearly five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, forming the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the war was fought psychologically. It was a battle for hearts, minds, and intellects. Few understood this more clearly than George Minden, head of a covert intelligence operation known as the CIA book program, which aimed to undermine Soviet censorship and inspire revolt by offering different visions of thought and culture. From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden's book club secretly sent ten million banned titles into the East. Volumes were smuggled aboard trucks and yachts, dropped from balloons, hidden aboard trains, and stowed in travelers' luggage. Nowhere were the books welcomed more warmly than in Poland, where they would circulate covertly among circles of like-minded readers, quietly making the case against Soviet communism. Such was the demand for Minden's texts that dissidents began to reproduce them in the underground. By the late 1980s, illicit literature was so pervasive in Poland that censorship broke down: the Iron Curtain soon followed. Charlie English narrates this tale of Cold War spycraft, smuggling, and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who fought for intellectual freedom--people like Miroslaw Chojecki, who suffered beatings, imprisonment, and exile in pursuit of his clandestine mission. The CIA Book Club is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. Books, it shows, can set you free.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers2.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/59/344/790/0593447905_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "35.00", "online_price" : "35.00", "our_price" : "35.00", "club_price" : "35.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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The most effective weapon the CIA deployed during the Cold War was not exploding cigars, LSD-powered mind-control experiments or even the Afghani mujahideen army. Instead, as Charlie English details in The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War With Forbidden Literature, the most economical and powerful arrow in the CIA’s quiver was . . . books. Yes, books. And magazines. The CIA disseminated books and magazines on all subjects (art, literature, philosophy, sports) throughout the Eastern bloc, but nowhere did this operation have a greater impact than in Poland. English points out that Poland—with its long history of underground resistance to czarist, Nazi and Soviet oppression; an extensive expat community; an activist intelligentsia and a popular labor union called Solidarity—was particularly fertile ground for a literary campaign against totalitarianism. CIA bureaucrats funded Polish expatriates as they published and smuggled books into their homeland. Eventually, this extended to smuggling ink, paper, typewriter parts and even printing presses into Poland. Like his 2021 book, The Gallery of Miracles and Madness, English focuses on the ordinary and flawed people whose heroism made the seemingly impossible happen. There are many worth celebrating in this story: the quiet genius at the CIA who expanded the program’s remit, a Polish expat and CIA asset who supported the resistance from a suburban villa outside Paris, a group of young women responsible for the publication of the Solidarity weekly newspaper. But Polish publisher Miroslaw Chojecki, the dogged “minister of smuggling” whose carefully spun web of smugglers, suppliers, publishers and creatives provided crucial equipment and information to the resistance, is undoubtedly the vital cog in the movement’s machinery. There are villains, too, including double agents and sinister police, as well as disastrous cock-ups and destructive office politics. English brings these strands together in a well-paced, cohesive narrative that is as entertaining as it is informative and inspiring.