The CIA Book Club reveals how the West won minds behind the Iron Curtain

How the CIA, instead of pursuing scandalous swashbuckling interventions, smuggled books to weaken the Iron Curtain and offer Eastern Europe a glimpse of an alternative future

The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War

by Charlie English

Published by HarperCollins

361 pages   ₹699

  For earnest Indian university students, at least until the eighties, George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago were standard social reading. These and other “intellectual” books, readily available and easily borrowed, were discussed threadbare during adda sessions, the duration of which depended on the number of classes we felt compelled to miss. It is striking to discover, then, that for contemporaries behind the Iron Curtain, these and many other authors — including Agatha Christie! — were