Smuggling Literature

During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) coordinated the secret distribution of books to key individuals, libraries, research institutes, cultural organizations, universities, and schools. From mid-1956 through 1991, these “forbidden books” found their way to six Warsaw Pact countries — Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and eventually the Soviet Union.

The CIA’s clandestine book program was little-known to the public until 2003, when a former official of the CIA-founded Free Europe Committee (FEC), John P. C. Matthews, disclosed it in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. The program was later chronicled by Alfred Reisch, who oversaw the Hungarian book distribution project until 1974, in his “Hot Books in the Cold War.” Reisch’s book provides an encyclopedic, scholarly account of the program’s origins, operations, and impact. Henry T. Edmondson III, The MIT Press Reader