000			03867nam a2200301 4500
008			250622b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9780008495138
037			_cPurchased _nMathrubhumi Books, Kaloor
041			_aEnglish
082			_a327.1273 _bENG/CI
100			_aEnglish, Charlie
245			_aCIA BOOK CLUB : Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War
250			_a1
260			_aLondon _bWilliam Collins _c2025
300			_g 361
500			_aThe astonishing story of the ten million books that were smuggled across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. For almost five decades after the Second World War, Europe was divided by the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. The Iron Curtain, a near-impenetrable barrier of wire and wall, tank traps, minefields, watchtowers and men with dogs, stretched for 4,300 miles from the Arctic to the Black Sea. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the conflict would be fought in the psychological sphere. It was a battle for hearts, minds and intellects. No one understood this more clearly than George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the ‘CIA books programme’, which aimed to win the Cold War with literature. From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden’s global CIA ‘book club’ would infiltrate millions of banned titles into the Eastern Bloc, written by a vast and eclectic list of authors, including Hannah Arendt and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell and Agatha Christie. Volumes were smuggled on trucks and aboard yachts, dropped from balloons, and hidden in the luggage of hundreds of thousands of individual travellers. Once inside Soviet bloc, each book would circulate secretly among dozens of like-minded readers, quietly turning them into dissidents. Latterly, underground print shops began to reproduce the books, too. By the late 1980s, illicit literature in Poland was so pervasive that the system of communist censorship broke down, and the Iron Curtain soon followed. Charlie English tells this true story of spycraft, smuggling and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who risked their lives to stand up to the intellectual strait-jacket Stalin created. People like Miroslaw Chojecki, an underground Polish publisher who endured beatings, force-feeding and exile in service of this mission. And Minden, the CIA’s mastermind, who didn’t waver in his belief that truth, culture, and diversity of thought could help free the ‘captive 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.
505			_aPrologue: Teresa's Flying Library PART ONE: HOPE (1980-1981) A Snaggle-Toothed Thought Machine Our Friends Down South The French Connection An International Spider Web They Will Crush Us Like Bugs The Deal PART TWO: WAR (1981-1985) The Night of the General This Is Big Casino Citizens versus the Secret Police Raphael Ideas for Getting Out of a No-Win Situation HELPFUL Oh Sh**! Reactionary Propaganda! This Turbulent Priest The Network PART THREE: RECKONING (1986-1989) The Regina Affair A General, a Lowly Recruit and All Ranks in Between Television Free Europe High Noon Bloody Feliks Epilogue: The Best-Kept Secret
650			_aBooks and reading Europe, Eastern
650			_aCensorship Europe History 20th century
650			_aPublishers and publishing Europe History 20th century
650			_aUnderground literature Poland
650			_aUnderground literature Soviet Union
650			_aUnited States. Central Intelligence Agency
650			_aPoland History 1980-1989
942			_cLEN
942			_2ddc
942			_2ddc
999			_c195732 _d195732