Charlie English (15:15 BST)

A Book is Like a Reservoir of Freedom

The CIA Book Club tells the true story, for the first time, of George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the ‘CIA books programme’, which aimed to win the Cold War with literature as it infiltrated over 10 million banned titles into the Eastern Bloc. The chosen books were by a vast and eclectic list of authors, including Hannah Arendt, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell and Agatha Christie. Once inside the Soviet bloc, each book would circulate secretly among dozens of like-minded readers, quietly turning them into dissidents. With no physical combat, the conflict would be a battle for hearts, minds and intellects.

Former Guardian journalist Charlie English highlights the work of a handful of extraordinary people, such as an underground Polish publisher who endured beatings, force-feeding and exile in service of this mission in which books were smuggled on trucks, aboard yachts, dropped from balloons, and hidden in the luggage of hundreds of thousands of individual travellers.

In conversation with Rodge Glass

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