During the Cold War, 260,000 lightweight copies of Animal Farm floated into eastern Europe, carried by balloons. They were part of the CIA’s huge covert operation to slip ‘cultural enlightenment’ through chinks in the Iron Curtain. The agency sponsored the clandestine distribution of millions of books, journals and leaflets designed to undermine communism and promote democracy throughout the region. Additional contraband included printing presses, paper and ink, photocopiers, fax machines, videos, audio cassettes, computers and floppy disks – all of which aided the production of underground newspapers and other subversive publications. The items were sent not only by balloon but also by mail and diplomatic bag; they were smuggled across frontiers in trucks and trains and sneaked in aboard boats. John Matthews, who worked for Radio Free Europe, another propaganda organisation secretly funded by the CIA, described its so-called ‘book programme’ as ‘the West’s Secret Marshall Plan for the Mind’. 

How secret was it? Not completely, despite the subtitle of Charlie English’s book. As early as 1958, William F Buckley Jr, writing in his right-wing National Review, congratulated the CIA on getting Doctor Zhivago into the hands of Russians. During the 1960s, there was a furore over the revelation that the CIA was giving surreptitious financial support to the anti-communist literary magazine Encounter, which was published in London. This fed speculation: if the spooks were trying to indoctrinate America’s allies, they would surely be doing the same, through a shadowy web of proxies, to its enemies. Articles appeared in the 1990s confirming such suspicions and several subsequent books told the story in more detail. Prominent among them was Alfred A Reisch’s Hot Books in the Cold War (2013), which characterised the book programme as ideological, political, cultural and psychological warfare all in one.

On the other hand, the programme’s boss, a Romanian exile called George Minden who was obsessed with security, managed to conceal nearly all its activities during his long tenure. While other CIA operations were exposed and curtailed after the Watergate scandal, Minden continued to work under the radar, conducting his