Friday March 23, 1984, dawned cold and grey at the Baltic port of Swinoujscie, in northwestern Poland, as the rusting ferry Wilanów, arriving from Copenhagen, spilled vehicles on to the dock, where they formed a queue for customs checks. Near the back of the line was a Mercedes lorry loaded with a charitable shipment of clothes and medicine, driven by a young French tax official named Jacky Challot.
As was usual when he reached the head of the queue, Challot handed out dollars, western chocolate and Marlboro cigarettes to smooth his way through the border. But just as the lorry was about to be waved on, a senior officer spotted something others had missed: the vehicle seemed shorter inside than out.
‘Reactionary propaganda!’
The officer called in a team of specialists, who broke through the wall at the front of the truck’s cargo bay, exposing a secret compartment. As dozens of books began to tumble out, the officer lost his cool.
‘Shit!’ he exclaimed. ‘Reactionary propaganda!’
Challot was immediately arrested: he would be held at the port while a camera crew was summoned from Szczecin to make a propaganda film for state TV. Soon officers showed up from the SB, Poland’s equivalent of the KGB. The Frenchman had been smuggling printing machines and inks, the SB investigators found, and almost 800 forbidden books and magazines which contained ‘fake news capable of causing serious damage to the interests of the People’s Republic of Poland’. He was convicted and sentenced to two years in jail, only to be released after a few months in exchange for $10,000.
What neither the secret police nor Challot knew was that the lorry and its contents were part of a long-running operation known in Washington as the ‘CIA book programme’, and that the 800 books seized at the Swinoujscie were a tiny proportion of the 10 million publications smuggled through the Iron Curtain over the course of the Cold War.
The origins of the programme can be traced to the aftermath of the Second World War, when the Agency was trying to combat what Washington saw as the ‘vicious covert activities’ of the KGB in spreading the virus of communism. The CIA’s early success was in broadcasting. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, set up by the Free Europe Committee (FEC), the CIA’s psychological warfare arm, were powerful propaganda tools, but they were susceptible to jamming, so the FEC began to experiment with other ways to deliver its message.
Balloon drops in the 1950s scattered 300 million leaflets over the Eastern Bloc, but these were crude, so people weren’t inclined to keep them. When the FEC began posting books to addresses culled from East European phone directories, the response was very different. People wanted to keep the books. Sometimes they even sent a letter of thanks. There was an opportunity here, and no one could see it more clearly than the man who would lead the book programme for the next three decades: George Minden.
As a Romanian American, born in Bucharest, Minden knew that every country in the Soviet bloc had its equivalent of the Ministry of Truth, the propaganda department in George Orwell’s novel 1984, where history is rewritten to serve the regime’s needs, since ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’
Minden saw the intellectual straitjacket imposed by Stalinist censorship as the real enemy. The books programme, he believed, constituted an ‘offensive of free, honest thinking’. It would work because ‘truth is contagious’, and if they could deliver truth to the oppressed peoples of the Soviet Bloc, it was certain to have an effect.
The titles Minden’s team sent spanned a vast range. They included overtly political works such as Animal Farm and 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Albert Camus’s essay The Rebel, but also material with no obvious anti-communist message. The Whitney Museum’s Three Hundred Years of American Painting was an early hit, as were lifestyle magazines such as the French-language Marie Claire and the German Madame.
These publications, Minden understood, had a wholly different meaning in the East, where every aspect of life was controlled by the state, from art to music and fashion. ‘All book distribution is politically significant,’ he wrote in 1969, ‘because all books – political and literary – accomplish the political task of making the ideological isolation of Eastern Europe difficult and thus frustrate one of the communists’ main objectives.’
From Chiswick to Poland
Posting the books was just one form of delivery. In the late 1950s, the brief political thaw following Stalin’s death meant many Poles could visit the West for the first time. Why not give them books to take home?
The CIA’s first person-to-person giveaways were run from 1958 by a young Free Europe Press employee named Andy Stypulkowski, who began handing out literature to Polish travellers who visited his home in Chiswick, west London. Carrying banned books through the Iron Curtain required courage, but frontier confiscations were rare. As word of the giveaways spread, more people showed up at the Stypulkowskis’ home.
Stypulkowski began to expand his distribution to bookstores, churches, libraries and community centres all over Western Europe. Soon, CIA-bought books were being passed out anywhere Poles could be found: in Scottish ports where Polish fishing boats tied up; at French basketball tournaments where Polish teams competed; at concerts by Polish choirs in London. It helped that a black market in uncensored books developed in the East, feeding demand.
Flying libraries
No country took to the smuggled books with greater enthusiasm than Poland, the largest of the ‘captive nations’ of Eastern Europe. In Poland, whole collections of illicit books, known as ‘Flying Libraries’, began to circulate, built on the principle that the books would never stay in one place long enough for the secret police to find them.
Often, a banned book would arrive disguised as something else – as a computer technical manual, say, or wrapped in a copy of the Party newspaper. Readers would be given a single night to finish the book before passing it on. As well as showing people that another political system was possible, the act of sharing forbidden books had a powerful secondary effect, in that it brought together like-minded people who recognized the failings of the communist system and wanted change.
By the late 1970s, large numbers of Polish dissidents had been raised on these books, including Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, who wrote a postcard to Minden’s outfit expressing his gratitude. These dissidents included almost the entire intellectual class of the Solidarity generation, who would go on to set out the political agenda of the anti-communist movement born in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in August 1980.
Wittingly or not, this generation of dissidents would create a new paradigm for the CIA’s book programme, illegally republishing the books in Poland in what was known as the ‘second circulation’. After martial law was declared in Poland in 1981, the CIA swung in behind these underground publishers, supplying them with presses, print supplies, money and western technology, which meant underground, uncensored publications appeared all over the country.
By the mid-1980s, Poland was so awash with uncensored material that the regime was unable to control what the population saw, read and heard. It lost control of the narrative. The collapse of communism in Poland would follow, and after it, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.