CIA book smugglers of the Cold War

Summary

History Extra Podcast Summary: "CIA Book Smugglers of the Cold War" Release Date: June 12, 2025

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of the History Extra Podcast, hosted by Lauren Good and featuring author Charlie English, listeners delve into the clandestine operations of the CIA during the Cold War. The episode, titled "CIA Book Smugglers of the Cold War," explores how the United States leveraged literature as a tool in the ideological battle against the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies.

Overview of the CIA Book Program

Charlie English introduces his book, "The CIA Book Club: The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War," detailing a covert CIA operation that smuggled approximately 10 million books into Eastern Bloc countries from the mid-1950s to 1991. This initiative aimed to undermine the strict censorship imposed by communist regimes by introducing uncensored literature that promoted freedom of thought and democratic values.

Key Quote:

[02:29] "The CIA Books program was a long-running US intelligence operation that succeeded in secretly infiltrating around 10 million books into the Eastern Bloc over that period in a bid to undermine the draconian censorship regimes."

Context of Eastern Bloc Censorship

The episode paints a vivid picture of the oppressive environment in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland, where state censors controlled all forms of media and publication. The censorship extended to mundane aspects of life, requiring permits for printing even simple items like business cards or wedding invitations.

Key Quote:

[03:26] "Every East European country that was part of the Soviet bloc had a state censor who basically controlled everything that was allowed to be broadcast or published or printed in that country."

Methods of Smuggling Books

The program employed a diverse array of innovative and sometimes absurd methods to transport literature into the Eastern Bloc. Initially starting with balloon drops filled with leaflets, the operation quickly evolved to more effective strategies after realizing books held greater value and impact.

Notable Techniques:

• Disguised Books: Miniature books hidden inside everyday items like baked bean tins and even baby nappies. For instance, "a copy of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago was pushed into a nappy and taken on a flight to Moscow." [08:55]
• Human Carriers: Engaging touring groups such as mountaineering teams and orchestras to smuggle books within their luggage.
• Modified Vehicles: Special compartments built into trucks and camper vans allowed for discreet transportation of large quantities of books.

Key Quote:

[08:55] "Books would be disguised as food and someone would presumably get a tin of baked beans and open it up and find that it was a copy of George Orwell inside, which must have been a bit of a shock."

Important Figures in the Program

The success of the CIA Book Program hinged on dedicated individuals and emigre networks:

• George Minden: An emigre from Bucharest, Minden became the head of the CIA Book Club, operating out of the International Literary Centre in New York. His leadership spanned from the mid-1950s until the program's conclusion in 1991. [16:41]

• Jerzy Giedreich: Based in Paris, Giedreich was a pivotal figure in the Polish book smuggling efforts. As a CIA asset codenamed QR Beretta, he facilitated the distribution of Polish-language literature into the Eastern Bloc. [18:45]

• Miroslaw Hojecki: An underground publisher in Poland, Hoycki became a symbol of resistance by smuggling literature despite repeated arrests and harsh punishments. His resilience and dedication exemplify the program's impact on fostering dissent. [25:56]

Key Quote:

[16:41] "George Minden was an emigre who quickly rose up the ranks of the Free Europe Committee and ended up running the book program... pretending that they were philanthropists who wanted to send books into the Eastern Bloc."

Types of Literature Smuggled

The selection of books ranged from overtly political works to seemingly non-political publications, each serving a strategic purpose:

• Political Literature: Works by George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Hannah Arendt critiqued totalitarianism and promoted democratic ideals.

• Non-Political Material: Magazines like Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan introduced Western lifestyles and freedoms, subtly challenging communist norms by showcasing alternative ways of living.

• Fiction: Authors like Agatha Christie provided a window into Western societal norms and personal freedoms, fostering a sense of aspiration and desire for change among Eastern Bloc readers.

Key Quote:

[11:09] "There was a whole range of completely non-political, to our mind material, like for instance, Marie Claire magazine or Cosmopolitan... served as a kind of propaganda argument in itself."

Impact on the Eastern Bloc and the Fall of Communism

Poland emerged as the primary beneficiary of the CIA Book Program, with literature playing a crucial role in sustaining the Solidarity movement. Dissidents like Adam Michnik credited books with keeping opposition sentiments alive, contributing significantly to the eventual collapse of the communist regime in 1989.

Key Quote:

[23:04] "Adam Michnik told me... it was books that were victorious in the fight. Literature kept the idea of the opposition movement alive in Poland throughout the 1980s."

Comparisons to Other CIA Operations

While often overshadowed by more prominent operations like supporting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, the book smuggling program was a cost-effective yet influential strategy in the Cold War's ideological battle. Despite its significance, the program remained largely unacknowledged due to CIA secrecy and internal agency dynamics.

Key Quote:

[29:33] "It probably had a similar magnitude of influence on the outcome of the Cold War... but it probably had a similar magnitude of influence on the outcome of the Cold War."

Legacy and Modern Relevance

Charlie English reflects on the enduring power of literature as a tool for ideological influence. While the Cold War saw books as a primary medium for propaganda, today's digital landscape has transformed the battleground to information and social media, though the fundamental objective of shaping ideologies remains unchanged.

Key Quote:

[32:03] "Books were probably unrivalled at that time, but now things are very different. It's very much easier to slip a kind of digital signal into another territory."

Conclusion

The CIA Book Program represents a fascinating and underappreciated facet of the Cold War, highlighting the profound impact literature can have in shaping political and social landscapes. Through innovative smuggling techniques and the dedication of key individuals, the program not only disseminated uncensored information but also ignited the flames of resistance that ultimately contributed to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.

For more insights and to read "The CIA Book Club: The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War" by Charlie English, visit HistoryExtra.com.

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Produced by:
Daniel Kramer Arden

Note: This summary excludes all advertisements, intros, and outros to focus solely on the content of the episode.

Transcript

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Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. During the Cold War, the CIA Book program was a covert campaign to smuggle books into the Eastern Bloc using everything from balloon drops to baked bean tins. But why was literature such a significant weapon in the culture wars between east and West? Speaking to Lauren Good for today's episode, the author Charlie English explores this campaign and what it tells us about the power of the written word.

[Charlie English]

Hi Charlie, thank you so much for joining me today to talk all about your new book, the CIA Book, the Best Kept Secret of the Cold War. We should probably start at the very beginning. What exactly was the CIA Books Program?

[Narrator]

Well, the CIA Books program was a long running US intelligence operation that ran from the mid-50s until about 1991 and it succeeded in secretly infiltrating around 10 million books into the Eastern Bloc over that period in a bid to undermine the draconian censorship regimes that existed in every East European country.

[Charlie English]

Now, before we delve into the work of this program, you've described the situation as draconian. I think it would be beneficial to really paint a picture of what sort of circumstances this program was operating in. What sort of restrictions were actually imposed on the Eastern Bloc?

[Narrator]

Well, every East European country that was part of the Soviet bloc had a state censor who basically controlled everything that was allowed to be broadcast or published or printed in that country. So, for instance, in Poland, which is largely the focus of my book, if you wanted to print so much as a business card or a wedding invitation, you needed permission from the main office, which was the main censorship body in Poland at that time. And the main office was filled with people who worked essentially for the party. And the Party would decide not only what could be published, but also how you would cover certain things. So if you worked for the Party newspaper, for instance, then the censor would decree that you had to cover certain things in a certain way. So it wasn't just a question of cutting things out of the public realm, though there was a great deal of that. It was also quite question of telling people how things should be done.

[Charlie English]

It's difficult to imagine, isn't it? Even a wedding invite. You need to have approval.

[Narrator]

Yeah, I mean, it's extraordinary. I mean, every typewriter had to be registered with the state and every photocopier when photocopies came in. So it was really a very tight system that prevented people from. I mean, the aim of it was to stop people thinking thoughts that were beyond the kind of framework of the ideology of the regime at the time. So anything that contradicted the Marxist Leninist philosophy that had been laid down by the state was not to be thought about or not to be spoken about. And it led to a society that was very Orwellian. I mean, the people of Eastern Europe had a great affinity with Orwell because they could understand him in a way that perhaps in the west we would struggle to. But these ideas of doublethink and thought police and all these Orwellian ideas and devices were very familiar to people who lived in the Eastern Bloc.

[Charlie English]

And can we talk about how the program actually began?

[Narrator]

Yeah, it began in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Americans in particular were very alarmed by the idea that the virus, if you like, of communist ideology was going to spread all around the world. And the Russian and Soviet Secret Service were promoting Communism, obviously, all over the world, covertly and overtly. And so the US intelligence agencies came up with a way of fighting this psychological battle, if you like. It's a kind of battle for hearts and minds. It's to try and persuade people that Communism was not a good idea. And they had various methods of doing this. The first one that really was the origin of the book program was the balloon drops, which began in the early 1950s. And these involved filling these thousands, hundreds of thousands of air balloons filled with helium and lighter than air gases. And they would load these up with payloads of leaflets and then release them in West Germany. And then the weather would kind of carry them across the Iron Curtain and into Czechoslovakian airspace, for instance. And then they would dump all these leaflets into Czechoslovakia. And the leaflets would say things like, you haven't been forgotten. You know, the winds of freedom are blowing on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and we believe in freedom as you do, and so on, which were all very well, but quite useless to the people of the Eastern Bloc because they didn't really want to be caught with these leaflets. And the authorities obviously would come down quite hard on anybody who was seen repeating this kind of information. But when they experimented with sending books, and the first book I think they sent on balloon was George Orwell's Animal Farm, then people wanted to keep the books. I mean, books had a value. So books were much more successful than just propaganda leaflets. And then they moved from balloon operations to mailing the people in the Eastern Bloc from names and addresses that they just culled from East European phone books. And from there, things kind of progressed. As the years went by, the program got more and more developed and more sophisticated, and they started giving away books from certain distribution hubs in Western Europe. So, for instance, after Stalin's death, there was a period of liberalization, and visitors could travel from the Eastern Bloc into the West. And if they showed up at a house in Chiswick, a particular house in Chiswick, for instance, they could take home three or four copies of uncensored books that they would put in their suitcases and then carry through the Iron Curtain kind of individuals. And this method was very successful because there were so many people carrying books in that even if a few of them got caught, and sometimes they would, it was impossible to stop the flow of all of them. And so, yeah, people, individual, person to person distribution like that. And then latterly, there were whole trucks and yachts sailing across the Baltic filled with books that would carry, you know, up to kind of a thousand books at a time and take them into the Eastern Block.

[Charlie English]

You talked a bit there about getting books into the Eastern Block, but you also cover some pretty absurd methods in the book. Could you tell us some of these?

[Narrator]

Well, one book was taken in inside a baby's nappy. There's a documented case of that. The smugglers, in the late 70s and early 80s, started to develop different formats of books, if you like. So they produce these miniatures which are. I mean, I've got one here. They're probably about a six in size, and you could fit those inside, for instance, a can of baked beans. I mean, you wouldn't put the baked beans in, you understand, but they bought canning equipment and they would put these miniatures inside tins and then seal them up and then put them on the back of these trucks that were carrying humanitarian relief into the Eastern Bloc, which ran throughout this period. So books would be disguised as food and someone would presumably get a tin of baked beans and open it up and find that it was a copy of George Orwell inside, which must have been a bit of a shock. The miniatures were also, in this particular instance with the baby's nappy. It was a copy of Solzhenitsyn's the Gulag Archipelago, which was pushed into the nappy and taken on a flight to Moscow, I believe, with the baby. Also, obviously, in the nappy. They would meet, for instance, touring mountaineering groups or orchestras or sports teams who came to the West. The book smugglers would approach them and deliver them dozens and dozens of books, and then these would be taken home in the sheet music of the orchestra, say, or in their luggage. So, yeah, there were kind of myriad ways of getting things through towards the end. And they built special secret compartments into trucks. There was a famous Czech book smuggler who was based in London, who had a camper van, and he built these compartments beneath the floor of the campervan, and he could put all this dissident material in there, drive through the Iron Curtain into Prague and then distribute the books from there.

[Charlie English]

Now, you've talked quite a bit about Orwell and his books being smuggled in, but there were a lot of titles coming through to the Eastern Block. Which titles might we recognise today that were smuggled in?

[Narrator]

Well, I think Orwell has a special place, and I think he was certainly near the top of the lists for the CIA book program. There was. I mean, I like to kind of think of them in genres, if you like. So there was this kind of political material And Orwell is obviously very political, even in his novels, but also in his essays. There were people like Solzhenitsyn. So when the Gulag Archipelago came out, the CIA was very involved in reprinting that in the west and then trying to get it back into the east, which they did very successfully. And that Gulag Archipelago was just one of Solzhenitsyn's books, perhaps the most famous, but there were others too. There were books, for instance, like Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, which is a critique of totalitarianism for obvious reasons, that would be something they would be interested in. But then there was a whole range of completely non political, to our mind material, like for instance, Marie Claire magazine or Cosmopolitan or I mean, the Guardian Weekly was one publication they smuggled in. And the idea of this less political material was that it had a different meaning when it was read inside the Eastern Bloc. So for instance, a copy of Marie Claire has fashion advice, lifestyle advice. And in the east, where people didn't have those freedoms, where for instance, fashion was frowned upon, then it had a completely different social context, if you like. So people would read Mary Claire in the east and look at the clothes and the kind of liberties, if you like, that people in the west had. And that would serve as a kind of propaganda argument in itself. Similarly, there were books about art and art in the Soviet world was very heavily prescribed. I mean, you had to produce social realist art. That was the only kind of art that Stalin allowed. So to see different types of art being produced in the west was very interesting to people in the east and again persuasive that the western system was better and more free. And one book smuggler told me that even Agatha Christie, for instance, was read very differently in the east in that if you read about people with their own cars, in their own houses who ate food that they wanted to eat, and that wasn't just what was available in the butchers that day, for instance, then this was a very strong argument against the communist system under which they lived.

[Charlie English]

It was Agatha Christie that really struck me because I think a lot of people would dismiss fiction as something to enjoy perhaps rather than to inform. But it shows that it had a real importance here.

[Narrator]

Yeah, absolutely. It showed what life was like on the other side of the Iron Curtain. And I mean, in a sense it did at least. I mean, we could debate whether Agatha Christie's world bears much relation to what life was like in mid century Western Europe, but it certainly painted a picture for people who weren't able to access those sorts of freedoms and created, I guess you'd say, a kind of desire in them to live in that system. I mean, other people would say to me, things like Life magazine, for instance, might show a beachfront property in California with a view of the ocean. And if you lived in a tower block in central Warsaw, then that was obviously something that you could only dream of. And that kind of aspirational quality of Western American life, which, I mean, even for us would be a fantasy, but for them it was beyond all.

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[Charlie English]

Can we talk about some of the individuals actually involved in this program? You talk about George Minden, who was the head of the CIA Book club. How did he actually end up in this role?

[Narrator]

Well, George Minden was a emigre. He was born in Bucharest in Romania before the Second World War. And the CIA and the Free Europe Committee, which was the branch of the CIA that set this up relied very heavily on emigres who were. At the end of the war, a lot of people from Eastern Europe had to flee. They fled the Communists and the Red army that was taking over their countries. And Minden had been a very wealthy individual just before the Second World War, one of the richest people in Romania. And he was forced to flee with his family. He spent some time in England and in Madrid and ended up in New York. He married an American woman called Marilyn, his wife, his second wife, and joined the Free Europe Committee in the early 1950s in New York, and was clearly a very intelligent, well educated, intellectual sort of a man. And quickly rose up the ranks of the Free Europe Committee and ended up running the book program from about, I think, the mid-1950s onwards. And he would lead it until the very end, until 1991. And he had latterly an office in Park Avenue south in New York in a big skyscraper there. It was called the International Literary Centre. His operation, which was basically a front for the CIA. And they sort of pretended that they were philanthropists who, with an interest in East European literature, who wanted to send books into the Eastern bloc. But in fact, they were being funded all along by the American intelligence agency.

[Charlie English]

And of course, this was the work of so many people other than Minden. It was a huge operation which other figures heavily influenced the success of this program.

[Narrator]

Well, I think the program was most influential in Poland. And Poland, for various historical reasons, received the books more warmly. They were more delighted to have these books than other Eastern European countries. And there are probably several reasons for that. One was that they identified with the west perhaps more than other East European nations, that they felt that at the Yalta Conference they'd been betrayed trade, really, when they'd been put into the Eastern Bloc effectively. And so the Poles had a big diaspora in Western Europe and in America. And the center of that diaspora, if you like, was probably Paris, because France and Poland have always had strong historic ties. And there was a particular character in Paris called Jerzy Giedreich, who ran a kind of intelligence operation, I guess you would call it, out of the suburbs of western Paris from the end of the Second World War right through to the 1990s. And Giedreutch was a very important figure in the Polish language book program, both as a publisher and as a smuggler and as a supporter of the emigre literature that they were trying to get into the Eastern Bloc. And he was a very famous figure in Poland. I mean, he's one of the leading literary figures both inside and outside Poland at that time. And he was also a CIA asset with his own code name, which was QR Beretta. And he had been working with the CIA since about 1951, and receiving a kind of regular stipend from them to keep his publications going and to keep them being smuggled into Eastern Europe.

[Charlie English]

You really focus on the importance of Poland in your book, and we actually see books being printed and sold there. The country really does seem vital to this effort.

[Narrator]

Yes, I think it was certainly the most important country as far as the book program went, partly because it was. I mean, it still is the largest country in Eastern Europe in terms of population. So I think around 40 million people lived in Poland at that point, which was far greater than some of the small East European countries. And the other major target for the book program was the Soviet Union itself, which, of course, was in many ways more important. But the efforts to get books into the Soviet Union, it was much more difficult because of the kgb, really, and the Soviet secret services, who were much harsher in their crackdowns and probably much more effective than the Polish secret service, which was called the sb, which tended to be slightly more lenient. In fact, Poland as a country was probably the most liberal, or one of the most liberal in the Eastern Bloc anyway. So it was easier to get material into Poland. The Poles were more receptive to it. And as things turned out, as you probably know, it was Poland where the Cold War really ended in that Poland was the first communist regime to fall in 1989, and it started a kind of domino collapse of all of the other communist regimes in the Eastern Bloc. So I think for those reasons, Poland was the most important. And I think it's a testament to the effectiveness of the books program that it was really literature that won the Cold War in Poland. As a very famous dissident called Adam Michnik told me when I interviewed him a couple of years ago, it was books that were victorious in the fight. Literature kept the idea of the opposition movement alive in Poland throughout the 1980s. And uncensored literature became so all pervasive that the regime really lost control of the argument and lost control of the population.

[Charlie English]

You spoke a little bit there about Poland being more liberal than the Soviet Union. And, you know, we're dealing with different places here. How did the repercussions differ in different places if people were discovered with this uncensored literature?

[Narrator]

It's hard for me to say exactly how it changed between different countries. I mean, it changed even within Poland. It changed depending on which period you would be caught in. So, for instance, from mid-1980 until the end of 1981, there was a period of liberalization in Poland that's known as the Solidarity Carnival, which followed the establishment of the Solidarity trade union in August 1980. And in that period, you could almost get away with anything. I mean, you could import books with impunity, really. And the censor was not nearly as effective or stringent as it had been before that. But then in December 1981, under pressure from Moscow, the Polish army established martial law in the country. They basically launched a coup and invaded their own country. And after that, all the illegal printing presses were. Well, a lot of them were captured and smashed up. Most of the high ups in solidarity were arrested. 10,000 solidarity activists were put in jail. And then the punishments at that point were much more extreme. I mean, you could certainly be jailed for publishing books. I mean, I sort of think that when people ask what was the punishment for being caught with books? I think it's a bit like we would view drugs in our society in that if you had a few for your own use, then it probably wouldn't have been too harsh a punishment, but you would have been given a warning. And of course, in a police state, any contravention of the law can be used against you at any point because you're put on file. And then people would come back in six months or a year and say, well, we'd like to know a bit of information about your neighbour. And look, you were caught with this illegal literature a year ago, and would you like to help us or would you like us to kind of blacklist you from the employment register because of this crime that you've committed? So the punishments varied quite widely, but they were certainly people who were jailed for these kinds of offences. And being in jail in Poland in that time was not a happy affair.

[Charlie English]

Charlie, there are so many people and organizations. You say there were at least 500 that were involved in this program. I mean, this is a mass scale thing and we just don't have time to cover everything that you talk about. People will have to read the book for that. But are there any individual accounts that you found particularly striking during your research?

[Narrator]

Well, I think the hero of the story, if you like, is a guy called Miroslaw Hojecki, who was an underground publisher in Poland in the late 70s and very early 80s and then found himself in exile when martial law was declared in December 1981. And his account, which was given to me verbally over many, many hours of interviews over the course of some years was, I think, very well extraordinary. I mean, he's an extraordinarily brave figure. He was jailed at least, well, arrested at least 43 times in Poland before he was put into exile. He was force fed in prison, but he never gave up. I mean, his parents were war heroes who fought against the Nazis in the Warsaw Uprising. And you can see it in him that he's this sort of freedom fighting character. And his father at one point said to him, do you think with your little books that you're going to be able to get rid of the communists? And Mirek with sort of characteristic aplomb replied, would you rather I shoot someone? And he essentially used literature instead of weaponry. I mean his parents generation had to fight with guns, but they used books instead. And he became the sort of number one smuggler in the west trying to supply the Solidarity underground with literature and printing presses from his base in Paris. And he was, I think, very successful at that. And his story I found very powerful.

[Charlie English]

That's such a striking idea, the idea that books are an alternative weapon to what we usually associate with this sort of history, I suppose.

[Narrator]

Yeah, sometimes it's called the Cold War of words. I think we see it today in different spheres. Obviously the digital world means that these sorts of psychological battles are being fought on social media and similar channels. But it was a genuine war in that both sides were at it. I mean the KGB were also promoting books and literature and their equivalent of these CIA operations are called active measures and they are political psychological operations. But also, I mean being the KGB also take in assassinations and other dirty tricks like that. But they had. There's a point in mind's reports of his journeys around Europe where he is talking to one of his assets, if you like, one of the people in his network and he tells them that they shouldn't go into a particular bookshop and I won't name it, but it used to exist on the Charing Cross Road because he said they reported every week to the Soviet embassy. So I think it's clear the KGB were plugging their own books in London bookshops around the same time.

[Charlie English]

I mean, I wasn't aware of this history before I read your book. And I'm sure a lot of people listening to this wouldn't have been aware of it once the Iron Curtain had fallen. How is this program actually remembered? Were these people involved doing these huge incredible things, given much credit for the work they'd done?

[Narrator]

Well, not really, no. And I think for unaccountable reasons, the CIA has tried to keep this operation classified. In fact, most of the documents that relate to it are still classified. I can only imagine, because there are people still alive who were involved who they don't want to embarrass. But in terms of Cold War operations, I mean, I like to liken it to the CIA's support of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the same period, really. And you've probably heard of or seen the film Charlie Wilson's War, and, you know, it's something people talk about and know about. And the CIA were giving the Mujahideen something like $700 million a year at the height of that operation, not in cash, but in weaponry and so on. And that tends to get quite a lot of credit for bringing down the Soviet Union, whereas the book program probably cost in the region of $4 million a year. So it's absolutely peanuts by comparison. But I think it probably had a similar magnitude of influence on the outcome of the Cold War. And of course, nobody really died. So for internal reasons, I think, and this is what a CIA, a former CIA officer told me, having spent so much on the Afghan campaign, it was politic to credit that with the end of the Cold War, and also there was this sort of schism, if you like, within the CIA itself, in which the paramilitary guys, who were often drawn from the army and liked to go around the world's trouble spots, kind of running guns and recruiting agents and all this kind of thing, were very much in opposition to the political psychological staff who were more cerebral. They often were kind of country specialists who spoke lots of different languages. And this kind of conflict within the CIA meant that the book program, which came very much from the latter group of people, got less credit than it deserved. So I don't think it's been much talked about. And I think that's one of the reasons why I wanted to write this book.

[Charlie English]

Finally, Charlie, we see such a mass effort here, which really shows just how much people valued the importance of literature. How much do you think we value this in the modern day? Do you think we'd be smuggling literature across the Iron Curtain, or do you think something entirely different would be prioritised?

[Narrator]

I think similar sorts of operations are probably underway today. I don't have any information on what they are exactly, but I think we can see that influencing now is done through the digital sphere. And I think books are probably less relevant to that propaganda war than they were in the Cold War. I mean, if you think from the 50s to the 80s, the printed word was probably the main form of delivery of ideas. I mean, the Free Europe Committee famously also has or had the radio stations, Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. And the BBC obviously has its World Service in different languages broadcast around the world. So broadcasting was certainly a rival or another channel. But in terms of getting across quite a complex and emotional argument in a fairly portable, if you like, format. I think books were probably unrivalled at that time, but now things are very different. It's very much easier to slip a kind of digital signal into another territory. And as we've seen, it's almost impossible to stop that stuff coming through. I mean, the Chinese obviously have their great firewall and it's effective in some ways, but there are so many other ways of getting information in, and I think that's what people are probably doing now.

[Podcast Guest]

That was Charlie English, a writer and former head of international news at the Guardian. Charlie's book on this subject is called the CIA Book Club. The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War. He was speaking to Lauren Good and you can read plenty more about the Cold War on our website historyextra.com thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.

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