The CIA Book Club by Charlie English

I saw this on a "Best Books" list for 2025, and I had just finished reading a fictionalized account of the smuggling of Doctor Zhivago back into Russia earlier in the Cold War and thought this was related to that mission. And in some ways it is, but whereas that happened at the front end of the Cold War, this book is focused on things that happened closer to when the Berlin Wall came down rather than when it went up. This is a well researched and very readable book about the CIA operation codenamed QRHELPFUL. Solzhenitsyn was most often smuggled, but he was far from being the only author whose works the CIA snuck into Soviet block countries. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm were probably the most popular among the dissidents the books were intended for, but a wide range of other authors including Adam Mickiewicz, Albert Camus, Nadezhda Mandelstam and even Agatha Christie also featured on the QRHELPFUL book list. The inspiration behind the scheme was a charming-sounding CIA boss called George Minden, who believed that the freedom to read good literature was as important as any other form of freedom. During most of the 1980s the CIA was run by a rather tiresome, boisterous adventurer called Bill Casey, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981. It was under him that Minden was able to pump books, photocopiers and even printing presses into the Soviet empire. They helped to keep people there in touch with precisely the kind of western culture the high priests of Marxism-Leninism wanted to block out. This was especially true in Poland, which is English’s main focus. Poles never forgot that their country was essentially part of western Europe, and the flow of French, British and American literature in particular was an important part of keeping that awareness going, and that it helped fuel the effort to re-establish independence. This is an interesting read about behind the scenes efforts to educate people.