
For almost five decades after the Second World War, Europe was divided by the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. The Iron Curtain, a near-impenetrable barrier of wire and wall, tank traps, minefields, watchtowers and men with dogs, stretched for 4,300 miles from the Arctic to the Black Sea. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the conflict would be fought in the psychological sphere. It was a battle for hearts, minds and intellects.
No one understood this more clearly than George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the ‘CIA books programme’, which aimed to win the Cold War with literature.
From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden’s global CIA ‘book club’ would infiltrate millions of banned titles into the Eastern Bloc, written by a vast and eclectic list of authors, including Hannah Arendt and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell and Agatha Christie. Volumes were smuggled on trucks and aboard yachts, dropped from balloons, and hidden in the luggage of hundreds of thousands of individual travellers. Once inside Soviet bloc, each book would circulate secretly among dozens of like-minded readers, quietly turning them into dissidents. Latterly, underground print shops began to reproduce the books, too. By the late 1980s, illicit literature in Poland was so pervasive that the system of communist censorship broke down, and the Iron Curtain soon followed.
Charlie English tells this true story of spycraft, smuggling and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who risked their lives to stand up to the intellectual strait-jacket Stalin created. People like Miroslaw Chojecki, an underground Polish publisher who endured beatings, force-feeding and exile in service of this mission. And Minden, the CIA’s mastermind, who didn’t waver in his belief that truth, culture, and diversity of thought could help free the ‘captive nations’ of Eastern Europe. This is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. Books, it shows, can set you free.
Shipping Policy
1 Products will be shipped within 2-3 working days of receiving the order.
2. We ship within India free of charge. For international orders, we can quote customised rates.
Refund Policy
1 We offer refunds for products purchased from us or our eCommerce partner that are damaged or defective.
2 If you receive a damaged or defective product, please contact us within 48 hours of receiving the product to initiate a refund.
3 We may require proof of the damage or defect before processing a refund.
4 Refunds will be processed within 7 business days.
Cancellation Policy
1 Orders may be cancelled within 24 hours of placing the order.
2 Once an order has been shipped, it cannot be cancelled.
3 If you wish to cancel an order, please contact us as soon as possible.
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About Us
We are a bookstore and publishing house based in Chandigarh, India, in operation since 1997. We specialise in military books and have published over 40 titles to date.
Contact Us
SCO 14-15, Sector 8-C, Chandigarh
(Phone number and email in the footer)