In the 1980s, the American government spent billions of dollars on paramilitary campaigns to advance Cold War objectives. They also spent something like $20 million on a series of information campaigns.
Effective as it was, few are interested in celebrating the effectiveness of what more often got laughed about in military circles, including funding secret newspapers and distributing banned literature within the Soviet system, Poland in particular.
This is documented in The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature, a book published this summer and written by Charlie English.
The book is not really about the CIA, that’s just a particularly compelling subplot. Rather the bulk of the book is a thorough rehashing the Polish underground resistance and how that intersects and was often funded in part by the CIA. The subterfuge is inspiring in a sense, the power of free information. I enjoyed the book and recommend it to other history fans.
Below find my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- “It was books that were victorious in the fight. We should build a monument to books.” Adam Michnik of Gazeta Wyborcza (‘Election Gazette’) told the author
- Teresa Bogucka’s “Flying library” is the opening story: in Poland she kept a copy of 1984 with the cover of a 1970s computer technical manual and exchanged books
- A copy of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was snuck into Moscow inside a baby’s diaper
- CIA supported dissidents, it didn’t direct them
- Publisher Miroslaw Chojecki (hoy-yet-ski) was arrested (for the 43rd time) March 1980 in evening at his home
- The Nazi’s burned books publicly, the Soviets did so quietly — Poland overrun by one and then the other
- August 1951: CIA agents let fly balloons filled with leaflets into Czech from west German spoil, this if the start of the “winds of freedom”” program, but the 500k balloons and 300m leaflets of freedom were mostly ignored. They moved on to mailing somewhat random addresses but similar result. Then they tried mailing books, and there were so welcome that people sometimes wrote back asking for more
- Free Radio Europe was by the same CIA committee
- George Minden: the enemy wasn’t the inferiority of the east but the intellectual straight jacket of the Soviet system
- Doubleday, Hachette and Barnes and Noble among the publishers who gave the CIA special discounts and even mailed the literature directly : many of the pieces overtly political but also just general art books
- Among the tens of thousands of those who received periodicals and books, one was Cardinal Karol Wojtyla — who became pope John Paul II
- Though books were sent everywhere including the USSR, it was Poland with its big population, relatively less oppressive mail screening and history of democracy and fending off the Soviets that was the biggest target
- “Gay, untroubled songs” Solzenitsyn Gulag Archipelago
- Schlesinger: history is a pendulum swinging back and forth
- October 1981 Frankfurt book fair , the independent polish press got NYT coverage and conference attention— many of the press were CIA funded
- Helena Luczywo Dark Circles Solidarity Press agency: her experience fleeing Operation Azaela in 1981
- Jerzy Zielinski veteran of Warsaw uprising turned journalist jumped to his death from a hospital as the Polish operation Fir Tree
- Other dissidents advanced Mazovia Weekly paper
- Black Maria police vans
- The Polish coup: anyone distributing news that was “weakening the defense preparedness of the Polish People’s Republic” would be subject to a jail term of 1 to 8 years
- Chojecki brought to US to make Polish issues present for American leaders
- Flying offices and flying universities like the flying libraries: flying offices were for Warsaw underground
- “Being female was advantage, the women found, because the security services were generally chauvinist and tended to underestimate them.”
- Because if communists pressured Poles to be atheist, Poles became more devoted to Pope John Paul II
- Ford Foundation paid Chojecki in 1982 ($28k annually) likely as part of it being an extension of CIA
- Mazovia Weekly might have hit 80k print copies at peak with a network of distributed printers — how radical should they get? In February 1987 should they run Kuron essay from prison arguing for a massive uprising and show of force? Organizers debated
- Reagan agreed to $2m to QRHELPFUL, including buying printing equipment and propaganda campaigns
- Always giving money through intermediaries: often with literal brown envelopes of cash
- Satellite tv in the late 1980s
- Gorbachev Glasnost in 1980s
- Because we are all interconnected in a ‘plurality,” Hannah Arendt wrote in 1958 The Human Condition: “Nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives or will live.”
- 450k circulation Election Gazette after constraints were liberalized: “your president, our prime minister” op ed to avoid civil war in first elections
- Round table talks ending communism
- Why so little attention for the information campaign? Relatively little cost and operating in the background: QRHELPFUL cost $18.6m over 5 years and the book program was $2m-$4m annually. In contrast Operation Cyclone in 1987 cost $700m — politically expedient to say Afghanistan ended the Cold War not information campaigns (paramilitary efforts vs book sponsorship)