Travel Blog

Sunday’s New York Times Book Review carried a review of a new book, The CIA Book Club, that tells the story of the agency’s efforts during the Cold War to smuggle books and magazines into Eastern Europe in hopes of promoting not just the Western ideology but also its way of life. Among the magazines was Cosmopolitan.

The review, like the project, focused on Poland, which I found interesting but also a little puzzling. In Warsaw, where I lived in the early ’80s, Poles had free access to the British Council and the library in the American embassy, where there was no security check or request for ID; you simply walked in the side entrance, past the marine, and entered the brightly-lit room filled with books, periodicals, and days-old copies of the New York Times, Washington Post, and International Herald-Tribune. I don’t recall that Cosmopolitan was available, but Time, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly all were.

The British Council was more popular with Varsovians because it was located far from the British embassy and so carried no obvious governmental association. I assume the political classics mentioned in the review were available – 1984, Brave New World – but, because I had read them in college, I was drawn to other works: V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts (which remain, 45 years later, two of my favorite books). I also read, as every Anglophone Pole could, Timothy Garton Ash’s stylishly insightful reports from Poland in The Spectator.

I will read The CIA Book Club to see if any mention is given of the valuable role these libraries played in the Cold War.