Author interview: America’s ‘high-brow’ Cold War propaganda operation

A secret American programme put 10m Western books and magazines in the hands of intellectuals and professionals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union for 37 years

Charlie English is a British writer and journalist who has published four critically acclaimed non-fiction books. Picture: Nicola Hippisley

• The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War
• Charlie English 
• Harper Collins, €23.99 

In early April 2006, George C Minden died at his Manhattan home, aged 85.

“For 37 years, [Minden] ran a secret American programme that put 10m Western books and magazines in the hands of intellectuals and professionals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,” explained an obituary The New York Times published two weeks after Minden’s death.

Minden was born in Bucharest in 1921. His family owned some of Europe’s largest oil reserves and on the eve of the Second World War, the Romanian teenager was on course to become the country’s richest individual.

By 1945 though, Romania lay in Stalin’s territory. After communists seized Minden’s family assets, he fled to Britain, then Spain, and eventually settled in New York, where he started working for the Free Europe Committee (FEC).

Established at the start of the Cold War, the FEC was an anti-communist CIA front organisation, made up of East European political dissidents that sought to liberate their countries from communist oppression.

One of the FEC’s early projects was Radio Free Europe. Launched in 1950, it provided news and cultural programming across the Eastern Bloc — such as Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Poland — then politically and militarily aligned to Moscow.

The FEC also fronted numerous other cultural organisations, including Free Europe Press.

In the spring of 1955, it printed 260,000 copies of George Orwell’s political fable, Animal Farm (1945). These were sent by balloon into East-Central Europe, but many were shot down. 

Many writers banned on eastern side of Iron Curtain

The British novelist was banned on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. As were many western writers like Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, and Virginia Woolf. 

That strict censorship also applied to dissident writers from the East, such as the Polish poet, Czesław Miłosz, and the Russian novelist and historian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 

The CIA eventually devised more inventive ways to smuggle their books in from the West. Some were sent by direct mail. Others were hidden in trains, trucks, yachts, in food tins, and in Tampax boxes.

In Washington, it became known as the “CIA book program”. Its main purpose was to build up moving libraries of illicit books into Soviet spheres of influence, where censorship and the Sovietisation of culture and history went hand in glove.

Minden became the brains behind the decades-long covert operation. By the late 1950s, he had become an influential figure in the Free Europe Press Book Center, in New York, which handled the CIA’s mailing project to East-Central Europe.

Two decades later, Minden was president of the International Literary Center, a cosmopolitan network with offices in many countries, which controlled covert CIA literary influencing programmes across the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union.

“I like to think of the CIA Book Program as a network of planes, trains, and automobiles; where small quantities of literature were being sent, via a vast number of routes,” Charlie English explains from his home in Hackney, London.

Earlier this year, the former journalist and editor at The Guardian published The CIA Book Club.

The narrative is based on hundreds of hours of interviews that English conducted in Poland, Sweden, the US, France, Austria, and the UK, from 2020 to 2024. 

Today, most files linked to the CIA Book Program remain classified. But Minden’s notes are not. They detail meetings the Romanian exile held with network contacts across Europe over nearly four decades.

After Minden died, his family found his notes in a closet and later donated them to the Hoover institution library and archives at Stanford University, California. 

“When I read those reports, I started matching the names on them with real people, who I later interviewed,” English explains.

That list of interviewees includes figures like Adam Michnik, who was imprisoned for much of the 1980s for speaking out against Polish censorship. 

The Polish journalist, editor, writer, and intellectual was also a leading advisor to Poland’s Solidarity trade union. 

One of the most influential workers’ movements in postwar Europe, Solidarity evolved into a broader political social movement that used civil resistance to advance workers’ rights.

In December 1981, the Polish government, then led by general Wojciech Jaruzelski, declared martial law across the country, in a kneejerk reaction to the growing influence of the Solidarity movement.

Led by the electrician and trade-union activist, Lech Wałęsa (who won Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and later served as the president of post-communist Poland) Solidarity gained substantial support and became a symbol of resistance against communist oppression. Not just in Poland itself, but also across the Eastern Bloc.

Underground newspaper in Poland

Helena Łuczywo is another important character in English’s book. Between 1982 and 1989, the Polish journalist and opposition leader edited Mazovia Weekly. 

The underground paper was launched under conditions of extreme censorship. Still, until the end of the Cold War, it remained Poland’s most widely read underground paper. 

Most of the funds to keep Mazovia Weekly afloat came from the CIA, at least indirectly. The cash passed through a vast chain of people, before reaching the underground movement.

Most intellectuals and journalists in Poland at this time had no qualms about having their palms greased with dollars from Langley and Washington. 

English claims they were caught “in a Manichaean battle between two superpowers where they had to pick a side”.

From the outset, the intended target of the CIA Book Program was the Soviet Union. But it was easier to get books, radio scanners, and even TV satellites, into Poland, the most populus country in East-Central Europe.

The KGB (the main security agency of the Soviet Union) was much more ruthless and efficient than the Polish secret police, the SB.

Arduous path to intellectual freedom and democracy

English believes that Poland’s arduous path to intellectual freedom, and to democracy, are closely linked. Michnik was at the heart of that struggle.

In May 1989, along with Helena Łuczywo, Michnik co-founded Poland’s first independent daily newspaper, Election Gazette.

That November, the Berlin Wall fell. This pivotal historical moment marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. But a political tsunami was already happening in Poland.

A major turning point came on June 5, 1989, when the opposition movement achieved a huge victory in Poland, in what turned out to be the most significant election there since before the Second World War. CIA funding played more than a small role in that result. 

In August 1989, Tadeusz Mazowiecki was elected prime minister of Poland.

The Polish journalist and Solidarity official became the first non-communist leader to be elected head of state in the Eastern Bloc since the late 1940s.

Poland’s transition from a one-party communist state to a Western European democracy took many years. The country joined Nato in 1999 and became an EU member state in 2004.

Those decades of underground literary activity during the Cold War gave the new Polish leaders a head start.

“Unlike other states emerging from Soviet rule, Poland had a ready-made administrative elite class that understood the changes that would be required to emerge from the ruins of communism,” says English.

But is English going a little too easy on the CIA?

In 2018’s Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War the American political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke, noted that between 1947 and 1989, US regime-change operations around the world included 64 covert cases where the CIA supported armed dissident groups, backed bloody coup d’etats, engaged in election interference, and played a central role in both successful and failed attempts to covertly assassinate foreign leaders.

English claims he was careful not to give the “the CIA a blank cheque”.

“I followed the facts of the story,” he says. “The CIA Book Program was undoubtedly a propaganda operation, but a high-brow propaganda operation.

“I don’t think many of us would criticise giving people the opportunity to read George Orwell or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I can only applaud that.”