• United States

TO THE PEOPLE OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA
A NEW WIND IS BLOWING
A NEW HOPE IS STIRRING
Friends of Freedom in other lands have found
a new way to reach you.
They know that you also want freedom.

The CIA psychological operation dubbed “Winds of Freedom” was perfectly executed: The agency had coordinated an 11-truck convoy from Radio Free Europe in Munich to a launch site in the Bavarian countryside and correctly predicted the wind speeds and pressure points that would cause the balloons to explode across the border. The operation was also a total failure. When the fliers arrived, nobody cared. The propaganda was too crude.

The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War With Forbidden Literature, Charlie English, Random House, 384 pp., $35, July 2025

But over the coming years, through trial and error, the CIA discovered a far more effective approach than leaflets: books. As British journalist Charlie English details in The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War With Forbidden Literature, Central and Eastern Europeans were hungry for literature. Poles circulated banned books through “flying libraries,” intricate human networks of secret exchange, where readers risked imprisonment to get their hands on novels such as 1984. The Polish dissident leader Adam Michnik, who spent much of the 1980s imprisoned, said that banned books were like “fresh air.” Through a long and brutal struggle with no end in sight, “They allowed us to survive and not go mad.”

In the late 1950s, CIA agent and Romanian émigré George Minden realized that a book smuggling program could have the potential to destabilize the Soviet regime and fuel the resistance in satellite states. But Minden, who disliked the superiority and didacticism of early agency efforts, wanted to move away from cultural imperialism to collaboration with dissidents. He was chosen to lead what would come to be known as the CIA book program. Over the coming decades, this “Marshall Plan for the Mind” would smuggle nearly 10 million items, along with printing presses and materials, into the Eastern Bloc, importing banned works by writers including Czeslaw Milosz, Jospeh Brodsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Albert Camus, Kurt Vonnegut, Hannah Arendt, Philip Roth, and Vaclav Havel.

The books program was a rare agency triumph during CIA director Bill Casey’s reign. Tim Weiner, whose Legacy of Ashes chronicles the catastrophes of the era, called the program “among the most important CIA operations of the Cold War.” This should perhaps not come as a surprise. In addition to destabilizing democracies and championing imperialists, the CIA has always had great taste in art, supporting abstract expressionism, the Paris Review, and countless postwar artists at home and abroad, often without the artist’s knowledge. The CIA wanted to promote art that championed freedom and individualism to fight communism, win hearts and minds, and counter the Soviet-promoted idea that, as historian Lucie Levine put it, “the United States was a ‘culturally barren’ capitalist wasteland.” Art supported by the CIA would go a long way in showing the world that the United States was actually a culturally rich capitalist wasteland.

Journalists look at newspapers in Warsaw, Poland, on May 31, 1989, during the run-up to elections organized after an agreement was reached between the communist government and the Solidarity movement. Bernard Bisson/Sygma via Getty Images

English, a former editor at the Guardian, interviewed countless surviving members of the Polish resistance to tell the story of how CIA-bought books—and equally, if not more importantly, printing presses—fueled a patient and determined underground of journalists, printers, editors, smugglers, and writers who risked everything to resist.

English’s history of Solidarity is detailed and expansive, but one of the most striking threads is that of Mazovia Weekly, an underground publication launched in 1982 by the Women’s Operational Group, a collection of veteran dissident journalists headed by Helena Luczywo. Through the quality of the paper’s writing, production, and editing—a joke about their minimalist editorial style went, “What is a pole? A tree edited by Mazovia Weekly”—Mazovia Weekly became the most important Polish underground publication of the 1980s.

Over that decade, Mazovia Weekly reached an estimated circulation of up to 80,000—which, even aided by CIA funds, was a staggering figure considering that reporting, editing, printing, and distribution all had to be done in secret. Those running the paper evaded detection for more than six years, in part because the secret police didn’t think women could lead such a successful operation.

Protestors in Gdansk, Poland, during the August 1988 strikes.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images.

In August 1988, when major strikes led by young workers broke out in parts of the country, Mazovia Weekly needed to spread the word. The industrial unrest was so serious that U.S. intelligence believed it could be the worst crisis for the Polish government since it had instituted martial law in 1981. But there was a problem: No one had expected the strikes, and the entire staff was on vacation except for deputy editor Joanna Szczesna. Szczesna tried to get coded messages to her colleagues on the seaside to return home, but with tapped phones and widespread surveillance, she soon realized that if she wanted to put out a special edition of the newspaper, “she would have to do it solo.”

She worked for five days straight, traveling to plants and coal mines to report and writing all the articles herself, barely sleeping. The night she finally sent the issue to press, she woke to a knock on her door. Thankfully, it was not what Solzhenitsyn called the “night-time ring,” that moment when agents arrived at the door to take you away. It was a messenger with the urgent news that a belt on the printer had broken and the publisher could not produce the paper until it was replaced.

Under martial law, printing banned materials carried a prison sentence of 10 years, and neighbors, bus drivers, or colleagues could be informants—even the priest who took the last confessions of condemned prisoners at the Mokotow Prison. To avoid detection, “health and safety” protocols employed by the underground meant not only that printers moved every week, but that every element of printing and distribution took place at a different location, and “no one had the full picture of who was doing what or where.”

In Mazovia Weekly’s early days, Szczesna would visit friends and acquaintances in hopes of finding “hosts”—apartments where newspaper staff could temporarily set up printing operations. Like the earlier “flying libraries,” the paper would always be on the move. Printers would only use each apartment for three days a week every two months, but hosting was still no small request, since for those days, “typewriters would be clacking away twenty-four seven. … They would keep the lights on day and night, and everyone chain-smoked as if their lives depended on it.”

Students at Warsaw University stage a sit-in during the run-up to the June 1989 elections. Bernard Bisson/Sygma via Getty Images

But when the printing belt broke, Szczesna didn’t have time for niceties. She visited underground editors directly, at great personal risk, but nobody had the belt she needed. Finally, she got the name of a printer who owned the same press. She found him attending mass and urgently told him what she needed. Like a bad Soviet joke, he answered: “I’m the person printing Mazovia Weekly for you. It’s my machine’s belt that has broken.”

Just as Szczesna was hitting her breaking point—pouring glasses of water on herself to stay awake—the paper’s head of production arrived back from vacation and dashed into action. Thousands of copies were published and smuggled across the country. Shortly afterward, police burst into an editorial meeting—the first time in Mazovia Weekly’s six-and-a-half-year history that the journalists had been discovered. But by then, it was too late for the regime: The strikes had “marked a turning point in the ‘uphill war,’” and the officers couldn’t arrest anyone in fear of disrupting secret negotiations between the government and the opposition.

The following year, the Round Table Talks between the government and Solidarity yielded an agreement for elections and relaxation of censorship. Solidarity was allowed a newspaper—which it needed to mobilize voters for the first election just two months away—and the editors of Mazovia Weekly ended the paper’s run to team up with newly freed resistance leader Adam Michnik on the Election Gazette. Supported by editors at the New York Review of Books, in two months, the Election Gazette reached a daily circulation of 450,000 and helped carry Solidarity to victory in the 1989 elections—the first Eastern Bloc election that the communists lost.

People read in the International Book Club in Warsaw in 1960.Claude Jacoby/ullstein bild via Getty Images

But the book is more than just a timely read—it is a thrilling and moving history outside of any contemporary American context. I have the bad habit of imagining myself in any story I read, but even I struggled to put myself into the shoes of Miroslaw Chojecki, who went on hunger strike in prison and endured a rubber tube jammed down his throat for daily force feeding, or Luczywo, who sacrificed seeing her young daughter for years to live underground and put out Mazovia Weekly. I could identify more with the civilians who offered up their apartment to turn it into a printing press. I wondered: Would I be brave enough to do even that if my worst doomscrolling fears came true? To risk imprisonment to help the heroes? But then I stopped myself. It is one thing to learn from the past; it is another to confuse imagined future persecution with the real persecution others have endured.

In 1983, after years of harassment and assault, the poet and Solidarity activist Barbara Sadowska learned that her 18-year-old son had been beaten to death by the secret police. She wrote:

My hands are full of holes.
Falling out of them
Are the first tiny cherries
Of the year.
I don’t think I can carry them
To you,
My little son