The CIA smuggled the Guardian Weekly to eastern bloc countries during the cold war, a new book reveals. Copies of this newspaper were sent as part of a broader secret programme that got literature by authors including George Orwell and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn behind the Iron Curtain.
In the early 70s, Guardian Weekly was sent to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, said Charlie English, former head of international news at the Guardian and author of The CIA Book Club.
Under the “CIA book program”, the US intelligence agency sent approximately 10m books east over the three decades leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The programme aimed to “combat the stultification that Stalinism imposed on the eastern bloc”, where censorship was rife, and show those living there that “the west hadn’t forgotten about them”, said English.
Books were transported by truck, yacht, balloon, and in travellers’ luggage, among other methods. Miniature books and magazines were packed in tampon boxes and sugar packets, while in one instance Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was carried on a plane to Warsaw in a baby’s nappy.
The CIA Book Club details the significant role of the late Jerzy Giedroyc, a relative of the former Great British Bake Off television presenter Mel Giedroyc, in the CIA’s operations. He was “perhaps the most important person in the west helping the CIA ship books into Poland” and considered a “hero of the Polish independence movement”, said the author.
While the book programme is given “almost no credit” for bringing about the end of the cold war, dissidents say literature was vital to the anti-communist movement in Poland, and former CIA officers believe it played a significant role in ending the war. “I am convinced it was books that were victorious in the fight”, Adam Michnik, a leading figure of the Polish Solidarity movement who was jailed by the regime in the 60s and 80s, told English.
“There was a whole generation of Solidarity-era dissidents who’d been raised on these uncensored publications”, added English. Mirosław Chojecki, who was encouraged to seek out dissident literature by one of his school teachers and who went on to become a mastermind of book smuggling operations, said that the clandestine volumes “showed you there was somewhere out there in the world where culture is free”.
As well as sending books, the CIA funded underground publications in the eastern bloc, and Agency assets based in western Europe smuggled printing equipment to them. When Solidarity “was almost destroyed” by the regime in the early 80s, “it was the underground publishing movement and literature that kept it alive”, said English.
Mazovia Weekly, supported by Giedroyc and the CIA, “exerted a profound influence on Polish politics”, leading the way in arguing for negotiations with the regime, which took place in early 1989 and resulted in the first partially free elections in the country since the war. Michnik said that while he was imprisoned, the publication had been “a source of strength, a source of hope, a source of faith that there would be a free Poland”.
Within the CIA, it was Operation Cyclone, which financed the Afghan mujahideen, that “took the plaudits for bringing about the end of the cold war”, wrote English. This may have been because Cyclone cost $700m a year, while the book programme’s latterday budget was $2 to $4m annually. Given the “tremendous outlay, it was politically expedient to give the Afghan action all the credit”.
Operation Cyclone may also have been credited because, according to US historian Benjamin Fischer, it “suited the image US intelligence leaders liked to project of the CIA, of an organisation packed with spooks and paramilitaries who fought in war zones, in sharp contrast to the more intellectual pursuit of sponsoring books and publishing”, wrote English.
• The CIA Book Club: The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War by Charlie English, will be published by William Collins (£25) on 13 March. To support the Guardian order your discounted copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
