5 d. ago
The CIA Book Club by Charlie English review – ‘It was like fresh air’
A fascinating, exciting history of how the agency smuggled subversive books across the iron curtainIn, I think, November 1978, I got a call from a rather grand British journalist who’d heard that I was about to go to Moscow. “A Russian friend of mine would dearly like the latest volume of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. I don’t suppose you’d smuggle it in for him?” I did, of course, disguising it rather feebly by wrapping it in the dust jacket of the most boring book I owned: Lebanon, A Country in Transition. A customs official at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport flicked through it briefly, but even though the text was in Russian he didn’t spot what it was about. Two nights later, near the entrance to Gorky Park, I handed over the book to a shifty character who seemed to be a supplier of forbidden goods to the dissident community. He gave me a small 18th-century icon in exchange for it.It’s only now, all these years later, that I’ve realised I was almost certainly a rather n...
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