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The CIA Book Club

The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War

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The CIA Book Club

By: Charlie English
Narrated by: James Parsons
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About this listen

'Entertaining and vivid… This is a gripping account of an intriguing and little-known Cold War moment' OBSERVER

'Reads like a thriller' THE SUN

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.

©2025 Charlie English (P)2025 HarperCollins Publishers
20th Century Americas Freedom & Security Literary History & Criticism Modern Politics & Government Russia Soviet Union Cold War Espionage War Stalin
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This book was a great tour through history of the Soviet Union and how it was affected by literature and the power of collective covert action.

Excellent Whistle-stop History

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I really enjoyed the story and was gripped by some really well presented and researched detail of Polish underground movement. However, some of the narrator pronunciations were so bad I couldn’t recognise names and titles he was mentioning

Loved the book but I wish the narrator practiced his pronunciation more

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Depressing in places, inspiring in others, I'd somehow expected that it would cover more than just one operation, but the one operation certainly warranted the entire book.

This particular operation of the CIA in Poland may not make up for its more disastrous operations, but it certainly offers a silver lining to their existence and use of government money. It's certainly interesting to read just how much effort went into the underground operations that tried to free the countries behind the Iron Curtain of the communist yoke. It's a topic close to my heart, and the stories were both inspiring and heartbreaking. People gave up a lot, lost a lot, and suffered terribly for other people's ability to have their voice heard in the future, and look at what we use it for today.

Oh, well. Excellent read. It makes me very interested to read Gulag Archipelago, which was frequently mentioned throughout the book as a popular read for the downtrodden Poles. Orwell's 1984 also came up with some frequency, but I've already read that one.

Solid read

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