In, I think, November 1978, I got a call from a rather grand British
journalist who’d heard that I was about to go to Moscow. “A Russian
friend of mine would dearly like the latest volume of Solzhenitsyn’s The
Gulag Archipelago. I don’t suppose you’d smuggle it in for him?” I did,
of course, disguising it rather feebly by wrapping it in the dust
jacket of the most boring book I owned: Lebanon, A Country in
Transition. A customs official at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport flicked
through it briefly, but even though the text was in Russian he didn’t
spot what it was about. Two nights later, near the entrance to Gorky
Park, I handed over the book to a shifty character who seemed to be a
supplier of forbidden goods to the dissident community. He gave me a
small 18th-century icon in exchange for it. It’s only now, all these years later, that I’ve realised I was almost certainly a rather naive mule for a CIA scheme to smuggle subversive books through the iron curtain. John Simpson, The Guardian
recensione a: The CIA Book Club: The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War, Charlie English (William Collins), l'affascinante storia di come la CIA faceva passare libri clandestini oltre la Cortina di Ferro.
