Q&A: author Charlie English

The 'CIA book club', formally known as the 'CIA book programme', was a US psychological warfare operation that ran for more than three decades from the mid-1950s to 1991. Operating out of a tower block on Park Avenue South, Manhattan, it aimed to undermine the Orwellian systems of thought control that operated in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War by infiltrating uncensored books through the Iron Curtain. In all, ten million titles were smuggled into the East using a variety of methods, including aboard yachts that sailed the Baltic, hidden on transcontinental trains or in secret compartments built into trucks. Many books were sent in the luggage of East European travellers who were given free books when they visited certain bookshops or distribution hubs in the West.