Book Review | The CIA Book Club by Charlie English #booksky #theCIAbookclub

The CIA Book Club was offered by the publisher as an ARC via Netgalley. Thank you so much. It sounded fascinating – and it was.

The CIA Book Club

by Charlie English

This is the astonishing story of the ten million books that US intelligence smuggled across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

From copies of Orwell to Agatha Christie, the Western effort was to undermine the censorship of the Soviet bloc, offer different visions of thought and culture to the people, and build relationships with real readers in the East.

Historian Charlie English follows the characters of the era, with Bucharest-born George Minden at the narrative’s heart. Tasked with masterminding the effort, Minden understood both sides of the he was opposed to the intellectual straightjacket created by the communist system, but he also resented the Americans’ patronising tone – the people weren’t fooled by what their puppet governments were saying, but they did need culture, diversity of thought, entertainment, art, reassurance and solidarity. This is how the perilous mission to bring books as beacons of hope played out, told in riveting detail. [goodreads]

My Review

It came as a surprise to me to discover the author, Charlie English, was a historian as it says in the blurb. I’d previously read The Snow Tourist, which made me assume he was more of an environment or science writer. Never mind, here he tackles the murky depths of the CIA and its involvement in providing books to the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. It is just as fascinating as snow is, in all its many and varied forms.

The blurb does a good job of describing the book itself. I’m not sure how it would come across to someone younger than me, because I discovered I connected with it on a very personal level: much of the early part of the book looks at events in Poland, from after the war to the Solidarity movement of the 80s. During the 60s I was classmates with a lot of Polish girls, daughters of emigres from Poland, including the daughter of the prime minister in exile, as I discovered a few years later.

Something of those times and Polish culture definitely rubbed off. I experienced considerable deja vu as Mr English covered events like the Prague Spring (Russian tanks rolling into Wenceslas Square, and I have a vivid memory of exactly where I was reading the paper reporting on that), and the start of the uprising in the Gdansk shipyards.

jigsaw puzzle

As you might expect of a book describing a long-tailed CIA operation, the book is extremely complex. The chapters deal with separate parts of the jigsaw puzzle, which helps, and each set of characters becomes encapsulated to their own episode. This detail allows the reader to keep track of who’s who. It’s still a book worth reading in small chunks, though, and I think I treated the Snow Tourist in the same way. The author also ensures that although the role of the CIA as funder and enabler is clearly shown, acknowledgement is given to many organisations, government and otherwise, who were–sometimes unwittingly–involved in what was, essentially, a deep propaganda exercise.

But it was also about freedom of the press, a person’s right to express their own views, and for the written word to be treated with respect. The books were copied, but copyright was not abused. Some organisations need reminding about that, these days.

Well worth reading, especially in these days of turmoil. In fact, it might be worth learning a few lessons from it. Like surviving during Occupation, keeping safe under surveillance, and passive resistance.