'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.
