Every fall, the American Library Association publishes a list of banned books during its Banned Books Week campaign. No book on this list is actually banned in the United States. Every single one can be bought “wherever books are sold,” as the slogan goes.
So, why does the ALA publish it? The short answer, I suspect, is to raise money. Banned Books Week is part of the organization’s fall fundraising push. Every year, newspapers run earnest stories about the threat of censorship in the U.S. They praise the ALA’s courageous defense of freedom and include Amazon links to “banned” books. Donations to the ALA have increased by nearly 50% recently. American publishers, who had first suggested that the ALA run such a campaign in 1982, benefit from the free publicity, too. In fact, it may be one of the most successful marketing campaigns of the past 50 years, and thanks to gullible journalists, it is still going strong.
For a refresher on what censorship is and what freedom fighting actually looks like, these journalists might consider reading Charlie English’s excellent The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature.
The CIA’s publishing initiatives during the Cold War have been the subject of a handful of books. Before English’s, the most recent was Joel Whitney’s Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers (2017). For Whitney, the CIA’s support of literary magazines such as The Paris Review was akin to Soviet propaganda. In The CIA Book Club, English argues that the CIA was a strong supporter of the freedom of expression while the Soviets suppressed it, often violently. He tells the story of the CIA’s support of the Polish-language Kultura and the underground press in Poland — and the selfless actions of individuals on both sides of the Atlantic in the battle for freedom of expression before the fall of the Soviet Union.
A major figure in English’s account is Mirosław Chojecki, who cut his teeth in the 1968 student strikes at Warsaw Polytechnic. Chojecki helped organize the Workers’ Defense Committee in 1976 and founded the Independent Publishing House NOWa the following year. It became the largest independent publisher in Poland, printing banned Polish titles by writers such as Kazimierz Brandys and Czesław Miłosz, as well as works in translation by Günter Grass, Arthur Koestler, Kurt Vonnegut, and others. By 1980, it had published over 100 titles. It received money and essential equipment from the CIA via Jerzy Giedroyc, known as “the Editor,” in Paris.
English writes that Poland’s “system of ideological manipulation” was “one of the most complex in the world.… The Main Office for the Control of Presentations and Public Performances … worked to align the thoughts of the people with the aims and edicts of the Party.… It had subbranches in every city and region, and employees in every television and radio station, every film and theatre studio and every publishing house.” English notes that every typewriter in Poland had to be registered. The use of photocopiers was restricted. A permit was required to buy a ream of paper. The Main Office banned 2,482 publications in 1951 alone. A book about growing carrots, English writes, “was destroyed for implying that vegetables could sprout in individuals’ gardens as well as in those run by collectives.”
Government agents assaulted and imprisoned those they suspected of printing contraband materials. Family members were threatened, friends were arrested, and children were expelled from schools. English writes that the government’s “most time-consuming tactic was arrest.… They had the power to hold you for forty-eight hours without a warrant, so that’s what they did, over and over again.” Chojecki was arrested 43 times in just three years. “They would release him from one detention, watch him cross the street, then pick him up again on the far side.”
Yet, despite this, NOWa and other publishing ventures grew. By 1985, it had a list of 2,000 titles, some with print runs of up to 6,000. That same year, the underground paper Mazovia Weekly, edited by Helena Łuczywo, hit its circulation of 80,000.
This wouldn’t have been possible without the support of the CIA’s International Literary Center, which was located in a small office on Park Avenue in the unfashionable part of midtown Manhattan. It was run by George Minden, and would distribute some 10 million books and magazines over its 35-year history through “a complex organization” of “bookshops, publishers, libraries, book exporters, and Russian and East European personalities,” as Minden put it. It supported both NOWa and Mazovia Weekly.
Minden was born in Bucharest to a British father and a Romanian mother. He inherited huge tracts of land through his mother when he turned 18, becoming one of Europe’s richest men. However, after the communists seized his land, he left Romania for Spain, eventually immigrating to the U.S. in 1955.
He was a highly educated, quiet, unassuming man and ran a tight ship at the ILC. He kept detailed records of every expense and every title published or distributed, as well as a record of to whom it was sent and why. Recipients of ILC books and magazines would sometimes request more books or send a note of thanks. One of those to receive a book from the ILC — and send his thanks in response — was Karol Wojtyła, later Pope John Paul II.
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The ILC’s budget paled in comparison to other CIA operations. Minden spent $2.9 million to distribute 316,000 books in the organization’s final full year of operation in 1990. The CIA’s Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan cost the government $700 million a year. Still, many people at the CIA thought the ILC was a waste of time and money. According to the former CIA chief historian Benjamin Fischer, “The paramilitary guys thought, ‘Real men don’t sell books … Real men recruit spies.’ … You go to one of these guys and say, ‘Look, I need $100,000 to buy books from the Silver Age of Russian literature,’ or ‘I need to buy 500 copies of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry,’ they would look at you like, ‘Are you a moron?’”
Yet, English argues, the publishing program played a vital role, as one CIA officer put it, in providing access to “the freedom of thought and the expression of independent ideas so desperately sought by millions.” Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich argued that the program played “a decisive role” in the “West’s ideological victory.” The Polish dissident Adam Michnik put it more bluntly: “I am convinced it was books that were victorious in the fight. A book is like a reservoir of freedom, of independent thought, a reservoir of human dignity … They allowed us to survive and not go mad.”
Micah Mattix is the poetry editor of First Things.