
The CIA Book Club
The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature
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Narrated by:
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Michael David Axtell
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By:
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Charlie English
About this listen
“A story as fascinating as it is undersung . . . a riveting account” (The New York Times Book Review) of the CIA’s secret program to smuggle millions of books through the Iron Curtain during the Cold War
“English’s true tale of the federal government smuggling subversive books through the Iron Curtain sounds like a current-times call to action. . . . The book’s allure is intrigue, danger, and suspense in the service of meaning.”—NPR
For nearly five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, forming the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the war was fought psychologically. It was a battle for hearts, minds, and intellects. Few understood this more clearly than George Minden, head of a covert intelligence operation known as the “CIA book program,” which aimed to undermine Soviet censorship and inspire revolt by offering different visions of thought and culture.
From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden’s “book club” secretly sent ten million banned titles into the East. Volumes were smuggled aboard trucks and yachts, dropped from balloons, hidden aboard trains, and stowed in travelers’ luggage. Nowhere were the books welcomed more warmly than in Poland, where they would circulate covertly among circles of like-minded readers, quietly making the case against Soviet communism. Such was the demand for Minden’s texts that dissidents began to reproduce them in the underground. By the late 1980s, illicit literature was so pervasive in Poland that censorship broke down: the Iron Curtain soon followed.
Charlie English narrates this tale of Cold War spycraft, smuggling, and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who fought for intellectual freedom—people like Mirosław Chojecki, who suffered beatings, imprisonment, and exile in pursuit of his clandestine mission. The CIA Book Club is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. Books, it shows, can set you free.
©2025 Charlie English (P)2025 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Entertaining and vivid . . . [Charlie] English writes thrillingly about the activists inside Poland. . . . This is a gripping account of an intriguing and little-known Cold War moment.”—The Observer
“Charlie English tells the tale of a 1980s secret operation in communist-controlled Poland. . . . A vivid and moving story. [English] is terrific at evoking the atmosphere of Poland in the 1970s and 1980s—not just the regime’s narrowed horizons and suffocating repression, but the excitement of the Solidarity trade union movement and the idealism of the young dissidents.”—The Times
“Vibrant, beautifully researched and exciting . . . a real pleasure to read—a finely written page-turner full of well-researched stories of smuggling, intrigue and survival.”—The Guardian
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Story
The untold story of Hitler’s war on “degenerate” artists and the mentally ill that served as a model for the “Final Solution”.
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Outstanding material presented well
- By Algernon Moncrieff on 04-21-24
By: Charlie English
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The Big Hop
- The First Nonstop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and into the Future
- By: David Rooney
- Narrated by: Jeremy Clyde
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1919, in Newfoundland, four teams of aviators came from Britain to compete in "the Big Hop": an audacious race to be the first to fly, nonstop, across the Atlantic Ocean. One pair of competitors was forced to abandon the journey halfway, and two pairs never made it into the air. Only one team, after a death-defying sixteen-hour flight, made it to Ireland.
By: David Rooney
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The Second Coming
- Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future
- By: Carter Sherman
- Narrated by: Mia Hutchinson-Shaw
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on more than one hundred interviews with teenagers and young adults, activists, and experts, The Second Coming reveals how (mis)education, the internet, and politics have not only reshaped relationships but also unleashed a nationwide power struggle over the future of sex. From abortion clinics crowded with young patients, to “Dating with Dignity” seminars at the National Pro-Life Summit, to school board battles over what students should read, think, and feel, we meet folks from both sides of the aisle who are well-informed, empowered, and active (even if not always sexually).
By: Carter Sherman
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The Beast in the Clouds
- The Roosevelt Brothers's Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda
- By: Nathalia Holt
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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During the 1920s, dozens of expeditions scoured the Chinese and Tibetan wilderness in search of the panda bear, a beast that many believed did not exist. When the two eldest sons of President Theodore Roosevelt sought the bear in 1928, they had little hope of success. Together with a team of scientists and naturalists, they accomplished what a decade of explorers could not, ultimately introducing the panda to the West. In the process, they documented a vanishing world and set off a new era of conservation biology.
By: Nathalia Holt
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Miles of Destruction
- A True Story of Oil, Greed, Lust and Murder
- By: C. J. Wynn
- Narrated by: Marcus Barton
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields held the promise of unimaginable wealth… But for some, the price was paid in blood. James Henrikson was a man driven by greed and a lust for power. A mix of charm and ruthlessness, he carefully concealed his criminal past while rising to oilfield royalty alongside his equally deceptive wife, Sarah Creveling. But their short-lived empire was fragile, a house of cards held together by lies. When it all began to crumble, James was blinded by rage and consumed by a need for revenge.
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True Crime That Chills, Performed to Perfection
- By Mark M. on 06-26-25
By: C. J. Wynn
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The Road That Made America
- Travels on America's First Frontier Highway
- By: James Dodson
- Narrated by: James Dodson
- Length: 15 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In the bestselling tradition of Rinker Buck’s The Oregon Trail and Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic, The Road That Made America is a lively, epic account of one of the greatest untold stories in our nation’s history—the eight-hundred-mile long Great Wagon Road that 18th-century American settlers forged from Philadelphia to Georgia that expanded the country dramatically in the decades before we ventured west.
By: James Dodson
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I Want to Burn This Place Down
- Essays
- By: Maris Kreizman
- Narrated by: Maris Kreizman
- Length: 4 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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A debut essay collection by the inimitable cultural critic Maris Kreizman—an introspective, searing account of the life experiences that have pushed this former “good Democrat” even further to the political left.
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Her whineyness
- By D. F. Perschall on 07-07-25
By: Maris Kreizman
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A Flower Traveled in My Blood
- The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children
- By: Haley Cohen Gilliland
- Narrated by: Alejandra Reynoso
- Length: 13 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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A Flower Traveled in My Blood is the rarest of nonfiction that reads like a novel and puts your heart in your throat. It is the product of years of extensive archival research and meticulous, original reporting. It marks the arrival of a blazing new talent in narrative journalism. In this audiobook, a regime tries to terrorize a country, but love prevails. The grandmothers’ stunning stories reveal new truths about memory, identity, and family.
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Back from the Brink
- Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop
- By: Peter Moskos
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 12 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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From the 1970s to the early 1990s, New York City was seen, justifiably, as out of control. The city approached bankruptcy, the subways were covered with graffiti, and murders were at a record high. Right-wing fearmongering and vigilante justice were countered by liberal pleas to end poverty and provide drug treatment—none of which happened. Then, in a surprising break from the past, new NYPD leadership decided to focus on crime. Between 1993 and 1996, New York City's murder numbers were cut in half, dropping to under 1,000 for the first time in decades.
By: Peter Moskos
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The Hiroshima Men
- The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb, and the Fateful Decision to Use It
- By: Iain MacGregor
- Narrated by: Stephen McGann
- Length: 15 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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The Hiroshima Men’s vivid narrative recounts the decade-long journey toward this first atomic attack. It charts the race for the bomb during World War II, as the Allies fought the Axis powers, and is told through several key characters: General Leslie Groves, leader of the Manhattan Project alongside Robert Oppenheimer; pioneering Army Air Force pilot Colonel Paul Tibbets Jr.; the mayor of Hiroshima, Senkichi Awaya, who would die alongside eighty thousand fellow citizens; and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer John Hersey.
By: Iain MacGregor
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The Mission
- The CIA in the 21st Century
- By: Tim Weiner
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 16 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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The Mission has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.
By: Tim Weiner