The CIA Book Club: 'entertaining and vivid' book explores a huge Cold War secret

Charlie English's 'gripping' narrative explores a covert smuggling operation across the Iron Curtain

Book cover of The CIA Book Club by Charlie English
The CIA Book Club by Charlie English focuses particular attention on the agency's smuggling operation in Poland
(Image credit: HarperCollins UK)

In March 1984, customs officials at the port of Swinoujscie, in northwestern Poland, spotted something suspicious about a truck that had "arrived on an overnight ferry from Copenhagen", said Luke Harding in The Observer.

While inspecting its contents, they noticed that its interior was disproportionately small. Breaking through a walled-off panel, the officials found a cache of 800 books and pamphlets, along with "illicit printing presses" and "forbidden walkie-talkies". The source of this "reactionary propaganda" was none other than the CIA, which over a 35-year period sought to sow dissent in eastern Europe by flooding it with books, magazines and videotapes banned behind the Iron Curtain. "The methods used were ingenious": copies of Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" were floated over the border in balloons; Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" was stuffed into a baby's nappy on a flight to Warsaw.

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