The Parallel Lives

On Sunday, July 13, there appeared in the “New York Times Book Review” a quick look at Charlie English’s new non-fiction book, entitled, “The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature.” I have not read the book yet, but I will soon.

     Joseph Finder, author of the review, declares that “English’s book is a bracing reminder that, not so long ago, forbidden literature really could help tip the balance of history.”

     A startling idea: that literature can redirect history, topple dictatorships, and subdue tyrants.

     It is difficult for young Americans today to understand, that in the latter half of the twentieth century, millions of people who lived in the Soviet Union bloc, north and south across most of Eastern Europe, could not read what they wanted to read. Liberties to read and think were cut.

     Communist party officials, with their strong ties to Marxist-Leninist principles, prohibited Western books, from people either owning, selling, buying, copying, printing, publishing, or reading them. Hence the phrase, “forbidden literature.” The risk was imprisonment.

     Finder writes, “Even a volume about carrots might be banned if it hinted at the joys of gardening outside the collective [farm].” The people were starved into stupidity, lacking ideas. 

     Adam Michnik, a leading book smuggler in Poland, wrote, “A book was like fresh air. They allowed us to survive and not go mad. A book is like a reservoir of freedom, of independent thought, a reservoir of human dignity.”

     For me, a new word, “samizat.” It means, “The clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state, especially in former Communist countries of Eastern Europe.”

     George Minden, an official at the CIA, based in Manhattan, worked to promote smuggling.  He and his colleagues formed QRHELPFUL, code name for CIA’s book smuggling operation. Together they shipped ten million books into the Soviet Union bloc over several decades.

     George Minden said, “Truth is contagious.” 

     Joseph Finder said of the smuggling, “This was spy craft as soul craft.”

     What books? the Bible, George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” spy novels by John LeCarre, mystery novels by Agatha Christie, stacks of “Cosmopolitan” magazines, plus “Three Hundred Years of American Painting.”

     Although those titles do not sound subversive, Communist Party officials thought otherwise.

     Minden also smuggled in typewriters, duplicators, printing presses, and copy machines.

      A single copy of “1984” may have been retyped or rewritten by hand multiple times, or it was printed on hidden printing presses. With copy machines, smugglers copied it countless times.

     Finder calls those copies, “flying libraries.” “They devoured them in a night, and then passed them on to their friends, so the circle of readers was far larger than the few thousand copies run off on hidden duplicators.” 

     Of the Soviet Bloc countries, Minden enjoyed the most success in Poland.

     Some CIA officials ridiculed Minden’s covert book-smuggling scheme. “Real men don’t sell books.” They refused to believe “the idea that books could topple regimes.” 

     Yet, please remember that Lenin said, “Ideas are much more fatal things than guns.”  

     The cost for Minden’s book smuggling was a fraction of the hundreds of millions that the American taxpayers, via the CIA, paid to arm the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

     In 1980, Lech Walesa and his trade union, Solidarity, went on strike at the Gdansk shipyard and won the people’s support across Poland. In 1989, voters elected him President of Poland.

     Per Charlie English, “it was forbidden literature that helped to win the cold war.” Per Joseph Finder, “a paperback in the right hands helped crack the cement of totalitarian thinking.”