CIA book smugglers of the Cold War
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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.
Hi Charlie, thank you so much for joining me today to talk all about your new book, The CIA Book Club, the best kept secret of the Cold War. We should probably start at the very beginning. What exactly was the CIA Books program? 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. Now before we delve into the work of this programme, 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. 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,
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