One morning in the spring of 1984 a French former tax clerk called Jacky Challot drove his van off the Copenhagen ferry on to the dock at Swinoujscie, a port city in northwestern Poland. The temperature in the Cold War was close to freezing, but Challot had made the journey many times before and had come prepared.
As he handed out coffee, chocolate and Marlboro cigarettes to the Polish customs officials, they all seemed in good spirits. They glanced through his documents, as usual, and asked him to unload the van. He was struggling with one of the larger items, a dentist’s chair, when a senior official told him to stop. The inside of the van, the customs man said suddenly, wasn’t as long as the outside. What was going on?
Challot spread his hands in apparent bewilderment, but it was no good. A few moments later the customs men smashed open the thin wall concealing the van’s secret cache. When the chief official saw what was behind it, his eyes widened. “Oh shit!” he said. “Reactionary propaganda!”
Although Challot pleaded ignorance of what was behind the wall, the evidence was damning: hundreds of anticommunist pamphlets, walkie-talkies and printing equipment. It was obvious he was working with the underground.
In France a host of cultural celebrities, from the actors Simone Signoret and Gérard Depardieu to the composer Pierre Boulez and the philosopher Michel Foucault, campaigned for Challot’s release. With Poland’s communist authorities desperate for western currency, it took $10,000 to get him out. Challot was never sure who had put up the money, but he had a pretty good idea. It came, he said later, “from across the Atlantic”.
In a world where even owning the wrong book could get you thrown into prison, Challot had been taking quite a risk. But as the former Guardian journalist Charlie English explains in this breezy book, he was merely one cog in a much larger machine, which included Warsaw dissidents, Gdansk trade unionists, Polish exiles in Paris and CIA bureaucrats in Langley, Virginia.
The CIA had recognized the importance of the cultural front since the early days of the Cold War, bankrolling the cartoon version of Animal Farm by George Orwell and organizing balloon flights to drop copies of the book across the Iron Curtain. But English concentrates on a later episode: the operation to smuggle books, magazines and printing presses into Poland after the imposition of martial law by the communist hardliner General Wojciech Jaruzelski in December 1981.
Although this wasn’t the “best kept secret of the Cold War”, as his subtitle claims, English turns it into a vivid and moving story. He 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 who worked on papers like Mazovia Weekly, a flash of color in a monochrome world. And he picks out some memorable and inspirational characters, such as Solidarity’s “minister for smuggling”, Miroslaw Chojecki, a rebel with “a mane of red-brown hair and a penetrating blue-eyed gaze”, whose friends thought he was like a Polish Christ, “only somehow bolder”.
Given how atmospheric all this Polish material is — not least because English has interviewed so many former dissidents and smugglers — your heart slightly sinks whenever he cuts to the American side of the story, which is essentially a series of committee meetings. As he admits, the CIA’s efforts to smuggle books into Poland were “deliberately opaque”, relying on a spider’s web of front organizations, lobby groups, publishers and exiles, which makes for a less than thrilling read.
But the Polish stuff is so gripping it hardly matters. You marvel, for example, at the dedication of the young women in the Warsaw Women’s Operational Group, who used typewriter carbon paper to produce copies of their pro-Solidarity newsletter, hoping to keep the flame of resistance alive after the imposition of martial law.
Then there’s the lovely story of the astronomer Tomasz Chlebowski, who gave his students copies of his manual, The Little Conspirator, offering tips on “finance, phone calls, dead-drops, secret compartments, police entrapment techniques, pain, fear and life in prison”.
Not only did he put together a secret national postal service run by the Polish astrophysics community, he even designed special bags for their couriers with false bottoms. These were so popular, English writes, that “they became a problem: when a group of three or four conspirators got together, all carrying identical hand-sewn bags, people would look at them quizzically, wondering if this was a new fashion.”
Did all this dissident literature make a difference? Surely it did. In the course of the 1980s thousands, perhaps millions of people over Poland hid illicit books and newspapers under their beds or floorboards, many of them smuggled across the border with CIA funds. His book ends with the strikes and elections that brought down the regime in 1988-89, but you never doubt that this was a victory for writers and readers as well as for trade unionists and politicians.
Oddly, the one thing missing from English’s account is the books themselves: we never discover which titles all these people were reading, or what they made of them. But in an age when authors are struggling for attention and literature degrees are dying, it’s good to be reminded of a time when the written word really mattered.
“We should build a monument to books,” the former dissident Adam Michnik remarks. “A book is like a reservoir of freedom, of independent thought, a reservoir of human dignity. A book was like fresh air. They allowed us to survive and not go mad.”
Dominic Sandbrook co-hosts the podcast The Rest Is History and is the author of eight books, including Adventures in Time: The Six Wives of Henry VIII
