‘1984’ Hasn’t Changed, but America Has; The New York Times, July 27, 2025

Charlie English , The New York Times; ‘1984’ Hasn’t Changed, but America Has

[Kip Currier: It's incredibly heartening -- and disheartening at the same time -- to read about post-WWII "CIA Book Program" efforts to provide Soviet-propagandized citizens with access to books, ideas, and information (e.g. George Orwell's "1984"), but then reflect on book banning efforts in American libraries and censorship and erasure of information in museums like the Smithsonian right now.]

[Excerpt]

"There are myriad reasons the Eastern Bloc collapsed in 1989. The economic stagnation of the East and the war in Afghanistan are two of the most commonly cited. But literature also played its part, thanks to a long-running U.S. operation conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency that covertly moved millions of books through the Iron Curtain in a bid to undermine Communist Party censorship.

While it is hard to quantify the program’s effect in absolute terms, its history offers valuable lessons for today, not least since some of the very same titles and authors the C.I.A. sent East during the Cold War — including “1984”— are now deemed objectionable by a network of conservative groups across the United States.

First published in English in 1949, Orwell’s novel describes the dystopian world of Oceania, a totalitarian state where the protagonist, Winston Smith, works in a huge government department called the Ministry of Truth. The ministry is ironically named: Its role is not to safeguard the truth but to destroy it, to edit history to fit the present needs of the party and its leader, Big Brother, since, as the slogan runs, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

In the real Soviet system, every country had its equivalent of the Ministry of Truth, modeled on the Moscow template. In Poland, the largest Eastern European nation outside the Soviet Union, this censorship and propaganda apparatus was called the Main Office for the Control of Presentations and Public Performances, and its headquarters occupied most of a city block in downtown Warsaw.

From art to advertising, television to theater, the Main Office reached into all aspects of Polish life. It had employees in every TV and radio station, every film studio and every publishing house. Every typewriter in Poland had to be registered, access to every photocopier was restricted, and a permit was needed even to buy a ream of paper. Books that did not conform to the censor’s rules were pulped.

The result was intellectual stultification, what the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz called a logocracy, a society where words and language were manipulated to fit the propaganda needs of the regime...

Troublesome people, inconvenient facts and awkward areas of journalistic inquiry were removed from public life...

Orwell was made a “nonperson” in the Soviet Union, after the publication of his satire of the Russian Revolution, “Animal Farm,” in 1945. It was dangerous even to mention the author’s name in print there, and when “1984” was published it was banned in the Eastern Bloc in all languages. But when copies of the novel did slip through the Iron Curtain, they had enormous power. The book was “difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess,” Milosz wrote, but Orwell — who had never visited Eastern Europe — fascinated people there because of “his insight into details they know well.”

What some Eastern European readers of contraband copies of “1984” suspected, but very few knew for sure, was that these and millions of other uncensored texts were not reaching them entirely by chance, but were part of a decades-long U.S. intelligence operation called the “C.I.A. book program,” based for much of its existence in the nondescript office building at 475 Park Avenue South in Midtown Manhattan. There, a small team of C.I.A. employees organized the infiltration of 10 million books and periodicals into the Eastern Bloc, sending literature by every imaginable means: in trucks fitted with secret compartments, on yachts that traversed the stormy Baltic, in the mail, or slipped into the luggage of countless travelers from Eastern Europe who dropped in at C.I.A. distribution hubs in the West."

CIA historian Tim Weiner: ‘Trump has put national security in the hands of crackpots and fools’; The Guardian, July 15, 2025

 Aaron Gell, The Guardian; CIA historian Tim Weiner: ‘Trump has put national security in the hands of crackpots and fools’

"Trump’s anti-diversity crusade will also have national security repercussions, Weiner predicted. In February, a judge allowed the administration to reassign the team responsible for diversifying the agency. “For decades, the CIA has tried to hire people who don’t look like they just got off the bus from Kansas on the very sound principle that if you want to spy in a nation like Somalia or Pakistan or China, it might be wise to have a workforce that is not made up exclusively of white guys, and who speak languages other than English,” Weiner said. “Diversity was one of the CIA’s few superpowers, and the mindless abolition of the effort to diversify the CIA’s officers and analysts was one of the most stupid self-inflicted wounds that Ratcliffe could have delivered.”"

The CIA smuggled the Guardian into the eastern bloc during the cold war; The Guardian, February 22, 2025

Ella Creamer, The Guardian; The CIA smuggled the Guardian into the eastern bloc during the cold war

 "The CIA smuggled the Guardian Weekly to eastern bloc countries during the cold war, a new book reveals. Copies of this newspaper were sent as part of a broader secret programme that got literature by authors including George Orwell and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn behind the Iron Curtain.

In the early 70s, Guardian Weekly was sent to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, said Charlie English, former head of international news at the Guardian and author of The CIA Book Club.

Under the “CIA book program”, the US intelligence agency sent approximately 10m books east over the three decades leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The programme aimed to “combat the stultification that Stalinism imposed on the eastern bloc”, where censorship was rife, and show those living there that “the west hadn’t forgotten about them”, said English...

The CIA Book Club details the significant role of the late Jerzy Giedroyc, a relative of the former Great British Bake Off television presenter Mel Giedroyc, in the CIA’s operations. He was “perhaps the most important person in the west helping the CIA ship books into Poland” and considered a “hero of the Polish independence movement”, said the author.

While the book programme is given “almost no credit” for bringing about the end of the cold war, dissidents say literature was vital to the anti-communist movement in Poland, and former CIA officers believe it played a significant role in ending the war."

US intelligence agencies’ embrace of generative AI is at once wary and urgent; Associated Press, May 23, 2024

FRANK BAJAK , Associated Press; US intelligence agencies’ embrace of generative AI is at once wary and urgent

"The CIA’s inaugural chief technology officer, Nand Mulchandani, thinks that because gen AI models “hallucinate” they are best treated as a “crazy, drunk friend” — capable of great insight and creativity but also bias-prone fibbers. There are also security and privacy issues: adversaries could steal and poison them, and they may contain sensitive personal data that officers aren’t authorized to see.

That’s not stopping the experimentation, though, which is mostly happening in secret. 

An exception: Thousands of analysts across the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies now use a CIA-developed gen AI called Osiris. It runs on unclassified and publicly or commercially available data — what’s known as open-source. It writes annotated summaries and its chatbot function lets analysts go deeper with queries...

Another worry: Ensuring the privacy of “U.S. persons” whose data may be embedded in a large-language model.

“If you speak to any researcher or developer that is training a large-language model, and ask them if it is possible to basically kind of delete one individual piece of information from an LLM and make it forget that -- and have a robust empirical guarantee of that forgetting -- that is not a thing that is possible,” John Beieler, AI lead at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in an interview.

It’s one reason the intelligence community is not in “move-fast-and-break-things” mode on gen AI adoption."

WikiLeaks Releases What It Calls CIA Trove Of Cyber-Espionage Documents; NPR, March 7, 2017

Camila Domonoske, NPR; 

WikiLeaks Releases What It Calls CIA Trove Of Cyber-Espionage Documents

"WikiLeaks has released thousands of files that it identifies as CIA documents related to the agency's cyber-espionage tools and programs.

The documents published on Tuesday include instruction manuals, support documents, notes and conversations about, among other things, efforts to exploit vulnerabilities in smartphones and turn smart TVs into listening devices. The tools appear to be designed for use against individual targets, as part of the CIA's mandate to gather foreign intelligence."

Online Privacy Issue Is Also in Play in Petraeus Scandal; HuffingtonPost.com, 11/13/12

Scott Shane, HuffingtonPost.com; Online Privacy Issue Is Also in Play in Petraeus Scandal: "The F.B.I. investigation that toppled the director of the C.I.A. and has now entangled the top American commander in Afghanistan underscores a danger that civil libertarians have long warned about: that in policing the Web for crime, espionage and sabotage, government investigators will unavoidably invade the private lives of Americans. On the Internet, and especially in e-mails, text messages, social network postings and online photos, the work lives and personal lives of Americans are inextricably mixed. Private, personal messages are stored for years on computer servers, available to be discovered by investigators who may be looking into completely unrelated matters."