Books Behind the Iron Curtain: Cold War & CIA's Covert Cultural Campaign in CIA Book Club

Q. How did this book come about? Obviously, this was a long program, how did you decide to get immersed in this?

A. Yes, it took me probably about five years or so from start to finish to write it. I came to it really because I've been writing a series of books about culture in periods of conflict or periods of war. I wrote a book about saving some Islamic manuscripts from Al Qaeda in West Africa. And I wrote a book about Hitler’s attitude to art and cultural policy more broadly. So I was kind of in this area of looking around for stories that I thought were interesting and that were really a kind of enabled me to take a kind of a thriller type structure to a non-fiction story, and I came across this story of the CIA using literature in order to, well, in effect win the Cold War . And I thought it was something that I could really get into in some detail and that nobody had really told properly before. So yeah, that's how I came upon it.



Q. In terms of keeping it accessible for the reader, how did you find that balance in writing a good piece of history , making it visible, investigative journalism in this manner, while being aware of your audience?

A. I think that the genre I’m in really is trying to tell a true story, a historical story, in a way that is as easy to digest as possible for the reader. So there's a very big difference between writing this kind of book and writing a more academic history of, for instance, the CIA book program. And in this case, I'm trying to find characters, situations, hopefully single operations that can be told in a way that drives the narrative forward. So the genre is called narrative nonfiction for a reason. It's supposed to be accessible, if you like. But I don't see any real compromise in doing that and putting across the history as it was at the time. And I think, you know, I'm a journalist by profession. I've spent decades working out how to find out information and how to relate them to audiences in as digestible a way as possible. And I think that's really what I'm trying to do with this book. I'm trying to find out new information. I mean, that's important to me. Information that isn't just out there in a. In a kind of Google anyway. So that involved a lot of interviewing. With this kind of book, what you're trying to do is recreate the moments. So this requires a very high level way of interviewing where you spend a lot of time with people and you're trying to get into what they thought at a particular time. Trying to, I mean, for instance, describe the weather on that day. And you know, there are sources out there, weather reports that you can dig into. So you can more or less describe what the day was like in Warsaw in 1980, for instance. And so I'm really trying to reconstruct, those Cold War moments and make it very real to the reader.





Q. How much research and investigation and background work did you do before you actually reached out to your interviewees?

A. I think for me it's a sort of organic process. So I start out with a meeting and this, and then I talk to other people who were around the same time and the same event. And gradually you sort of build up a picture. I don't know, maybe it's like painting a watercolour or something. But you get a bit of information from one person and then you go back to the original person, you say, well, so. And so, you know, remembered this bit. Was that like, was it like that for you? And so, joking aside, I think when they compared me to communist era interrogators, I think if there's a serious point there, it's that you go to an interviewee with some knowledge of what the situation was and what somebody else has said about that situation. So you sort of know what they're going to say or perhaps what they're not going to say. And I think that's, that's how you gradually kind of fill in the colour in. In this kind of environment.





Q. Could you describe what the CIA book club was? Not just the fact that it crossed countries, but the number of publishers and individuals involved in it.

A. It began in the early 1950s and it ran right through to 1991. And what it was an attempt to bypass the censorship systems which existed in the Eastern bloc at that time. So you've got to think every East European country had a censor who worked for the Communist Party. And they were built on the Soviet model. There was one of these in Moscow, but there was also one in Warsaw and Prague and wherever. And the censors’ job was really to prevent anybody from reading about or seeing or really thinking about anything that contradicted the Marxist Leninist philosophy of the party. So it was a very stultifying environment. Certain types of art, for instance, were completely outlawed. There was a prescribed way of doing art, there was a prescribed way of writing literature and so on. You weren't allowed to use allegory, for instance, as a literary device. So something like Orwell's Animal Farm, which is, as you know, an allegorical story about the Russian Revolution, was anathema because it was written in a way that had multiple meanings which the Communist Party, particularly under Stalin, didn't like. So the book club was designed as a way of getting around this. It was aimed to smuggle in literature that was banned, effectively or outlawed in the Eastern Bloc. And over that period of 35 or so years, they shipped in something like 10 million periodicals and books of a huge range of material. There was, there was political stuff, for instance, like Orwell or Solzhenitsyn, but there was also much softer material, we might say, like Marie Claire magazine or Cosmopolitan magazine. And I mean, as people who lived in the Eastern bloc at that time told me, even this material had a very strong propagandistic effect because, for instance, if you have to queue for your food, if you don't have a. An apartment, you have to go on a waiting list, you probably don't own your own car. So to see, for instance, Marie Claire magazine, which is full of these gorgeous fashions and emblematic of all the freedoms that were available in other parts of the world at that time, then that has a very strong effect. You know, it makes you want to change your system and make the system into something that is much more liberated. So, yeah, it was a very long running program. Very large amount of material was sent. And I think it had a very impactful effect on ending the Cold War.