Vol. 41, No. 18
12/01/2025
Using Words as Weapons
The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War With Forbidden Literature, by Charlie English, New York: Random House, 2025, 380 pages, hardcover.
Freedom is liable to be lost when people won’t fight for it. We encounter many people in this stimulating and well-researched volume who lost, and then, by fighting back, regained their liberties. There is considerably more, including despots doing the bidding of a Soviet-backed regime; spies and double agents; information warfare; valiant dissidents; dueling intelligence agencies and secret police; international smugglers; courageous clergy; a CIA book program; and a wider campaign supporting the Polish opposition to communism, with a code name most readers probably have not heard of (QRHELPFUL). (That specific program dates to President Ronald Reagan’s administration, though there had been an agency “book program” for decades; the efforts get somewhat muddled in the telling. Most of the related files remain classified.)
The rather imprecise name of this title notwithstanding, this is not a story about a clandestine version of Oprah’s book club.
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