The 'Marshall Plan for the mind'

For earnest Indian university students, at least until the eighties, George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago were standard social reading.

- KANIKA DATTA

These and other "intellectual" books, readily available and easily borrowed, were discussed threadbare during adda sessions, the duration of which depended on the number of classes we felt compelled to miss. It is striking to discover, then, that for contemporaries behind the Iron Curtain, these and many other authors—including Agatha Christie!—were forbidden pleasures, accessible only through well-organised smuggling circuits from Western Europe.

This material was trafficked through, among other things, travelling musicians' sheet music, in food tins or Tampax boxes. The Gulag Archipelago once arrived in Warsaw wrapped in a nappy. The availability of proscribed books and periodicals (among them Marie Claire and the New York Review of Books) in Eastern Europe were courtesy an operation known as the "CIA book program", but variously described as an "offensive of honest free thinking" and the West's "Marshall Plan for the Mind".

In The CIA Book Club, former journalist Charlie English tells the story of the 35-year-long operation in Poland, the first falling domino of Soviet Europe.