Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

During the Cold War, the CIA book program was a covert campaign to smuggle books into the eastern block, using everything from

balloon drops to bake bean tins. But why was literature such a significant weapon in the

culture wars between East and West? Speaking to Lauren Good for today's episode, the author

Charlie English explores this campaign and what it tells us

about the power of the written word. Hi Charlie, thank you so much for joining me today to talk

all about your new book, the CIA Book Club, the best kept secret of the Cold War. We should

probably start at the very beginning. What exactly was the CIA Books Program?

Well, the CIA Books Program was a long-running US intelligence operation that ran from the mid-50s

until about 1991, and it succeeded in secretly infiltrating around 10 million books into the Eastern Bloc over that period

in a bid to undermine the draconian censorship regimes that existed in every East European country.

Now before we delve into the work of this program, you've described the situation as draconian.

I think it would be beneficial to really paint a picture of what sort of circumstances this program was operating in.

What sort of restrictions were actually imposed on the Eastern bloc?

Well, every East European country that was part of the Soviet bloc had a state sensor who basically

controlled everything that was allowed to be broadcast or published or printed in that country.

So, for instance, in Poland, which is largely the focus of my book, if you wanted to print so much as a business

card or a wedding invitation, you needed permission from the main office, which was the main

censorship body in Poland at that time. And the main office was filled with people who worked

essentially for the party, and the party would decide not only what could be published, but also how you would cover certain things.

So if you work for the party newspaper, for instance, then the censor would decree that you had to cover certain things in a certain way.

So it wasn't just a question of cutting things out of the public realm,

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