How the Agency Fueled the Polish Underground

For the people of Czechoslovakia
New winds blow
New hope is to move
I found friends of freedom in other lands
A new way to reach you.
They know that you also want freedom.

The psychological process of the Central Intelligence Agency, which was called “The Winds of Freedom”, was perfectly implemented: The agency has coordinated a convoy of 11 farms from the Free Europe Radio in Munich to a launch site in the Bavarian countryside and properly expected wind speeds and pressure points that would cause balloons to explode across the border. The process was also a complete failure. When the publications arrived, no one cares. Advertising was very raw.

But during the coming years, through experience and error, the CIA discovered a more effective approach than publications: books. As a British journalist Charlie Inch details in Central Intelligence Books Club: The secret task of winning the cold war with banned literatureThe Central Europeans and the East were hungry for literature. The columns circulated the banned books through “Airlines”, the complex human network 1984. Polish defector Adam Michnik, who spent a lot of prison in the 1980s, said that the banned books were like “pure air”. Through a long and brutal struggle on the horizon, “allow us to survive and not be crazy.”

In the late fifties of the last century, the Undersecretary of the CIA and the Romanian immigrant George Mindin realized that the book smuggling program could have the possibility of destabilizing the Soviet regime and nourishing resistance in satellite situations. But Mindin, who did not like the superiority and educational of the agency’s early efforts, wanted to move away from cultural imperialism to cooperate with the dissidents. He was chosen to lead what will be known as the Book Cia program. Over the coming decades, the Marshall Plan of Reason will blow nearly 10 million elements, in addition to prints and materials, to the eastern mass, and the import of prohibited works by the book including CZeslaw Milosz, JosPheh Brodsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Albert Camus, and Kurt Vonnestut, Hannah Arendt, Philip Roth, VACAGE,

The Books Program was a rare victory during the reign of the CIA director, Bill Casey. Tim Winner, who Ash He lists disasters in the afternoon, and called the program “Among the most important CIA operations in the Cold War.” This may not be a surprise. In addition to destabilizing the democrats and imperialist defense, the CIA has always had great taste in art, and to support abstraction, Paris reviewAnd countless artists after the war at home and abroad, often without the artist’s knowledge. The CIA wanted to promote the art that defended freedom and individualism to fight communism, win hearts and minds, and to confront the idea presented by the Soviets that, as the historian Lucy Levin, put, “the United States was arid culturally arid.” The art supported by the CIA will make a long way to show the world that the United States was actually culturally rich Capital wasteland.

Journalists view the newspapers in Warsaw, Poland, on May 31, 1989, during the period before the elections organized after reaching an agreement between the Communist government and the solidarity movement. Bernard Bisson/Sigma via Getti Imas

English, a former editor in GuardianI conducted an interview with countless members who are alive in the Polish resistance to tell the story of how the books that were purchased from the CIA-and on equality, if not the most important of this, the printing press-on a sick and firm underground journalists, printers, editors, smugglers and writers who risk everything to resistance.

The history of solidarity in the English language is detailed and expanding, but one of the most surprising strings is the history Mazovia WeeklyAn underground published launched in 1982 by the Women’s Operation Group, a group of veteran veteran journalists headed by Helena Lucio. Through the quality of the paper writing, its production and editing – a joke about the minimum editorial style went, “What is the pole? Its editing tree has been released Mazovia Weekly– – –Mazovia Weekly It became the most important Polish publication underground in the eighties.

During this contract, Mazovia Weekly It reached up to 80,000 – which, even with the help of the CIA funds, was an amazing person, given that reporting reports, editing, printing and distribution all should be made secretly. Those who manage the paper escape from his discovery for more than six years, partly due to the fact that the secret police did not believe that a woman could lead such a successful process.

The demonstrators in Ghadangsk, Poland, during August 1988 strikes.Bettmann Archive/Gety Pictures.

In August 1988, when the major strikes led by young workers erupted in parts of the country, Mazovia Weekly You need to spread the word. Industrial turmoil was so dangerous that the American intelligence believed that it could be the worst crisis of the Polish government since it put martial law in 1981. But there was a problem: no one expected strikes, and the entire employees were on vacation except for the deputy editor, Joanna Sznana. Szczesna tried to get encrypted messages to her seashore colleagues to return home, but with independent phones and extensive monitoring, I soon realized that if she wanted to put out a special version of the newspaper, “she will have to do this alone.”

She worked for five consecutive days, traveled to plants and coal mines to report and write all the articles themselves, barely sleeping. The night in which she finally sent the case to pressure, she woke up to her door. Fortunately, what Solzhenitsyn called the “Night Episode”, the moment when the agents arrived at the door to take you away. It was a messenger with urgent news that a belt on the printer was broken and the publisher was unable to produce the paper until it was replaced.

Under the martial law, the prohibited materials were carried on a 10 -year prison, and the neighbors, bus drivers, or colleagues can be informed – even the priest who took the latest confessions of prisoners convicted of Mukoto prison. To avoid detection, the “health and safety” protocols that you use underground not only means that the printers moved every week, but each element of printing and distribution occurred in a different location, and “no one had the full picture of those who were doing what or where.”

in Mazovia WeeklyIn the early days, Szzesna will visit friends and acquaintances in the hope of finding “hosts” – where newspaper employees can temporarily prepare printing operations. Like previous “flight libraries”, the paper will always be in a state of transportation. The printers will not use each apartment only for three days a week every two months, but the hosting was not a small request, because in those days, “the writer machines will fade twenty -four seven … You will keep the lights in the day and night, and every person who smoked as if their lives depend on them.”

Students at Warsaw University are a sit -in during the period before the June 1989 elections. Bernard Bisson/Sigma via Getti Imas

But when the print belt erupted, Szzesna had no time to shoot. She visited the editors directly underground, at a great personal danger, but no one had the belt you needed. Finally, she got the name of the printer with the same press. I found him attending the mass and told him urgently what you need. He answered like a bad Soviet joke: “I am the person printing Mazovia Weekly for you. It is the belt of the device that broke. “

Just as Szzzesna reached the collapse point – cups of water go on to stay awake – the paper production head has returned from the leave and caught to work. Thousands of copies have been deployed and smuggled throughout the country. Shortly later, the police exploded at a liberal meeting – the first time in Mazovia WeeklyOn the history of six and a half years discovered by journalists. But by that time, it was too late for the regime: the strikes were “characterized by a turning point in a” arduous war “, and the officers were unable to arrest anyone for fear of disrupting the secret negotiations between the government and the opposition.

The following year, the round table between the government and solidarity resulted in an agreement for elections and relaxation in censorship. Solidarity in a newspaper – which needed to mobilize voters for the first elections only two months away – and their editors Mazovia Weekly He ended the paper to cooperate with the newly liberated resistance leader Adam Michanik Ali Election newspaper. With the support of the editors in New York Books ReviewIn two months, Election newspaper It reached the daily blood circulation of 450,000 and helped to carry solidarity to win the 1989 elections – the first eastern mass elections that the Communists lost.

People read at the International Books Club in Warsaw in 1960.Claude Jacobi/Olstein Bild via Getti Ims

But the book is more than just a time reading – it is an exciting and moving history outside any contemporary American context. I have a bad habit in imagining myself in any story I read, but I even fought to put myself in Mirosla Chockee shoes, which went on a hunger strike in prison and endured a rubber tube Mazovia Weekly. I can determine more with civilians who offered their apartment to turn it into a printing press. She wondered: Will I be brave enough to do it even if my worst fears are fulfilled? To risk imprisonment to help the heroes? But then I stopped myself. It is one thing that we must learn from the past; It is another to confuse future persecution with the real persecution of others.

In 1983, after years of harassment and assault, the poet and solidarity learned Barbara Sadovska that her 18 -year -old son was beaten to death by the secret police. I wrote:

My hand is full of holes.
Falling them
It is the first small cherry
From the year.
I don’t think I can carry it
for you,
My little son