The CIA’s most unlikely Cold War weapon? A secret smuggling operation that terrified Soviet censors

The books chosen (from authors including George Orwell, Agatha Christie, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Albert Camus) were specifically picked for their power to challenge authoritarianism, undermine censorship and question the doctrines of totalitarian ideology.

Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, journalist and author Charlie English lifted the lid on the scale and ambition of this extraordinary campaign, which spanned four decades and reached deep behind the Iron Curtain.

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“The ‘CIA Book Program’ was a long-running US intelligence operation that ran from the mid 1950s until about 1991,” English explains. “It succeeded in secretly infiltrating around ten million books into the Eastern Bloc over that period in a bid to undermine the draconian censorship regimes that existed in every East European country.”

A war of words

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Soviet Union had expanded its influence across Central and Eastern Europe, establishing satellite states in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and beyond. With that expansion came rigid political control alongside strict ideological enforcement.

Enabling this control were state censorship offices which policed what could be published, read or discussed. Large swathes of Western literature were suppressed, critical thinkers were silenced and entire philosophical traditions with rich histories (from liberalism to existentialism) were denounced as dangerous.

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“Every East European country that was part of the Soviet Bloc had a state censor,” says English. “The aim of it was to stop people thinking thoughts that were beyond the kind of framework of the ideology of the regime at the time.”

For the CIA, this environment created opportunity. Rather than risking direct military confrontation, it decided it could chip away at communist legitimacy by exposing people to forbidden ideas. In this regard, English notes, “books were probably unrivalled at that time. The printed word was the main form of delivery of ideas”.

The ultimate reading list

At the top of the CIA’s list for covert distribution were George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, arguably the foremost stories exploring the perils of authoritarian control and propaganda. Alongside Orwell were works by Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, Milan Kundera and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose memoir-novel The Gulag Archipelago was a blistering critique of Soviet labour camps.

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But the campaign wasn’t limited to heavy-hitting dissident texts.

Western detective fiction, with its focus on individual agency and the power of creative and rational thinking, risked feeling revolutionary within the Soviet context. “Even Agatha Christie … was read very differently in the East,” English explains. So, unintentionally, “[Christie’s works became] a very strong argument against the communist.”

The CIA’s covert cultural contraband

Choosing the books was one thing, but the actual act of smuggling them into authoritarian states required more than good literary taste.

The CIA worked through front organisations, often operating under the guise of charitable or cultural foundations. No shipments bore the CIA’s name, and funding was laundered through seemingly benign intermediaries. The Agency deliberately obscured its involvement to maintain deniability.

But even with these fronts, a lot of creative licence was often required to get books past Soviet lines. “One book was taken in inside a baby's nappy,” says English.

They also produced miniature books that could fit inside a can of baked beans.

“Someone would presumably get a tin of baked beans and open it up and find that it was a copy of George Orwell, which must have been a bit of a shock,” says English.

Others were hidden in false-bottomed suitcases, secret vehicle compartments or the hollowed-out interiors of seemingly innocuous objects. The CIA even developed portable printing presses, allowing dissidents to reproduce smuggled texts on the ground.

Ultimately, it was a global operation, reliant on willing students, diplomats, missionaries and tourists; anyone who could cross borders and carry hidden cargo. It was also expensive, with English suggesting that the operation probably cost in the region of $4 million a year.

Literature as a tool for resistance

Once a book had successfully infiltrated the Soviet Union, the operation transitioned into a new phase. Dissidents copied, translated and distributed the material through underground networks, a system Soviet authorities labelled as samizdat. These illegal, often hand-copied editions passed person-to-person in secret. The risks were enormous.

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In Poland, where the Solidarity trade union emerged as a mass movement in the 1980s, literature played a decisive role. Books helped activists formulate ideas, critique the system, and envision democratic alternatives.

Meanwhile, underground publishers, such as Poland’s prolific Mirosław Chojecki (who was imprisoned more than 40 times) became incredible symbols of defiance.

Cumulatively, the impact was enormous.

“It was literature that won the Cold War in Poland,” says English. “Uncensored literature became so pervasive that the regime really lost control of the argument and lost control of the population.”

Did the CIA’s Book Program work?

By the 1980s, conversations were decidedly shifting.

Communist regimes that had once controlled every channel of discourse found themselves outmatched by ideas they no longer had the political power to suppress.

And while the Cold War was largely a conflict defined by arms races, space exploration, proxy wars and nuclear standoffs, a paperback novel hidden in a tin can could still pose a very real threat to a regime that required ideological control.

Charlie English was speaking to Lauren Good on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

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