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

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.

In his "entertaining and vivid new work", Charlie English examines this "highbrow delivery service" and argues that, in several countries, including Romania and Hungary, it helped hasten the demise of communism.

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English focuses particular attention on the CIA's smuggling operation in Poland, which he turns into a "vivid and moving story", said Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times. "He is terrific at evoking the atmosphere of Poland in the 1970s and 1980s – not just the regime's narrowed horizons and suffocating repression, but the excitement of the Solidarity trade union movement and the idealism of the young dissidents." He picks out several "memorable" characters, including Solidarity's "minister for smuggling", Mirosław Chojecki, a blue-eyed rebel whose friends thought him like a "Polish Christ". So gripping is this material that "your heart slightly sinks" whenever English cuts to the US side of the story, "which is essentially a series of committee meetings".

The CIA's smuggling operation sought to bypass a Polish censorship system "which was both ubiquitous and ridiculous", said Piers Brendon in Literary Review. "Every typewriter had to be registered, access to photocopiers was restricted", and even a book about growing carrots was banned "because it implied that individuals as well as collectives could cultivate vegetables".

In such a climate, smuggled books were a lifeline, said John Simpson in The Guardian. "A book was like fresh air," a Polish activist recalls. "They allowed us to survive and not go mad." Finely written and well researched, this book is a reminder of the role literature played in the collapse of the "Soviet empire in Europe".