The CIA Book Club with Charlie English

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 stretched for 4.300 miles from the Arctic to the Black sea. No physical contact would be fought but a psychological battle would be fought for hearts, minds and intellects.

George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the ‘CIA books programme’ which aimed to win the Cold War with literature, ran a global distribution into the Eastern Bloc. Millions of banned titles were secretly sent, written by a vast eclectic list of authors, including George Orwell, Agatha Christie and Aleksandr

Solzhenitsyn. Volumes were smuggled  on trucks  and aboard yachts and  dropped from balloons.

Once inside the 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 spy craft, smuggling and secret printing for the first time. it is about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation.

Charlie English is the former head of International News at The Guardian, has written several books and is a member of The Royal Geographical Society.