Charlie English, a London-based nonfiction author and former journalist, has extensively researched his books on historical events conveyed through compelling storytelling. His latest book, The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature (Random House, 2025), follows a group of Polish rebels during communist rule and martial law in the 1980s. These men and women printed, smuggled, and distributed their underground newspaper, Mazovia Weekly, banned books, and printing materials into Poland when the country was under Soviet rule. The citizens at the time were only allowed to read and listen to government-sponsored publications, which were heavily influenced by propaganda. This group of rebels, along with world-renowned publishing houses and Allied countries, knew that the power of literature could help Poland out of communist rule through this secret underground rebellion.

English leads the reader through decades of planning to get this CIA-funded book club, the International Literary Center (ILC), or the program’s code name QRHELPFUL, which will smuggle more than 10 million books across the Iron Curtain in the span of over thirty-five years. The program originally started in the 1950s and expanded through the decades into the 1980s, helping the Solidarity movement, which first went on strike in 1980 at the Gdańsk shipyard, keep the freedom of ideas, expression, and work flowing within the country. Interweaving narrative style with thoughtful research, English highlights the characters’ new, hidden lifestyles to unfold a compelling story of the Cold War. Readers learn about the lives of the rebels living in an underground system, changing apartments every two weeks to stay ahead of the “cat-mouse chase” with the SB security service or smuggling books past security checkpoints to protect the program and the minds of the Polish people. 

In informative yet entertaining writing, English opens a new way of telling a Cold War story. The narrative builds on the same anticipation and stress the characters undergo, which makes the story easy to follow and facilitates making connections with the characters. He brings light to this rebellion through the eyes and ears of the people undergoing hardship to keep their beloved country from being fully consumed by communist ideology. English doesn’t introduce them as distant historical figures in a textbook but as real people who fought in these battles, sacrificing everything. He does so by starting his book with a personal account of one of the leading characters, Mirosław Chojecki, and his forty-third arrest by the SB. Chojecki was not new to the harassment, and it wouldn’t be the last for him and his team throughout the 1980s. Starting the book with this emotional and hard scene, which is difficult to read, is fitting for the type of story English wants to share. It is a hidden life and work; these characters must carry that weight and fear the Soviet Union place upon them along with the innocent lives for whom they are fighting. The emotion-filled events are shown with care to call attention to the goal: to save the hearts and minds of freedom-loving Poles. 

The emotion-filled events are shown with care to call attention to the goal: to save the hearts and minds of freedom-loving Poles.

The narrative is interwoven with historical contexts to show the bigger picture. In chapter 7, “The Night of the General,” Helena Łuczywo, an editor of the Worker and Mazovia Weekly, and her husband, Witek, famous for his work in printing, decided to check in at the Solidarity movement building where the Worker newspaper was located. Thinking it would be a quick drop-in, one by one the phone lines go dead. Moments later, “a roar of engines split the nighttime quiet.” The Zomos—a riot police force to suppress protests—were coming. The Łuczywos move quickly to escape, but the rest of their colleagues, making the “ridiculous, totally irrational” decision to stay put, were arrested. The Łuczywos watched them being loaded onto trucks in hiding, with a silent understanding that this was the start of them living underground. Between their long night and the long day that follows, English includes a white space to shift the perspective outside the Łuczywos and their secret work to the country as a whole. All over Poland, “80,000 soldiers and 30,000 police” were armed to carry out a surprise invasion overnight. Adding a slip of historical context zooms out to view the impact of the censorship surrounding the rebels. English does this throughout the rest of the book to connect the ties how the overseas intelligence responds to the military force in Poland and the actions carried out by those on the front lines. 

The title of the book, The CIA Book Club, does not highlight the most important people who were doing the hard labor for the book club. Although the CIA was the main source of financial aid and the processor of the books, risking millions of dollars and lives, the story mainly describes the Polish men and women printing, smuggling, and distributing censored work, often while in hiding and facing arrest. The real story lies in the underground newspaper, Mazovia Weekly, where Helena Łuczywo and a group of determined rebels work tirelessly to fight the psychological war between the government and citizens of Poland. But despite the somewhat misleading title, English did include the CIA’s involvement with the program; they were the only reason the rebels had a fighting chance. The Polish characters were not oblivious to this and praised the CIA’s support. One member said, “The printing presses we got from the West during martial law might be compared to machine guns or tanks during war.” 

The best details of the book were the use of quotes from novels, poems, and other works of literature at the beginning of each chapter. As noted in his author’s note, some individuals knew what the CIA and the Mazovia Weekly were doing in supporting Poland’s freedom. The quotations help set up what the chapter holds, as in chapter 18, “Television Free Europe,” which highlights Andrei Sakharov, and “Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom” when Chokecki, the ILC, and the French broadcast system help launch a show for the Polish people to know they were close to success. Other quotes include some of those in banned books like George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which were smuggled into Poland. The quotations alone highlight the importance of literature and why they were enlisted to fight the censorship system. It’s a book exposing the rough but, in the end, successful secret program that won the Cold War through a banned book club.

University of Oklahoma