Book Review of the CIA Book Club by Charlie English

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Lessons we need to learn for the future from the past successes and failures of the CIA

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher)

This is an heroically-researched (in the face of Covid restrictions) and well-referenced book about one of the CIA’s most ethical covert operations, which was much more successful than any of their known, less ethical overt operations. Between the nineteen-fifties until the very beginning of the nineteen-nineties, the CIA encouraged, funded and organised the supply, by divers routes, of books and other literature to people living in Communist countries. In this case that means “Warsaw Pact” countries in general and Poland in particular, mainly because that’s where the Books Programme found most traction: it doesn’t seem to have even been attempted as far as Laos or Cambodia are concerned.

One of the ways in which this programme was ethical was a reluctance to incite violence and when this was attempted, towards the end, much against the instincts of many of the Polish dissidents involved, things went very wrong, very quickly (but too late in the day to matter all that much). The other way in which the programme was unusually ethical by CIA standards was that in the first instance the literature smuggled into Poland was anything and everything that Polish people might be interested in and was censored by their own government. It was propaganda, but in a very different sense from Communist propaganda because the idea was to encourage people to think for themselves rather than to stop them thinking at all. Once contact had been established and the organisers had an address for someone who wanted banned literature (or even literature which would be banned if the Communists knew about it) efforts were made to meet any specific request or need. This in turn led to original creative material coming out of Poland to the West for publication and distribution to interested readers in the West as well as for redistribution to and within Poland. That two way street was probably the most important thing. The CIA wasn’t using the programme to gather military intelligence (they evidently kept that function entirely separate) but the political intelligence they got through the programme was priceless because it was what their Polish clients actually thought and more especially wrote, rather than what intelligence analysts guessed they might be thinking: the programme gave the Poles a VOICE and not simply books. Capitalism only beats Communism when the customer is allowed to exercise a choice: when choice is denied, liberal democracy dies and capitalism falls with it. The book programme was a cost-effective success because it was customer-led, if not quite based on the golden premise that the customer is always right. (The customer has a right to learn from making his own mistakes.)

Unfortunately, this was not true of very many other CIA programmes and a strong bias towards expensive failure can be detected in very many parts of the world; especially Afghanistan. And if the CIA even understood that Generals Pinochet and Galtieri were essentially the same thing as the Polish Communist military leader, General Jaruzelski, save that they were the CIA’s men and under the CIA’s control: the CIA were only half right about Pinochet and wrong on both counts with Galtieri because both South American leaders were more willing to kill their own people on a large scale than Jaruzelski and Galtieri’s concept of a really smart move was to start a war with America’s most important ally. And that reluctance to exterminate rather than oppress is another reason why the book programme actually worked in the end by bringing about a free Poland, even if the CIA’s military faction believed that Communism (other than in China, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam…) fell because they had brilliantly achieved a free Afghanistan! Perhaps it’s a little unfair to judge that claim with the benefit of hindsight.

Jaruzelski did not want to lose power himself, nor did he want to see the end of Communism. But he was still Polish and didn’t want to fight a hot war with his own people if he could possibly negotiate his way out of it. And it was only because the Book Programme had given the Polish people a voice, despite his own best efforts, that there was anyone to negotiate with! He sent General Kisczak to the “Round Table” negotiations with Solidarity, which led to a new constitution and an election, and then it was those who’d published underground newspapers with the support of the Book Programme, who managed to grasp the very fleeting opportunity that an unexpected election, in which the Communists still seemed to hold all the cards, actually represented.

All this resulted, not from some great plan, or skilled psychological manipulation of the irrational masses by an enlightened oligarchical elite, but from simply giving the customer what he asked for and then letting him think for himself and take charge of his own destiny. That’s exactly what we in the West have had taken from us since February 2020 and that’s why this is the most timely and important book this reviewer has read in many years.

The CIA Book Club, by Charlie English is published in the UK by Fourth Estate/ William Collins on the 13^th of March 2025.