During the Cold War the CIA managed to smuggle ten million books across the Iron Curtain. The banned titles included Hannah Arendt, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell, and Agatha Christie.
Books 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.
Author Charlie English has written about the clandestine project and joins Jim to discuss The CIA Book Club and about the power of books during the Cold War.
Photo: HarperCollins
