By Charlie English
The former Guardian journalist Charlie English, in his book The CIA Book Club, has told a previously classified high-impact story about the dissolution of the former Communist Party dictatorships of Eastern Europe. After the completion of the Manhattan Project, which orchestrated the building of the first atomic bomb, Lieutenant-General Leslie Groves wrote an account of his actions in the book Now It Can Be Told. What is bizarre but illuminating in a comparison between Groves’s and English’s tomes is that more appears to remain classified about the nonviolent dismantling of the Communist bloc than the building of the atomic bomb, which led to the instantaneous deaths of at least 150,000 people. All the records associated with the clandestine CIA program to export forbidden books to Eastern Europe remain classified.
The sources that English was forced to rely upon are largely memoirs of the participants, and notably an obituary tribute published in The New York Times of George Minden. A CIA employee, Minden was the book club’s leader and believed in “an offensive of clear, honest thinking” against the lies of the Eastern Bloc. The ways that illegal literature was smuggled into the Communist dictatorships of Europe, while effective, were quite zany, although very economical. The program was quite low-cost, at its peak costing only US $2.7 million annually.
English tells how, “Books arrived by every possible means: smuggled in trucks, aboard yachts, sent by balloon, by mail, or in travellers’ luggage. Mini-editions were hidden in the sheet music of touring musicians, placed into food tins or Tampax boxes. In one instance, a copy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was carried on a flight to Moscow hidden in a baby’s diaper.” English calls this “the most highbrow intelligence” operation “ever undertaken.”
The only criticism I have of The CIA Book Club is its light coverage of how the program worked eventually in the USSR itself. I know some of this from the editor of Peace Magazine, Metta Spencer. She told me how, on the eve of the end of the Cold War, an elite group in the USSR was given access to otherwise banned literature. It was the ultimate status symbol of success in the USSR to receive one of these secret white-bound books. This paradox encouraged a system where the elite questioned the ideology on which its own power was based and made it incapable of suppressing movements in Eastern Europe opposed to its rule. This explains the context of the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev.
While acknowledging the Europe-wide nature of the CIA book club, English concentrates on its operations in Poland. The critical underground figure he describes is a founder of the Workers Defence Committee (KOR), Miroslaw Chojecki. He played an important role in the success of the Solidarity trade union, and in the first Independent Polish publishing house, NOWA, which operated through a ditto machine. KOR was formed to supply striking workers in 1976, hundreds of whom had been injured by police beatings “with food, money, medical care and legal aid.”
Following the initial success of Solidarity as an independent union, Chojecki was able to move NOWA “into the Ursus tractor plant outside Warsaw, where printers and presses would be protected by the workforce, the ultimate arbiter in the communist state.” Their biggest selling book was an account of “the secret police’s nonstop harassment” of “a famous Polish actress who had joined the KOR.” English describes the dramatic nonviolent resistance to the banning of Solidarity through the four-year Proclamation of Martial Law which lasted from 1981–1985. Here the secret of success was summarized well by the underground leader of Solidarity during this era, Zbigniew Bujak. He was a strong supporter of Solidarity’s intellectual wing, diligently “reading all the books they suggested.” Bujak came up with a catchy, successful formula for the resistance that eventually restored Solidarity to power: “Once resistance had meant taking up a gun…. Now, people instinctively took up typewriters.”
One of the most important aspects of Solidarity’s resistance was to expose the horrific crimes of repression of the Polish government. The most brutal actions took place on December 12, 1981. Then nine miners were killed by a barrage of bullets to quell a sit-in. The same day, a worker in the Lenin Shipyard was killed and 300 injured in a strike. With determination, such brutal actions were “exposed to the bright light of the world’s media.”
An odd aspect of The CIA Book Club is English’s account of fortunately failed efforts of the briefly functioning “Fighting Solidarity” to engage in violent struggle fizzled without anyone being actually injured. One attempt to move arms was prevented by a flat tire.
The most moving chapter in The CIA Book Club concerns the murdered “Turbulent Priest,” Father Jerzy Popieluszko, who was denounced by the regime for transforming his apartment into a repository for illegal literature.
The priest’s death backfired on the regime because Popieluszko had the foresight to have a bodyguard, who witnessed his abduction and escaped to tell the tale. This proved fatal to the regime, as the presence of a witness meant “the killers had left an eyewitness who could testify that Popieluszko had been violently abducted and that at least one of the kidnappers wore a police uniform. They couldn’t simply write off the priest’s death as the latest in a spate of unexplained suicides, accidents, and murders by ‘unidentified attackers’ that had plagued the opposition.” Tragically, before English could finalize his manuscript, US President Donald Trump launched actions against public agencies such as Radio Free Europe and the US Institute for Peace, which had continued to undermine dictatorships through what Minden termed “clear, honest thinking.” For his withdrawal of government funding for Radio Free Asia, spokespersons for the Chinese dictatorship even heaped praise on the president, now lauded by them as “Comrade Trump.”
Reviewed by John Bacher, a St. Catharines, Ontario environmental activist.
