put it<\/a>, \u201cthe United States was a \u2018culturally barren\u2019 capitalist wasteland.\u201d Art supported by the CIA would go a long way in showing the world that the United States was actually a culturally rich capitalist wasteland.<\/p>\n ![\"Two](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/2-cia-poland-books-newspaper-solidarity-GettyImages-583333390.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Two men hold newspapers in an office. The word Solidarity is seen in red on a sign on the wall.<\/p>\n
Journalists look at newspapers in Warsaw, Poland, on May 31, 1989, during the run-up to elections organized after an agreement was reached between the communist government and the Solidarity movement. Bernard Bisson\/Sygma via Getty Images <\/p>\n
The CIA Book Club tells the story of the books program, primarily in Poland, where it had the greatest impact. But it is to English\u2019s great credit\u2014and the reader\u2019s benefit\u2014that the book is not really about the CIA. It is above all an oral history of the Polish underground during the rise of Solidarity: the social movement and \u201ccarnival\u201d of freedom of expression that began with widespread strikes in 1980, survived more than a year of martial law and nearly a decade of punitive repression, and pulled Poland into democratic self-rule in the \u201990s.<\/p>\n
English, a former editor at the Guardian, interviewed countless surviving members of the Polish resistance to tell the story of how CIA-bought books\u2014and equally, if not more importantly, printing presses\u2014fueled a patient and determined underground of journalists, printers, editors, smugglers, and writers who risked everything to resist.<\/p>\n
English\u2019s history of Solidarity is detailed and expansive, but one of the most striking threads is that of Mazovia Weekly, an underground publication launched in 1982 by the Women\u2019s Operational Group, a collection of veteran dissident journalists headed by Helena Luczywo. Through the quality of the paper\u2019s writing, production, and editing\u2014a joke about their minimalist editorial style went, \u201cWhat is a pole? A tree edited by Mazovia Weekly\u201d\u2014Mazovia Weekly became the most important Polish underground publication of the 1980s.<\/p>\n
Over that decade, Mazovia Weekly reached an estimated circulation of up to 80,000\u2014which, even aided by CIA funds, was a staggering figure considering that reporting, editing, printing, and distribution all had to be done in secret. Those running the paper evaded detection for more than six years, in part because the secret police didn\u2019t think women could lead such a successful operation.<\/p>\n
![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/3-cia-poland-solidarity-GettyImages-857361012.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
a large crowd of protesters stand with one arm outstretched with two fingers in a V sign.<\/p>\n
Protestors in Gdansk, Poland, during the August 1988 strikes.Bettmann Archive\/Getty Images. <\/p>\n
In August 1988, when major strikes led by young workers broke out in parts of the country, Mazovia Weekly needed to spread the word. The industrial unrest was so serious that U.S. intelligence believed it could be the worst crisis for the Polish government since it had instituted martial law in 1981. But there was a problem: No one had expected the strikes, and the entire staff was on vacation except for deputy editor Joanna Szczesna. Szczesna tried to get coded messages to her colleagues on the seaside to return home, but with tapped phones and widespread surveillance, she soon realized that if she wanted to put out a special edition of the newspaper, \u201cshe would have to do it solo.\u201d<\/p>\n
She worked for five days straight, traveling to plants and coal mines to report and writing all the articles herself, barely sleeping. The night she finally sent the issue to press, she woke to a knock on her door. Thankfully, it was not what Solzhenitsyn called the \u201cnight-time ring,\u201d that moment when agents arrived at the door to take you away. It was a messenger with the urgent news that a belt on the printer had broken and the publisher could not produce the paper until it was replaced.<\/p>\n
Under martial law, printing banned materials carried a prison sentence of 10 years, and neighbors, bus drivers, or colleagues could be informants\u2014even the priest who took the last confessions of condemned prisoners at the Mokotow Prison. To avoid detection, \u201chealth and safety\u201d protocols employed by the underground meant not only that printers moved every week, but that every element of printing and distribution took place at a different location, and \u201cno one had the full picture of who was doing what or where.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Mazovia Weekly\u2019s early days, Szczesna would visit friends and acquaintances in hopes of finding \u201chosts\u201d\u2014apartments where newspaper staff could temporarily set up printing operations. Like the earlier \u201cflying libraries,\u201d the paper would always be on the move. Printers would only use each apartment for three days a week every two months, but hosting was still no small request, since for those days, \u201ctypewriters would be clacking away twenty-four seven. \u2026 They would keep the lights on day and night, and everyone chain-smoked as if their lives depended on it.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/4-cia-poland-solidary-GettyImages-583262196.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
A woman holds a newspaper and a soda bottle during a sit-in<\/p>\n
Students at Warsaw University stage a sit-in during the run-up to the June 1989 elections. Bernard Bisson\/Sygma via Getty Images <\/p>\n
But when the printing belt broke, Szczesna didn\u2019t have time for niceties. She visited underground editors directly, at great personal risk, but nobody had the belt she needed. Finally, she got the name of a printer who owned the same press. She found him attending mass and urgently told him what she needed. Like a bad Soviet joke, he answered: \u201cI\u2019m the person printing Mazovia Weekly for you. It\u2019s my machine\u2019s belt that has broken.\u201d<\/p>\n
Just as Szczesna was hitting her breaking point\u2014pouring glasses of water on herself to stay awake\u2014the paper\u2019s head of production arrived back from vacation and dashed into action. Thousands of copies were published and smuggled across the country. Shortly afterward, police burst into an editorial meeting\u2014the first time in Mazovia Weekly\u2019s six-and-a-half-year history that the journalists had been discovered. But by then, it was too late for the regime: The strikes had \u201cmarked a turning point in the \u2018uphill war,\u2019\u201d and the officers couldn\u2019t arrest anyone in fear of disrupting secret negotiations between the government and the opposition.<\/p>\n
The following year, the Round Table Talks between the government and Solidarity yielded an agreement for elections and relaxation of censorship. Solidarity was allowed a newspaper\u2014which it needed to mobilize voters for the first election just two months away\u2014and the editors of Mazovia Weekly ended the paper\u2019s run to team up with newly freed resistance leader Adam Michnik on the Election Gazette. Supported by editors at the New York Review of Books, in two months, the Election Gazette reached a daily circulation of 450,000 and helped carry Solidarity to victory in the 1989 elections\u2014the first Eastern Bloc election that the communists lost.<\/p>\n
![\"Four](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/5-cia-poland-solidarity-GettyImages-550966805.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Four people sit on chairs holding books in a gallery-like space with paintings behind them.<\/p>\n
People read in the International Book Club in Warsaw in 1960.Claude Jacoby\/ullstein bild via Getty Images <\/p>\n
In an age of democratic backsliding in the United States and increasing indifference to the survival of democracy abroad, it is tempting to call The CIA Book Club a timely read. Luczywo remembered that during the resistance, if your name was read on Radio Free Europe, \u201cit was much, much, much more difficult to hurt you, to beat you, to disappear you.\u201d It\u2019s hard to read that line without thinking of the Trump administration\u2019s bulldozing of eight decades of institutions of soft diplomacy, including Radio Free Europe, which supported democracy and saved lives in Poland and many other places across the globe.<\/p>\n
But the book is more than just a timely read\u2014it is a thrilling and moving history outside of any contemporary American context. I have the bad habit of imagining myself in any story I read, but even I struggled to put myself into the shoes of Miroslaw Chojecki, who went on hunger strike in prison and endured a rubber tube jammed down his throat for daily force feeding, or Luczywo, who sacrificed seeing her young daughter for years to live underground and put out Mazovia Weekly. I could identify more with the civilians who offered up their apartment to turn it into a printing press. I wondered: Would I be brave enough to do even that if my worst doomscrolling fears came true? To risk imprisonment to help the heroes? But then I stopped myself. It is one thing to learn from the past; it is another to confuse imagined future persecution with the real persecution others have endured.<\/p>\n
In 1983, after years of harassment and assault, the poet and Solidarity activist Barbara Sadowska learned that her 18-year-old son had been beaten to death by the secret police. She wrote:<\/p>\n
\nMy hands are full of holes.
Falling out of them
Are the first tiny cherries
Of the year.
I don\u2019t think I can carry them
To you,
My little son<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One August day in 1951, a giant fleet of balloons sailed into Czechoslovakia. It must have been a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":111075,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,15533,392,171,51395,472,51665,123,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-111074","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-cia","10":"tag-culture","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-fp-weekend","13":"tag-history","14":"tag-homepage_regional_americas","15":"tag-poland","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114955227229532694","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111074\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/CIA-book-club-charlie-english-book.png\")
<\/p>\n