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."
