One August day in 1951, a large fleet of balloons sailed into Czechoslovakia. It should have been a wierd sight, 3,000 rubber baggage floating overhead earlier than bursting open and raining hundreds of thousands of leaflets on the folks beneath:
TO THE PEOPLE OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA
A NEW WIND IS BLOWING
A NEW HOPE IS STIRRING
Buddies of Freedom in different lands have discovered
a brand new method to attain you.
They know that you just additionally need freedom.
The CIA psychological operation dubbed “Winds of Freedom” was completely executed: The company had coordinated an 11-truck convoy from Radio Free Europe in Munich to a launch web site within the Bavarian countryside and appropriately predicted the wind speeds and stress factors that might trigger the balloons to blow up throughout the border. The operation was additionally a complete failure. When the fliers arrived, no person cared. The propaganda was too crude.
The CIA E book Membership: The Secret Mission to Win the Chilly Struggle With Forbidden Literature, Charlie English, Random Home, 384 pp., $35, July 2025
However over the approaching years, by trial and error, the CIA found a much more efficient method than leaflets: books. As British journalist Charlie English particulars in The CIA E book Membership: The Secret Mission to Win the Chilly Struggle With Forbidden Literature, Central and Japanese Europeans have been hungry for literature. Poles circulated banned books by “flying libraries,” intricate human networks of secret change, the place readers risked imprisonment to get their arms on novels comparable to 1984. The Polish dissident chief Adam Michnik, who spent a lot of the Eighties imprisoned, mentioned that banned books have been like “contemporary air.” By a protracted and brutal battle ad infinitum, “They allowed us to outlive and never go mad.”
Within the late Fifties, CIA agent and Romanian émigré George Minden realized {that a} e book smuggling program might have the potential to destabilize the Soviet regime and gasoline the resistance in satellite tv for pc states. However Minden, who disliked the prevalence and didacticism of early company efforts, needed to maneuver away from cultural imperialism to collaboration with dissidents. He was chosen to steer what would come to be often called the CIA e book program. Over the approaching a long time, this “Marshall Plan for the Thoughts” would smuggle almost 10 million objects, together with printing presses and supplies, into the Japanese Bloc, importing banned works by writers together with Czeslaw Milosz, Jospeh Brodsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Albert Camus, Kurt Vonnegut, Hannah Arendt, Philip Roth, and Vaclav Havel.
The books program was a uncommon company triumph throughout CIA director Invoice Casey’s reign. Tim Weiner, whose Legacy of Ashes chronicles the catastrophes of the period, referred to as this system “among the many most essential CIA operations of the Chilly Struggle.” This could maybe not come as a shock. Along with destabilizing democracies and championing imperialists, the CIA has all the time had nice style in artwork, supporting summary expressionism, the Paris Evaluate, and numerous postwar artists at residence and overseas, usually with out the artist’s data. The CIA needed to advertise artwork that championed freedom and individualism to combat communism, win hearts and minds, and counter the Soviet-promoted concept that, as historian Lucie Levine put it, “the USA was a ‘culturally barren’ capitalist wasteland.” Artwork supported by the CIA would go a great distance in displaying the world that the USA was really a culturally wealthy capitalist wasteland.
Journalists have a look at newspapers in Warsaw, Poland, on Might 31, 1989, in the course of the run-up to elections organized after an settlement was reached between the communist authorities and the Solidarity motion. Bernard Bisson/Sygma through Getty Photos
The CIA E book Membership tells the story of the books program, primarily in Poland, the place it had the best impression. However it’s to English’s nice credit score—and the reader’s profit—that the e book just isn’t actually in regards to the CIA. It’s above all an oral historical past of the Polish underground in the course of the rise of Solidarity: the social motion and “carnival” of freedom of expression that started with widespread strikes in 1980, survived greater than a yr of martial regulation and almost a decade of punitive repression, and pulled Poland into democratic self-rule within the ’90s.
English, a former editor on the Guardian, interviewed numerous surviving members of the Polish resistance to inform the story of how CIA-bought books—and equally, if no more importantly, printing presses—fueled a affected person and decided underground of journalists, printers, editors, smugglers, and writers who risked all the things to withstand.
English’s historical past of Solidarity is detailed and expansive, however one of the crucial placing threads is that of Mazovia Weekly, an underground publication launched in 1982 by the Ladies’s Operational Group, a set of veteran dissident journalists headed by Helena Luczywo. By the standard of the paper’s writing, manufacturing, and enhancing—a joke about their minimalist editorial model went, “What’s a pole? A tree edited by Mazovia Weekly”—Mazovia Weekly turned a very powerful Polish underground publication of the Eighties.
Over that decade, Mazovia Weekly reached an estimated circulation of as much as 80,000—which, even aided by CIA funds, was a staggering determine contemplating that reporting, enhancing, printing, and distribution all needed to be performed in secret. These working the paper evaded detection for greater than six years, partly as a result of the key police didn’t suppose girls may lead such a profitable operation.
Protestors in Gdansk, Poland, in the course of the August 1988 strikes.Bettmann Archive/Getty Photos.
In August 1988, when main strikes led by younger employees broke out in components of the nation, Mazovia Weekly wanted to unfold the phrase. The commercial unrest was so severe that U.S. intelligence believed it could possibly be the worst disaster for the Polish authorities because it had instituted martial regulation in 1981. However there was an issue: Nobody had anticipated the strikes, and the whole workers was on trip apart from deputy editor Joanna Szczesna. Szczesna tried to get coded messages to her colleagues on the seaside to return residence, however with tapped telephones and widespread surveillance, she quickly realized that if she needed to place out a particular version of the newspaper, “she must do it solo.”
She labored for 5 days straight, touring to crops and coal mines to report and writing all of the articles herself, barely sleeping. The night time she lastly despatched the problem to press, she woke to a knock on her door. Fortunately, it was not what Solzhenitsyn referred to as the “night-time ring,” that second when brokers arrived on the door to take you away. It was a messenger with the pressing information {that a} belt on the printer had damaged and the writer couldn’t produce the paper till it was changed.
Underneath martial regulation, printing banned supplies carried a jail sentence of 10 years, and neighbors, bus drivers, or colleagues could possibly be informants—even the priest who took the final confessions of condemned prisoners on the Mokotow Jail. To keep away from detection, “well being and security” protocols employed by the underground meant not solely that printers moved each week, however that each ingredient of printing and distribution happened at a special location, and “nobody had the complete image of who was doing what or the place.”
In Mazovia Weekly’s early days, Szczesna would go to pals and acquaintances in hopes of discovering “hosts”—flats the place newspaper workers might briefly arrange printing operations. Like the sooner “flying libraries,” the paper would all the time be on the transfer. Printers would solely use every residence for 3 days every week each two months, however internet hosting was nonetheless no small request, since for these days, “typewriters can be clacking away twenty-four seven. … They’d preserve the lights on day and night time, and everybody chain-smoked as if their lives relied on it.”
College students at Warsaw College stage a sit-in in the course of the run-up to the June 1989 elections. Bernard Bisson/Sygma through Getty Photos
However when the printing belt broke, Szczesna didn’t have time for niceties. She visited underground editors instantly, at nice private threat, however no person had the belt she wanted. Lastly, she acquired the title of a printer who owned the identical press. She discovered him attending mass and urgently informed him what she wanted. Like a nasty Soviet joke, he answered: “I’m the individual printing Mazovia Weekly for you. It’s my machine’s belt that has damaged.”
Simply as Szczesna was hitting her breaking level—pouring glasses of water on herself to remain awake—the paper’s head of manufacturing arrived again from trip and dashed into motion. Hundreds of copies have been revealed and smuggled throughout the nation. Shortly afterward, police burst into an editorial assembly—the primary time in Mazovia Weekly’s six-and-a-half-year historical past that the journalists had been found. However by then, it was too late for the regime: The strikes had “marked a turning level within the ‘uphill warfare,’” and the officers couldn’t arrest anybody in concern of disrupting secret negotiations between the federal government and the opposition.
The next yr, the Spherical Desk Talks between the federal government and Solidarity yielded an settlement for elections and leisure of censorship. Solidarity was allowed a newspaper—which it wanted to mobilize voters for the primary election simply two months away—and the editors of Mazovia Weekly ended the paper’s run to workforce up with newly freed resistance chief Adam Michnik on the Election Gazette. Supported by editors on the New York Evaluate of Books, in two months, the Election Gazette reached a each day circulation of 450,000 and helped carry Solidarity to victory within the 1989 elections—the primary Japanese Bloc election that the communists misplaced.
Individuals learn within the Worldwide E book Membership in Warsaw in 1960.Claude Jacoby/ullstein bild through Getty Photos
In an age of democratic backsliding in the USA and rising indifference to the survival of democracy overseas, it’s tempting to name The CIA E book Membership a well timed learn. Luczywo remembered that in the course of the resistance, in case your title was learn on Radio Free Europe, “it was a lot, a lot, far more tough to harm you, to beat you, to vanish you.” It’s onerous to learn that line with out pondering of the Trump administration’s bulldozing of eight a long time of establishments of sentimental diplomacy, together with Radio Free Europe, which supported democracy and saved lives in Poland and plenty of different locations throughout the globe.
However the e book is greater than only a well timed learn—it’s a thrilling and shifting historical past exterior of any modern American context. I’ve the unhealthy behavior of imagining myself in any story I learn, however even I struggled to place myself into the footwear of Miroslaw Chojecki, who went on starvation strike in jail and endured a rubber tube jammed down his throat for each day drive feeding, or Luczywo, who sacrificed seeing her younger daughter for years to stay underground and put out Mazovia Weekly. I might determine extra with the civilians who provided up their residence to show it right into a printing press. I questioned: Would I be courageous sufficient to do even that if my worst doomscrolling fears got here true? To threat imprisonment to assist the heroes? However then I ended myself. It’s one factor to be taught from the previous; it’s one other to confuse imagined future persecution with the true persecution others have endured.
In 1983, after years of harassment and assault, the poet and Solidarity activist Barbara Sadowska realized that her 18-year-old son had been overwhelmed to demise by the key police. She wrote:
My arms are stuffed with holes.
Falling out of them
Are the primary tiny cherries
Of the yr.
I don’t suppose I can carry them
To you,
My little son
