The Directorate of Operations in the Central Intelligence Agency wasn’t initially a big fan of what might be its two most consequential Cold War covert actions: the delivery of Stinger missiles to the Afghan mujahideen and QRHELPFUL, which sent books, magazines, cash, printing supplies, and other aid into Poland after the communist regime tried to smash the independent trade union, Solidarity, in December 1981.
Toward the Stingers, senior case officers in the Near East Division thought the shoulder-fired missiles might be too provocative, leading possibly to Soviet attacks on Pakistan. Senior Pentagon officials, who echoed the Pakistani strongman Zia ul-Haq, saw an Afghan collapse as an invitation for further aggression. They and Zia eventually got Langley to deliver the Stingers. Soviet helicopter gunships pulled back. The DO’s senior cadre quickly claimed credit for the foresight and the weapon.
Less heralded inside the CIA was the effort to liberate minds from Soviet communism. By the late 1970s, in the operations directorate, espionage had triumphed over covert action as the métier of choice. The DO’s mandarins, in whom “realism” ran deep, weren’t enamored of hard-to-assess, hearts-and-minds covert action projects. Covert action was always more prone to public cock-ups and embarrassing exposés. The literary side of QRHELPFUL was only a part of the CIA’s efforts to help the Poles—the least sexy part. The book project was, however, the oldest, continuous commitment by the agency, stretching back to 1949, to keep free thought alive under communism. QRHELPFUL wouldn’t have been born without these earlier efforts.
Folks inside the DO knew in the 1980s that we were helping the Poles and the Solidarity labor movement, but the effort neither had the dimensions nor the publicity—like Stingers blowing Soviet helicopters out of the sky—that made the project a subject of much in-house gossip. For most of the 1980s, until it became clear the Soviet empire was cracking, Langley’s efforts to keep free thought and literature flowing into Eastern Europe didn’t offer immediate satisfaction. Nonlethal covert action was seen as a long-term investment, which really needed political types to oblige a resistant bureaucracy to keep up the good fight.
The British journalist Charlie English does a sublime job in allowing us to revisit this CIA-backed literary freedom movement in The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature. It’s a tour de force, especially since the author has reconstructed this history without access to classified documents or, it appears, the case officers and analysts overseeing the activities. He did talk to a lot of Europeans who were involved with what became a continent-spanning network of determined, brave men and women who wanted to free themselves and their countrymen from the most mind-numbing, soul-crushing, physically enslaving, unrelentingly boring, and ugly effort to improve the human condition.
This book is about the Europeans, usually knowing, however vaguely, of their CIA backers, who built the means to feed the dissident minds of Eastern Europe. The book has a lot of heroes—intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain, common Polish laborers who take a stand, Western European truck drivers who traverse the heart-stopping crossings between the West and the Soviet empire, European film stars who lend their fame to the cause, a Polish priest who paid with his life, Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty, and, most importantly, the exiles who took refuge in Western Europe and the United States who make the whole damn thing work. The hidden campaign was arduous, emotionally draining, family-wrecking, and always hazardous. As is often the case with CIA-backed covert action, it’s the locals who take the biggest risks and figure out all the details that no foreigner could possibly know.
But the CIA’s help was critical. As English writes: “the Agency supported the dissidents more than it directed them. But there is no question that the Americans played a significant role in defeating communism in Poland, and few Poles who knowingly benefited from covert U.S. support had bad words to say about it.” The amazing dissident Teresa Bogucka, whose “Flying Library” by 1978 had a stock of 500 prohibited titles she distributed throughout Poland, didn’t, as English writes “know for sure who was paying for the literature she received from the West, but she was aware of the propaganda line pushed by the Polish regime that American intelligence supported émigré publishers, and the idea didn’t concern her at all. ‘I thought, wow, a secret service supporting books,’ she said. ‘That’s fantastic.’”
Behind these courageous and stubborn Poles, in a small but decisive role in Washington, was Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, the Polish-born Zbigniew Brzezinski, who kept the money flowing at the right moment. A former Harvard professor, always curious and pretty passionate about his homeland, who understood how ideas could crack Marxist oppression, Brzezinski came to the rescue when Langley’s interest in such things—only six months after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—was waning. The former CIA chief historian Benjamin Fischer described the general DO attitude before Brzezinski, spurred on by the anger of former CIA operative-turned NSC official Paul Henze, obliged the agency to keep the cash coming: “Real men recruit spies. Books are not important,” Fischer told English. “You go to one of these [DO] guys and say, ‘Look, I need $100,000 to buy books from the Silver Age of Russian literature,’ or ‘I need to buy 500 copies of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry,’ they would look at you like, ‘Are you a moron? Why would you waste money on stuff like that?’” Once Brzezinski secured the funding, the right people in the Reagan administration kept it flowing, expanding the program when the Polish Communist regime, encouraged and backed by Moscow, tried to extinguish dissent.
With a vast set of characters at play, English uses three men as the spinal column of his beautifully written story: the Pole Miroslaw Chojecki, a trained chemist who worked at the Institute of Nuclear Research until his dissident activities got him fired and imprisoned, opens the first independent publishing house in Poland, NOWa, and later as an exile in Paris keeps on publishing and helps the clandestine literary deliveries and internal press stay in business even during the darkest days in the 1980s.
And Jerzy Giedroyc, who would become Chojecki’s chief promoter, ally, and mentor. There were no Poles among those that the CIA had direct contact with who had “more influence than the leader of a group based in the western outskirts of Paris, an émigré known to the Poles all over the world as the ‘prince’ or the ‘duke,’ but addressed by … [those] in the book program simply as ‘the Editor.’” At Langley Giedroyc was known as QRBERETTA.
And George Minden, an Eastern European exile, the son of a British father and a Romanian aristocratic mother, who, impoverished by war and communism, ends up in New York City and joins the Free Europe Committee, a psychological warfare arm of the CIA set up in 1949 to counter Soviet intelligence activities. In 1959 Minden takes over the Free Europe Press Book Center, which handles book deliveries behind the Iron Curtain. By 1962 Minden has 500 organizations sending books into Eastern Europe by a variety of means. He’s got “Doubleday, Barnes & Noble, the Oxford English Dictionary, Encyclopedia Britannica, Allen and Unwin, Chatto and Windus, Faber and Faber, Macmillan, Gollancz, Bertelsmann, and Hachette. No country responded with greater enthusiasm to these gifts than Poland, the largest of the ‘captive nations’ and the most liberal.”
But by the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the Vietnam war in the background, liberal Democrats, who’d hitherto provided most of the intellectual bone marrow of the CIA, started to turn on Langley. In 1971, after its covert funding was revealed, most of the Free Europe Committee’s activities were shut down. But the books program would remain secret, finally becoming, under Minden’s leadership, the International Literary Center. “From this moment on, Minden controlled covert CIA literary influencing programs across the Eastern Bloc, from Prague to Vladivostok.” Although many in the CIA and the State Department didn’t want to see an expansion of covert action in the Eastern Bloc, Langley was, more or less, ready to assist the Poles when, in August 1980, the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, reacting to increases in the price of meat, rose up in anger.
In the 1980s, bureaucratic battles would continue in Washington about expanding covert aid to Eastern Europe, but even the most cautious players about Poland, like the central intelligence director William Casey, who, skeptical of the DO’s competence, was worried that Langley might screw it up, now understood that the Polish internal opposition was real, widespread, and just might seriously wound the Soviet Union. Washington gradually began to realize what the famous Polish essayist and novelist, a Communist party man-turned-dissident, Kazimierz Brandys, saw after Solidarity forced the Communists to (temporarily) compromise in 1980: “I had argued that the masses in Poland were passive and in danger of being Sovietized. I was mistaken. I underestimated their hidden reserves. We awoke to a new society from one day to the next.”
English takes the reader into the shipyard at Gdansk and beyond, weaving together the history of the protesters’ and the regime’s actions and reactions, as the two sides square off into a war of attrition that, with the benefit of hindsight, looks like life-and-death 3D chess. The CIA Book Club comes damn close to being a thriller, as we see the dissidents do all that they can to outfox the state’s constant surveillance, employing elaborate counter-surveillance runs that often take them into the Polish countryside, into farm houses where makeshift clandestine print shops have been set up, with supplies paid for by the CIA. The Polish dissident underground used simple but disconnected logistics, keeping knowledge of who is doing what, where, and when known to as few indispensable players as possible. Everyone expected eventually to be arrested and tortured, so they worked backward, thereby ensuring that the fewest people possible would end up incarcerated if one part of the network were blown. English recounts the dangerous and rather fateful calculations of the Paris-based Chojecki as he, fingers crossed, sent forth supplies to keep the whole system running:
The hardest part of transporting material with the aid trucks was arranging someone to receive it in Poland. His only real option here was to send a postcard in code to a local group, telling them a shipment was coming but he didn’t have contacts everywhere, and it often felt like he was shooting in the dark, trying to hit targets a thousand miles away he couldn’t see. Even when the materials arrived safely, he couldn’t tell what happened next. Were they divided up among the groups, as he intended, or had one faction taken it all? Squabbles often broke out, and complaints reached Paris. If he was lucky, he would get confirmation that the goods had arrived in the form of a message printed in a copy of an underground publication that would find him. He was known for these purposes by the codename “Raphael.” “We thank Raphael for the present,” the messages would read.
And the Communist regime always had the advantage. The internal Polish intelligence service, SB, had spies everywhere. Between 1984 and 1986, when Polish dissidents were still in deep despair, “the police seized 36 offsets, 9 Xerox machines, 182 duplicators, 424 silkscreen frames and 255 typewriters [all typewriters had to be registered with the state], along with a staggering 1.3 million copies of books and periodicals.” But the Polish opposition didn’t buckle. When Minden closed shop on January 30, 1991, he gave “a summary of his career” in a final report entitled, “ILC: A short description of its structures and activities.” He had overseen the distribution of “books, magazines, and cassettes to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria for roughly thirty-five years, and to the Soviet Union for approximately thirty years. … The number of items sent east in that time was close to ten million, and … had been running at around 300,000 per annum, at a cost to the CIA of $2.7 million: In the ILC’s final year, they had distributed 316,020 books. His staff had been so diligent in documenting their shipments that they had records of all the titles distributed and the names of almost all the people who had taken them. Minden was instructed to send the files to Washington, where they remain classified.”
In 2003 the clandestine book program was revealed in an article for the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. In 2006 Minden died. His New York Times obituary described the ILC as “something of a personalized book club,” incongruously disclosing that it had also been financed by the CIA.
After the Cold War ended, the CIA officer who had overseen QRHELPFUL from Langley wasn’t promoted. Management sent him back into the bowels of the analysis directorate.
So ended America’s most consequential foray into soft power. We have English to thank for so vividly bringing it back to life and finally honoring properly all those who did so much to liberate Europe from a Marxist hell.
The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature
by Charlie English
Random House, 384 pp., $35
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former case officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.