Spooking the Censors

Michael O’Donnell reads Charlie English’s “The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature.”

By Michael O’DonnellAugust 13, 2025

• History

• Politics

IMAGINE YOU GO to your local library to borrow a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale. The classic novel has never been more topical, as sheriffs in Texas arrest midwives and the state of Georgia keeps a brain-dead woman on life support so her fetus can stay viable—a tragedy straight out of the Republic of Gilead. You might want to read Margaret Atwood’s 1985 book to see how bad things could get, or to find ways to fight back. But the library cannot help; this is a title that no longer circulates. You check your favorite bookstore—again, no joy. Even the online retailers, those faceless behemoths that have conquered us all, do not sell this particular novel to your area. You are in the United States. The Handmaid’s Tale is banned.

Book bans have exploded in this country over the past five years. According to PEN America, nearly 16,000 of them have been issued in public schools nationwide since 2021, a figure that rivals the dark days of the McCarthy era. The Handmaid’s Tale is number nine on PEN’s list, prohibited in 67 school districts. The majority of books outlawed in 50 or more districts were written by women, from enduring artists like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker to pop novelists like Jodi Picoult and others who merely had something provocative to say. Schools are not the only frontier; book bans have begun creeping into other walks of life. In May, the US Naval Academy removed nearly 400 books from its shelves after conducting a search for terms like “affirmative action” and “gender identity.” The Pentagon later rescinded the purge and returned most of the volumes.

Of the many ways that the Trump administration is tipping the United States towards autocracy—ignoring the courts, politicizing the military, defunding universities, attacking the civil service—the restriction of what citizens can read is an ominous sail on the horizon. The recent bans of titles for students might seem like so much old-fashioned sermonizing, all morals and pearls. Keep kids from reading about sex or drugs, and of course don’t let them encounter a queer character lest they turn pink. This nonsense is harmful enough. But it is easy to imagine the next, much broader step: a centralized effort to remove certain books from all shelves. Whether it is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or Maggie Haberman’s unflattering biography of Donald Trump, why give the enemy ammo, the thinking goes: cut off the opposition’s access to information—or inspiration. The courts might cry foul, but we have seen how this administration honors the courts. You can imagine Stephen Miller panting as he draws up a list of “woke” titles.

There is a template for this brand of intellectual repression. It comes from a place and time that was once anathema to the Right but now provides all sorts of ready-made ideas. As Charlie English shows in his new study The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature, the Soviet Union and its client regimes in Eastern Europe were rude experts in making books disappear. A Soviet list from 1951 itemized some 2,500 prohibited titles, one-fifth of them works for children. Books depicting Western life were prohibited; so were those with Jewish themes, as Soviet antisemitism was notoriously rampant. Censors scrubbed Russian history: there were to be no references to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, or to the Katyn massacre of 1940, in which Soviet secret police murdered some 22,000 Polish prisoners of war. If the Trump administration were likewise to erase the record of its most infamous misdeeds, it could restrict the Mueller report, all books about the January 6 assault on the Capitol, or studies of the administration’s catastrophic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to countless needless deaths.

Yet if the view east provides a template for intellectual repression, it also offers hope. A determined underground resistance smuggled in banned titles and set up presses to print materials in-country. In addition to Orwell’s 1949 novel, these rebels circulated the works of Boris Pasternak, Czesław Miłosz, Joseph Brodsky, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Virginia Woolf, and Václav Havel, among many others. Yet the history of contraband books behind the Iron Curtain is not black-and-white: there is a third player, and it is the grayest of gray. The CIA funded efforts to get books and periodicals into readers’ hands in Eastern Europe beginning in the 1950s, when it lofted copies of Animal Farm (1945) across the Berlin Wall by balloon. The agency’s goal was to limit the ideological isolation of the Eastern Bloc.

English, a seasoned British journalist, carefully lays out this history, focusing on the experience of Poland in the decades leading up to the fall of communism. The story of Polish underground book smuggling and printing is also the story of the Solidarity (Solidarność) movement, led by union activist Lech Wałęsa. “By pumping resources into Poland via this network,” English writes, the resistance engineered “a great flowering of uncensored texts, which at first had kept Solidarity alive and later provided space for uncensored political debate.” English’s book, despite some limitations, is well researched and briskly told. It arrives at a moment when historical inquiry is one more Enlightenment value in the Trump administration’s sights. Our national transgressions are being erased to produce a glossy memory fit for the MAGA brand. “Who controls the past controls the future,” as Orwell wrote. “[W]ho controls the present controls the past.” Trump and his cronies seem to have mistaken this warning for a blueprint.

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The Soviets suppressed books in private. “Unlike the Nazis, who burned books as a public ritual,” English writes, “in the Soviet system the destruction of literature that didn’t fit the Party’s ideas was designed to be invisible.” Apparatchiks took banned titles from bookstores and libraries in secret; they quietly edited and emended works to accord with orthodoxy. Amid such repression, uncensored literature and news was as vital as oxygen. This included Kultura, the leading Polish-language journal at midcentury. “Coming across a new edition of Kultura in communist Poland was like finding ‘fresh bread rolls,’” according to one dissident. Poles quietly passed magazines and paperbacks from hand to hand, as dangerous as weapons and as precious as gold.

In this context, the CIA in the late 1950s began acting through front groups to send books home with Poles visiting the West. Poland was a better target than the Soviet Union, English explains, because its regime was comparatively liberal and there was a strong diaspora community to harness. By 1975, the CIA formalized the books program into an organization called the International Literary Center, or ILC, whose nebbish administrator, George Minden, had to fight for his initiative against a bureaucracy that wanted to focus its resources on running agents and gathering intelligence. The ILC developed a database of tens of thousands of dissidents living in the Eastern Bloc and carefully targeted the books it sent. Paris became a critical hub where travelers could load up; the Librairie Polonaise, a venerable Polish bookshop, let visitors take several volumes for free on their way home. Its manager sent a bill to the CIA, which by the mid-1980s was covering half of the store’s inventory.

After an anti-Solidarity crackdown in 1981, the resistance shifted its efforts from smuggling books into Poland to printing them in-country. This was cheaper, it gave idle hands work to perform, and it allowed Poles to ship books elsewhere, effectively reversing the book program’s flow from an import to an export stream of ideas. Foreign partners, particularly in the Baltic states, helped the resistance smuggle in presses, ink, spare parts, and especially the master copies of the books to be printed. Occasionally, this led to catastrophe, as in November 1986 when a shipment arriving from Sweden carrying computers, ink, printing presses, and over 5,000 volumes was discovered and seized by the Polish authorities. The fiasco brought the publishing resistance to a standstill.

The risks nevertheless paid off, bringing literature into countless hands. English writes that almost 2,000 uncensored books and booklets appeared between 1982 and 1985 in the underground Polish press—each with print runs in the thousands. From the CIA side, the ILC distributed over 300,000 books across Eastern Europe in its final year alone, operating at a minuscule cost of a few million dollars annually. By contrast, the agency’s efforts to frustrate the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s, Operation Cyclone, cost some $700 million per year.  During this time, Poles were increasingly throwing off the repressions of their own government; the influence that outside literature had on them is hard to quantify but difficult to understate. English quotes Mirosław Chojecki, the leader of the Polish literary resistance, who publicly likened the regime’s lies to Orwell’s “doublethink” during his sham trial—a powerful testament to the force of ideas.

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The key weakness of The CIA Book Club is English’s surprisingly uncritical attitude toward the CIA itself. The agency famously plotted to overthrow governments and colluded with violent right-wing dictatorships in countries including Chile, Argentina, and Chad, and of course played a key role in the Iran-Contra affair during the same years as this heroic literary story. English name-checks these transgressions but fails to explore the moral complexities inherent in the CIA’s sponsorship, largely on the rationale that the rebels embraced the arrangement. Yet just as the US Naval Academy recently combed through titles searching for disfavored DEI terms—a crass exercise antithetical to free inquiry—so did the CIA review books for approval before they could be sent to Eastern Europe. A censor’s fingers always leave marks, no matter the intent. No one can object to Camus or Orwell, and the books placed into the hands of repressed Poles were of course to the good. But it is worth asking whether the agency would likewise have helped Poles access Edward Said, Eric Hobsbawm, or Howard Zinn.

That’s not to say that those left-wing intellectuals make for better reading than the authors shipped into Poland. The point is that having someone choose what others can read creates a moral hazard. The CIA treated the war of ideas in Eastern Europe as a zero-sum game—not unreasonably, for the Cold War would be won by either the United States or the Soviet Union. But such binary thinking necessarily undermines open intellectual pursuit. If free thought is curated, it is not free. The purpose of the CIA books program was to defeat an enemy, not to liberate the minds of a repressed people; the liberation was a means rather than an end. Giving access only to some ideas, or only to the right kind of ideas, was a way of defeating the enemy using its own tools. None of this is to deny that the CIA’s program was, on balance, worth its drawbacks—it almost certainly was. Yet to present it as a soaring triumph free of cost is surely too facile. A more nuanced book would have explored the fundamental paradox at the heart of the CIA’s enterprise.

The role of the United States in helping Poles access literature during the Cold War raises a question for our time: if the Trump administration were to take the next step and begin banning books outright, do we have allies who would help us in a similar way? We would require friends whom we have not alienated with crippling tariffs, cultural imperialism, and gratuitous insults. Old allies—France, Britain, Ireland—with whom we have fought wars and share fond migratory highways, would need to contribute. As The CIA Book Club demonstrates, they would require a strategic reason to do so as well. The French could send Alexis de Tocqueville. The British, John Locke. Ireland could ship in James Joyce—dangerously prurient in today’s puritanical atmosphere. Such a scenario might seem like an unlikely dystopia, something out of the pages of Margaret Atwood. Then again, until recently, so did The Handmaid’s Tale.