War of words

US efforts to spread democratic ideals through smuggled books make a gripping yarn

- RICHARD J ALDRICH

In 1980, Ronald Reagan, campaigning for the American presidency, promised that, if elected, he would “unleash” the CIA, making it central to his aggressive new anti-Soviet foreign policy. But few imagined that this might include the smuggling of books by Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt - even Agatha Christie.

The CIA Book Club reveals the remarkable story of the ambitious “books program”, developed during the turbulent last 10 years of the Cold War, which involved moving large numbers of forbidden texts into Poland - millions of items were dispatched, in fact. The CIA had been engaged in these sorts of projects all the way across eastern Europe for decades, but now this accelerated activity converged with the ‘Third Wave’ of democracy. Propelled by burgeoning information flows, it spread across the wider world.