'Entertaining and vivid… This is a gripping account of an intriguing and little-known Cold War moment' OBSERVER

'Reads like a thriller' THE SUN

The astonishing story of the ten million books that were smuggled across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

For almost five decades after World War II, Europe was divided by the largest and most heavily guarded border in the world. The Iron Curtain, an almost impenetrable barrier of barbed wire and walls, tank traps, minefields, observation posts, and men with dogs, stretched for 4,300 miles from the Arctic to the Black Sea. There would not be a country that faced physical conflict on this front: the risk of nuclear destruction was far too high for that. Instead, the conflict would prove psychological. It was a battle for hearts, minds, and intellectual approaches.

No one understood this better than George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the CIA's book program, which aimed to win the Cold War with literature.

From its headquarters in Manhattan, Minden and the CIA’s global ‘library’ would penetrate millions of banned titles in the Eastern Bloc, written by a vast and eclectic list of authors, including Hannah Arendt and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell, and Agatha Christie. Tomes were smuggled in trucks and on yachts, dropped from balloons, and hidden in the luggage of hundreds of thousands of individuals. Once they entered the Soviet bloc, each book circulated secretly among dozens of like-minded readers, slowly turning them into dissidents. Later, underground printing operations also began to reproduce the books.

By the late 1980s, illegal literature in Poland had become so widespread that the communist censorship system collapsed, and soon the Iron Curtain followed.

Charlie English tells this true story of espionage, smuggling, and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who risked their lives to resist the intellectual stranglehold that Stalin had created. People like Miroslaw Chojecki, an underground Polish publisher who endured abuse, forced feeding, and exile in service of this mission. And Minden, the CIA designer, who had unshakeable faith that truth, culture, and diversity of thought could help liberate the 'occupied nations' of Eastern Europe. This is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. Books, it shows, can set you free.

Pages: 384, Dimensions: 15.9x15.9cm