Description
No physical combat would take place along the Iron Curtain frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high. Instead, the conflict would be fought in the psychological sphere. It was a battle for hearts, minds and intellects.
No one understood this more than George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the ‘CIA books programme’, which aimed to win the Cold War with literature. From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden’s global CIA ‘book club’ would infiltrate millions of banned titles into the Eastern Bloc. Volumes were smuggled on trucks and aboard yachts, dropped from balloons, and hidden in the luggage of thousands of individual travellers.
Charlie English tells the true story of The CIA Book Club, which tracks the ten million books that were smuggled across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War and the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation.