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 tens of millions of leaflets on the folks under:
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 strategy 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 accurately predicted the wind speeds and strain 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 Battle With Forbidden Literature, Charlie English, Random Home, 384 pp., $35, July 2025
However over the approaching years, by way of trial and error, the CIA found a much more efficient strategy than leaflets: books. As British journalist Charlie English particulars in The CIA E book Membership: The Secret Mission to Win the Chilly Battle With Forbidden Literature, Central and Jap Europeans had been hungry for literature. Poles circulated banned books by way of “flying libraries,” intricate human networks of secret change, the place readers risked imprisonment to get their palms on novels akin to 1984. The Polish dissident chief Adam Michnik, who spent a lot of the Nineteen Eighties imprisoned, mentioned that banned books had been like “recent air.” By means of an extended and brutal battle for ever and ever, “They allowed us to outlive and never go mad.”
Within the late Nineteen Fifties, CIA agent and Romanian émigré George Minden realized {that a} e book smuggling program may 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, wished to maneuver away from cultural imperialism to collaboration with dissidents. He was chosen to guide what would come to be often called the CIA e book program. Over the approaching many years, this “Marshall Plan for the Thoughts” would smuggle almost 10 million gadgets, together with printing presses and supplies, into the Jap 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, known as this system “among the many most necessary CIA operations of the Chilly Battle.” This could maybe not come as a shock. Along with destabilizing democracies and championing imperialists, the CIA has at all times had nice style in artwork, supporting summary expressionism, the Paris Overview, and numerous postwar artists at residence and overseas, typically with out the artist’s data. The CIA wished to advertise artwork that championed freedom and individualism to struggle communism, win hearts and minds, and counter the Soviet-promoted concept that, as historian Lucie Levine put it, “the US was a ‘culturally barren’ capitalist wasteland.” Artwork supported by the CIA would go a good distance in displaying the world that the US was really a culturally wealthy capitalist wasteland.
Journalists take a look at newspapers in Warsaw, Poland, on Could 31, 1989, throughout the run-up to elections organized after an settlement was reached between the communist authorities and the Solidarity motion. Bernard Bisson/Sygma by way of Getty Photographs
The CIA E book Membership tells the story of the books program, primarily in Poland, the place it had the best influence. However it’s to English’s nice credit score—and the reader’s profit—that the e book will not be actually concerning the CIA. It’s above all an oral historical past of the Polish underground throughout 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 legislation 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 pieces to withstand.
English’s historical past of Solidarity is detailed and expansive, however probably the most putting threads is that of Mazovia Weekly, an underground publication launched in 1982 by the Girls’s Operational Group, a set of veteran dissident journalists headed by Helena Luczywo. By means of the standard of the paper’s writing, manufacturing, and enhancing—a joke about their minimalist editorial type went, “What’s a pole? A tree edited by Mazovia Weekly”—Mazovia Weekly turned crucial Polish underground publication of the Nineteen 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 finished in secret. These operating the paper evaded detection for greater than six years, partially as a result of the key police didn’t suppose girls may lead such a profitable operation.
Protestors in Gdansk, Poland, throughout the August 1988 strikes.Bettmann Archive/Getty Photographs.
In August 1988, when main strikes led by younger staff broke out in elements of the nation, Mazovia Weekly wanted to unfold the phrase. The commercial unrest was so severe that U.S. intelligence believed it may very well be the worst disaster for the Polish authorities because it had instituted martial legislation in 1981. However there was an issue: Nobody had anticipated the strikes, and your entire workers was on trip aside 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 wished 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 evening she lastly despatched the problem to press, she woke to a knock on her door. Fortunately, it was not what Solzhenitsyn known 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.
Beneath martial legislation, printing banned supplies carried a jail sentence of 10 years, and neighbors, bus drivers, or colleagues may very well 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 aspect of printing and distribution occurred at a special location, and “nobody had the total image of who was doing what or the place.”
In Mazovia Weekly’s early days, Szczesna would go to mates and acquaintances in hopes of discovering “hosts”—residences the place newspaper workers may briefly arrange printing operations. Like the sooner “flying libraries,” the paper would at all times 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 might hold the lights on day and evening, and everybody chain-smoked as if their lives trusted it.”
College students at Warsaw College stage a sit-in throughout the run-up to the June 1989 elections. Bernard Bisson/Sygma by way of Getty Photographs
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 obtained the identify of a printer who owned the identical press. She discovered him attending mass and urgently instructed him what she wanted. Like a foul Soviet joke, he answered: “I’m the particular person 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. 1000’s of copies had been printed 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 struggle,’” 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 staff up with newly freed resistance chief Adam Michnik on the Election Gazette. Supported by editors on the New York Overview 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 Jap Bloc election that the communists misplaced.
Folks learn within the Worldwide E book Membership in Warsaw in 1960.Claude Jacoby/ullstein bild by way of Getty Photographs
In an age of democratic backsliding in the US and growing indifference to the survival of democracy overseas, it’s tempting to name The CIA E book Membership a well timed learn. Luczywo remembered that throughout the resistance, in case your identify was learn on Radio Free Europe, “it was a lot, a lot, way more troublesome to harm you, to beat you, to vanish you.” It’s exhausting to learn that line with out pondering of the Trump administration’s bulldozing of eight many years of establishments of soppy diplomacy, together with Radio Free Europe, which supported democracy and saved lives in Poland and lots of different locations throughout the globe.
However the e book is greater than only a well timed learn—it’s a thrilling and transferring historical past exterior of any modern American context. I’ve the dangerous 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 dwell underground and put out Mazovia Weekly. I may establish extra with the civilians who provided up their residence to show it right into a printing press. I puzzled: 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 actual 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 crushed to demise by the key police. She wrote:
My palms 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
