Hot Books in the Cold War : The CIA-Funded Secret Western Book Distribution Program Behind the Iron Curtain

Foreword

Foreword My original intent when planning this book was to write up the entire story of the West’s secret Cold War book distribution project, a period of 35 years, from July 1956 until the end of September 1991. For reasons beyond my control, I was able to locate and access only the first 17 years of the complete archival documents covering the project. Financed throughout by the CIA, fourteen of these years (1956 to 1970) were run under the aegis of the Free Europe Committee in New York, and the remaining 21 years up to 1991 under the cover of an already existing fictitious organization, the International Advisory Council, Inc., later renamed International Literary Centre, Ltd., whose complete files have yet to be released by the CIA.1 Unlike the story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, told in several books and even more articles, the secret book distribution project run by and from the United States, with the participation and assistance of most 1   When the book project was terminated in September 1991, its manager George C. Minden reportedly destroyed the records held in his New York office. However, throughout the years he regularly sent his detailed reports to the CIA in Washington, D.C. This author requested access to the 1973– 1991 records by submitting to the CIA, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), five Mandatory Declassification Requests (MDRs). Following a series of denials, he then appealed to the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) in Washington, D.C., which on June 10, 2011, overturned the CIA’s previous decision. The author then resubmitted all his MDRs to the CIA, only to be told that the requested records could not be located and that they may be with the Department of State. i5 Cold War.indb 3 2013.03.04. 13:37 4 Hot Books in the Cold War West European countries, allied and neutral, has to this day remained an untold story.2 Between 1960 and 1974, while studying at Columbia University for a Ph.D. in Political Science, and then teaching part-time at Manhattan College in New York, I was personally involved in the book distribution program in New York, first as an information analyst, then as a national editor and plans advisor for Hungary. This involvement , however, would not be sufficient to tell in a scholarly and credible manner the full story of this amazingly effective and successful book project targeting five communist-ruled East European countries: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, as well as, until 1970, the three Baltic countries—the Soviet Republics from 1957—and then Soviet Union, from the mid-1970s onwards until the end of the Cold War. Thanks to the personal files of the late John P. C. Matthews, the Sam S. Walker, Jr. and George C. Minden Collections, as well as the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Corporate Records deposited with the archives of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, it became possible to study in depth the objectives, implementation, and impact of this remarkable covert Cold War project. Additional materials relevant to the book project were found in the U.S. National Archives at College Park, MD, the U.S. Library of Congress, the National Security Archives of George Washington University, and the Library 2  The first mention of the book program, basically covering the years 1956 to 1959, was by John P. C. Matthews in his article “The West’s Secret Marshall Plan for the Mind” from 2003. A Czech translation of Matthews’ article appeared in Ustav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR (Vol. XIV, No. IV (2007): n.p., Institute of Contemporary History, Prague). A Hungarian translation appeared in two parts in Magyar Szemle (Budapest, December 2007 and January 2008). See also Papp, “New York-Budapest Könyvküldő Szolgálat”; Reisch, “Ideological Warfare During the Cold War: The West’s Secret Book Distribution Program Behind the Iron Curtain”; and Schwartz et al., Barriers to the Broad Dissemination of Creative Work in the Arab World. The book project has also been mentioned very briefly in a few U.S. Government documents, and in interviews given in Czech by Zdeněk Mastník, a Czech book distributor in London, and by Peter Straka, an Austrian book distributor in Vienna. i5 Cold War.indb 4 2013.03.04. 13:37 5 Foreword...