‘It allowed us to survive, to not go mad’: the CIA book smuggling operation that helped bring down communism (Charlie English, 22 Feb 2025, The Guardian)
Years later, in 1976, when Bogucka joined the emerging Polish opposition movement, she decided to create a library of books that had bypassed the state censor, and donated her own small collection, including this Nineteen Eighty-Four. The SB security service, Poland’s KGB, kept continual watch on her, eavesdropping on her conversations, arresting her and searching her apartment, so she asked neighbours to store the forbidden books. Much of the time, though, they would be circulating among readers, since this would be a “Flying Library”, which rarely touched the ground.
Bogucka’s system of covert lending ran through a network of coordinators, each of whom was responsible for their own tight group of readers. She sorted the books into categories – politics, economics, history, literature – and divided them into packages of 10, before allocating each coordinator a particular day to pick up their parcel, which they carried away in a rucksack. The coordinator would drop the books back the following month at a different address, before picking up a new set.
The demand for Bogucka’s books was such that soon she needed more, and these could only come from the west. Activist friends passed word to London, where émigré publishers arranged shipments of 30 or 40 volumes at a time, smuggling them through the iron curtain aboard the sleeper trains that shuttled back and forth between Paris and Moscow, stopping in Poland along the way. By 1978, Teresa Bogucka’s Flying Library had a stock of 500 prohibited titles.How many people read her copy of Orwell’s book in those crucial cold war years? Hundreds, probably thousands. And this was just one of millions of titles that arrived illegally in Poland at that time. As well as via trains, books arrived by every possible conveyance: aboard yachts; in secret compartments built into vans and trucks; by balloon; in the post. Mini-editions were slipped into the sheet music of touring musicians, or packed into food tins or Tampax boxes. In one instance, a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was carried on a flight to Warsaw hidden in a baby’s nappy.
What some in the east suspected, but very few knew for sure, was that the uncensored literature flooding the country wasn’t reaching Poles by chance. It was sent as part of a decades-long US intelligence operation, known in Washington as the “CIA book program”, designed, in the words of the programme’s leader, George Minden, to assault the eastern bloc with an “offensive of free, honest thinking”. Minden believed that “truth is contagious”, and if they could only deliver it to the oppressed peoples of the Soviet zone, it was certain to have an effect.