Literature and The Cold War

When George Orwell returned to Barcelona for the third time, on June 20th, 1937, he discovered that the Spanish secret police were after him. He had been forced to return to the front in order to have his discharge papers countersigned and, in his absence, the Communists had initiated a purge of their perceived enemies. Orwell was on the list. As he arrived in the lobby of the Hotel Continental, Eileen approached him calmly, placed her arm around his neck, and smiled for the benefit of anyone watching. Once they were close enough she hissed in his ear:

“Get out!”

“What?”

“Get out at once.”

“What?”

“Don’t keep standing here! You must get outside quickly!”

Eileen guided a bewildered Orwell toward the hotel exit. Marceau Pivert, a French friend of Orwell’s who was just entering the lobby, seemed distressed to see him and told him he needed to hide before the hotel called the police. A sympathetic member of the staff joined in, urging Orwell to leave in his broken English. Eileen managed to get him to a café on a discreet side street, where she explained the seriousness of the situation.

*

David Crook, a young Englishman working for the Independent Labour Party’s (ILP) Barcelona office, had become friends with both Orwell and his wife over the last few months. He was not what he seemed. He had arrived in Spain in January 1937, the month after Orwell, eager to join up with the International Brigades and fight the Fascists. He was descended from Russian-Jewish immigrants and grew up in Hampstead, attending the prestigious Cheltenham College.

Like many young men who grew up after the First World War, he was attracted to left-wing causes. He moved to New York City, where he attended Columbia University and embraced radical politics, joining the Young Communist League. As a student delegate he traveled down to Kentucky to support the famous miners’ strike in Harlan County, witnessing its brutal suppression by the National Guard. On his return to London he became a member of the British Communist Party. At one meeting, the doomed poet John Cornford spoke about the Republican cause in Spain, and Crook was inspired to enlist.

Like Hyndman, Crook was thrust straight into the action at the Battle of Jarama, taking three bullets to the leg. Recovering in Madrid, he socialized with the literary set, including the brilliant war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, her lover Ernest Hemingway, Mulk Raj Anand, and Spender. At this point he came to the attention of Soviet intelligence agents. After recruiting him, the NKVD sent him to a training camp in Albacete, where he was given a crash course in sabotage and surveillance techniques.

There he became a Communist spy. Crook’s mission was to infiltrate the ILP and report on all their activities. The Soviets already had one agent in place, David Wickes, who volunteered as an interpreter with the ILP and passed what information he found on to his handlers. Now Crook was to infiltrate deeper and get hold of documents. Orwell was his most prestigious target.

As cover Crook pretended to be a stringer for a British newspaper, with credentials on headed paper secured from “a comrade in London.” The NKVD arranged for him to be discharged from the International Brigade with “lung trouble.” The day after Orwell returned from the front for the first time, before the outbreak of the May fighting, Crook installed himself at the Continental, befriended Eileen, and insinuated his way into the ILP office.

During the long Spanish lunch breaks, when the office was deserted, he took documents to a safe house on Calle Muntaner and photographed them. He compiled reports on the Orwells, Kopp, and McNair and, at meetings in a local café, delivered them folded up in a newspaper to his handler, Hugh O’Donnell (code name “Sean O’Brien”). Sometimes he secreted the reports in the hotel bathroom if more discretion was needed. Crook reported that Kopp and Eileen were having an affair, the kind of information the NKVD valued for blackmail purposes.

Kopp professed to be in love with Eileen, and while Orwell recuperated from his wound, their “association” developed “in little leaps” (these are her words; Orwell and Eileen had an unconventional relationship, and she was clear with Kopp that he could never replace his friend and rival). Also among the documents Crook apparently lifted was a report from Orwell’s doctor about his neck wound, which ended up in Orwell’s KGB file in Moscow. He was compiling evidence that could be used as justification for the coming purge.

Nobody suspected Crook, but there were plenty of other reasons to be fearful. Orwell knew it was pointless to remain in Spain; he could no longer serve the cause to which he had committed himself. Any foreign fighters seeking to leave the country were considered deserters, so it was important that Orwell got his discharge papers in order. For that, he needed to return to the front one last time. It took him five days. Time was running out.

*

The raid on Eileen’s room came early in the hours of June 16th, the same day that the Communist-controlled Republican government declared the POUM [the Worker’s Party of Marxist Unification] an illegal organization. The NKVD and the Spanish secret police (the SIM) moved swiftly on their targets. The NKVD assassin Iosif Grigulevich led the hit squad. Nin, POUM’s leader, had previously served as Trotsky’s private secretary in Moscow and, even though the two had split over political differences, argued that Catalonia should have given Trotsky asylum.

Those associations proved fatal. He was “arrested, brutally tortured, then flayed alive when he refused to confess to imaginary crimes.” Irwin Wolf, another of Trotsky’s former secretaries, was kidnapped and executed. Kurt Landau, a prominent Austrian Trotskyist, went into hiding, but thanks to information gathered by Crook, the death squad kidnapped and murdered him, too. Landau’s wife spent five months in prison, all the while vainly trying to discover what had happened to her husband.

Kopp was arrested at the Continental and thrown in prison. Crook, in order to maintain the integrity of his cover and to continue his spying, was “arrested” by two plainclothes policemen and thrown into the same jail as Kopp.

In the raid on Eileen’s room agents of the SIM confiscated every piece of paper they could find, including Orwell’s diaries, papers, and photographs. They also seized Orwell’s books, including his French edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and, ironically, Stalin’s Ways of Liquidating Trotskyists and Other Double Dealers. For two hours the policemen sounded the walls, checked behind the radiators, sifted through the trash, and held every item of clothing up to the light, searching for hidden letters or pamphlets.

They went through every single one of Orwell’s cigarette papers looking for hidden messages, yet for some reason, perhaps a perverse sense of decency, they failed to search the bed in which Eileen had concealed their passports and checkbooks. “The Spanish secret police had some of the spirit of the Gestapo, but not much of its competence,” he wrote.

Orwell arrived back in Barcelona on June 20th, having secured his discharge papers. It became clear he needed to get out quickly if he were to avoid the same fate as others associated with the POUM. Eileen told him McNair and an 18-year-old ILP volunteer, Stafford Cottman, were already in hiding. Eileen feared the only reason she remained free was as bait for her husband. She told him to destroy his militia card and incriminating photographs.

On no account could he return to the hotel. He would have to go into hiding, as there was almost certainly a warrant out for his arrest. Orwell suddenly felt like “a hunted fugitive.” The Orwells now had to find a way to get out of Barcelona and across the French border undetected. This was easier said than done. Suspicious as Orwell was, he had no idea just how closely the Communists were having him watched.

Eileen arranged for them all to meet the following morning at the British Consulate. Orwell spent the night in the ruins of an old church. After learning that it would take the consulate three days to get their passports ready, he and his friends did their best to remain inconspicuous. That night, in the bitter cold, Orwell, McNair, and Cottman slept, or at least tried to, “in some long grass at the edge of a derelict building lot.”

They spent the following morning restless for the cafés to open so that they could revive themselves with a coffee. After that Orwell went to the barber for a shave and then for a shoeshine. He took care to avoid any of the hotels or cafés associated with the POUM. Instead he began frequenting the city’s most exclusive restaurants, where no one knew him. Orwell took care not to be stopped as the streets “were thronged by local and Valencia assault guards, Carabineros and ordinary police, besides God knows how many spies in plain clothes.”

The morning after going into hiding, Orwell learned that Smillie, the young journalist alongside whom he had fought on the front, had died in a Valencia prison. The official verdict was appendicitis, but Smillie was only 22, and Orwell had seen just how tough he was. At best, Orwell thought, Smillie had been allowed to die “like a neglected animal.” Kopp later claimed he saw a police file that said Smillie had died from heavy kicks to the stomach. Orwell never forgave Smillie’s death.

By day the Englishmen pretended to be in the city on business, by night they slept rough. To get some respite, Orwell spent one day at the public baths. “It was an extraordinary, insane existence we were leading,” he wrote. “By night we were criminals, but by day we were prosperous English visitors—that was our pose, anyway.”

Needing an outlet, Orwell took the opportunity of an unobserved moment to scrawl political slogans on the walls. While on the run, Orwell persisted in the “ineradicable English belief that ‘they’ cannot arrest you unless you have broken the law,” even though “practically everyone we knew was in jail by this time.” He tried to do something for his friend Kopp, taking a great risk of his own arrest in twice visiting him in the filthy, overcrowded prison. Eileen offered to help Crook by smuggling letters out. But in the end there was nothing they could do for Kopp, and he spent the next year and a half being shuttled from prison to prison, from interrogation to interrogation, from prison ship to labor camp.

Even years later, Orwell kept among his papers a report detailing how when Kopp refused to sign a confession he was “put in a coal bin without light, air, or food where enormous rats ran in and out of his legs.” The use of rats in torture stuck with Orwell and became the subject of an iconic scene in Nineteen Eighty-Four. When Kopp was finally released 18 months later, he had lost 98 pounds in weight, and was suffering from scurvy and blood poisoning.

In the prison, Orwell had also seen Milton, who had tried to leave the country only to be arrested at the frontier despite having all his papers in order. The American had helped carry Orwell to the ambulance when he was wounded, and they had served together for months on the front line. But fearful of discovery, they “walked past each other as though [they] had been total strangers.” Milton’s failure to get out was a warning to Orwell and his friends: even jumping through the right hoops was no guarantee of a successful escape.

Finally Orwell discovered his papers were ready. The group hatched an escape plan. A train was leaving for Port Bou, on the French border, at half past eight in the evening. It was important the secret police did not get wind of their planned escape. Eileen was to give no indication that she was leaving or they would pounce. They would order a taxi ahead of time but Eileen should pack her bags and pay the bill only at the last possible moment. To his horror, when Orwell arrived at the station he discovered that the train had left early. Fortunately, it had done so in time for him to warn his wife. It was a close call.

Orwell managed to ascertain that the manager of a local restaurant was an Anarchist and therefore sympathetic to their cause. He put Orwell and his two friends up in a spare room, a great relief after sleeping rough. A train left early the next morning, June 23rd, and, joined by Eileen, the group took seats in the dining car. “Two detectives came round the train taking the names of foreigners,” he wrote, “but when they saw us in the dining-car they seemed satisfied that we were respectable.”

At the border crossing the guards looked up their names in a card index of suspects. It was a tense moment, but for some reason their names were not listed. (Orwell suspected police inefficiency.) Everyone was searched thoroughly, but nothing incriminating was found. The guards pored over Orwell’s discharge papers and, in another stroke of luck, failed to make the connection that the Twenty-Ninth Division was in fact the POUM.

The Orwells and their friends made it to France and safety (the first newspaper they read contained a premature report announcing McNair’s arrest for espionage). A secret police file, dated July 13th and prepared for the Tribunal for Espionage and High Treason in Valencia, denounced Orwell and Eileen as “confirmed Trotskyists.” The report was compiled with information from Wickes (and almost certainly Crook). Orwell had fled just in time.

Orwell’s tenure in Spain, he later wrote, “was a queer business. We started off by being heroic defenders of democracy and ended by slipping over the border with the police panting on our heels.” His wounds hurt and his health, as always, was poor. He needed time to recover. But when his strength returned he knew what he needed to do: he needed to tell the world, and most importantly his fellow left-wingers, the truth about what was going on in Spain.

The Communists had perhaps mistaken Orwell for another naive volunteer, there to be pushed around, but they had in fact made a powerful enemy, an enemy who now prepared to fight back with his trusted weapons, the typewriter and the pen.

From Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War.

The Communist Plot to Assassinate George Orwell. By Duncan White. LitHub,  September 10, 2019.

Harvard University history and literature professor Duncan White looked at how Cold War propaganda was disseminated through literature in the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. Video of an interview in Harvard Book Store.

C-Span, August 27, 2019.

Known as the Cold War, the clash of interest between the United States and the Soviet Union played out on several fronts, and culture was one of them. On both sides, the leadership had to do what it could to persuade the public that its values were superior, in the end worth fighting for. Intellectuals therefore came into their own because they were identifiable supporters of the political and social values under which they were living, or, perhaps more crucially, because they were critics. Survival might be a matter for the military; freedom was at stake for everybody.

Duncan White, a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard, sketches the involvement in the Cold War of a score or so of intellectuals, most of them American or British, with select Russians thrown in. Each merits a separate chapter, mostly biographical. White’s chosen few had only a moral sense of right and wrong in support of their anti-Communism. The CIA and British intelligence services were slow to become institutions fit for the Cold War. This book’s opening page describes the moment when the best that American intelligence agents could do was to fly 500 illicit books into Poland by attaching them to inflated ten-foot balloons. White makes a case that the long war of words over Communism was always a matter of personality, and he locates its origins in the Spanish Civil War. In a famous pamphlet, 127 leading authors took the side of the Left while only six came out for the Right. The British and French official policy of bemused neutrality in the civil war left the field open for Stalin and Hitler to intervene. The clash of interests appeared simple. A Communist now became an anti-fascist. All good men are anti-fascist, and therefore objectively, as the Party would say, all good men are Communists. Hemingway’s political engagement and his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls illustrate this trite syllogism.

Real anti-fascist passion motivated George Orwell. His comrades in the trenches called themselvesanarchists. He was lucky to survive a bullet through the neck and luckier still to escape from Stalinist Communists under orders to murder other leftists, whether anarchists, Trotskyists, or whatever. Political reality was catching up with someone determined to tell the truth and master of a clear style all his own. The various articles he wrote about his experience in Spain, and his book Homage to Catalonia, have been reprinted many times, but it still comes as a shock to remember that publishers rejected all of them for fear of offending the Left. Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, was one of these fainthearts, and in just a few sentences about him Orwell shows what scorn can do. Animal Farm and 1984 had the power to turn the image of Stalin from Uncle Joe to Big Brother. Czeslaw Milosz, himself at one time close enough to the Polish Communist Party to consider joining it, describes in The Captive Mind (1953) the amazement of his fellow Poles that Orwell could write so exactly about Communism when he had never lived under it. No British writer since Shakespeare has had such influence on public opinion, and White does him justice.

The Soviet Union was a police state, unmatched when it came to the black arts. A worldwide network loosely referred to as the Comintern consisted of activists at home and secret agents abroad. Something like a thousand media outlets and front organizations spread the Party line in many languages and many countries. Propaganda, deception, and information were indistinguishable. The United States and every country in Western Europe had its Communist party, whose leaders ensured obedience to Moscow. The course of events in the real world obliged Howard Fast and Richard Wright, the best-known American Communist writers, to understand that they had been peddling illusion and lies. Soviet writers had to deal with illusion and lies on a daily basis in the certainty that disobedience was likely to lead to a death sentence. White tells the tragic stories of Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak, the poet Anna Akhmatova, and Andrei Sinyavsky. No less tragic, Alexander Fadeyev, head of the writers’ union and therefore official enforcer of obedient literature, could not live with the harm he had done and shot himself. Except for the religious dimension, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a 20th-century Voltaire. White sees him as the bravest of the brave, with the unusual gift of cunning on top of it.

Arthur Koestler worked for the Comintern and knew the Party from the inside. When he perceived how the Party preferred causes to people, he broke with it. Escaping to Britain in the chaos of 1940, he nevertheless had with him the manuscript of Darkness at Noon. Although in the form of fiction, this exposition of the Party served as Koestler’s anti-Communist credentials. The watching world had been stupefied by trials in Moscow when foremost Communists pleaded guilty to crimes of treason they could not possibly have committed. For whatever reason, Walter Duranty, Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, had denied that the trials had been rigged. Koestler’s explanation was that the Party’s abusive appeal to loyalty could pressure anyone to confess to anything. The Communist press bracketed him with Orwell, often openly calling for their assassination. 

In order to have a forum in which to debate with the Soviets forcefully and regularly, Koestler helped to launch two projects, the Congress of Cultural Freedom and the monthly magazine Encounter. Unanimously leftists of one stripe or another, the contributors to the rival magazine Partisan Review sounded as though they were having a private conversation. Encounter’s editor, Melvin Lasky, was as formidable a character as Koestler, and he obtained financial backing from the CIA. When this became public knowledge, Stephen Spender, Lasky’s deputy and more a ninny than a poet, resigned. What did it matter where the money came from when Encounter was arguably the best magazine ever published in the English language, with an emphasis more on poetry and fiction than on politics? A number of critics made it an issue that the magazine depended on official but undeclared backing, but is that enough to discredit social democracy? White concludes the relevant chapter harshly, “Koestler fought the Cold War too hard.” Room should have been found in these 700 pages to mention the Sovietologists Walter Laqueur and Leo Labedz, front-line soldiers in the Cold War. For many years they edited Survey, the most authoritative specialist journal about the Soviet Union, presumably paid for by British intelligence. Both of them had encyclopedic memories that allowed them to have the last word.

In the course of the Cold War, anti-Communism was liable to dissolve into anti-anti-Communism. Put another way, there were intellectuals who accepted that Communism was an evil but didn’t like those who said so nor the way they said it. Graham Greene was one such. By nature an outsider, he sought to give offense, which fitted him, or perhaps unfitted him, for the Cold War. No writer outside the Communist Party has so continuously maligned the West and justified the Soviet Union. In a letter to the London Times in September 1967, he summed up his feelings. “If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the United States, I would certainly choose the Soviet Union.” America for him is “just the drugstore and the Coca-Cola, the hamburger, the sinless empty graceless chromium world.” Two of White’s chapters are devoted to Greene and generously overlook or underplay Greene’s pride in “my friend Fidel Castro,” his contribution to the Sandinistas in the hope his money would buy bullets, his defense of Kim Philby, the spy who betrayed Britain for Stalin’s Soviet Union, and much else of the sort. A similarly indulgent chapter sets up John le Carré, another outsider by nature, as heir to Greeneland, morbidly downbeat about the workings of democracy, capitalism, pharmaceutical companies, or whatever. As though they were like for like, le Carré repeatedly holds up the morality and efficacy of Soviet agents against their British counterparts.

“I confess that when I went to Vietnam early last February I was looking for material damaging to the American interest and I found it” is the revealing first sentence of Mary McCarthy’s Vietnam (1967). Anti-Communism, she was writing to her friend Hannah Arendt, was more of a danger than Communism. President Nixon, she feared, was setting up a police state. If you wanted law and order and proper police protection, you would defect behind the Iron Curtain. On whose side was this dubious heroine of the Cold War? She was representative of a type that saw nothing wrong (and a great deal right) in ridiculing the social system that provided her with indispensable royalties.

Cold Warriors is a big and brash book at the heart of which is the surprise that all in all, even in these godforsaken times, the pen managed to remain mightier than the sword.

The Cold War of Words. By David Pryce-Jones.  National Review ,  August 22, 2019. 

One autumn night in 1991, I stood on the rooftop terrace of a tacky villa in Saranda once owned by Albania’s Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha, beside three elderly former SOE officers who were returning to Albania for the first time since 1945. In an image that summed up the waste and the horror of the Cold War, David Smiley stared out over the dark water at the lights of Corfu, from where, on a similar night in October 1949, he had sent a group of dissidents, code-named the ‘Pixies’, to launch an insurgency — and wiped his eye in silence.

Smiley’s men had been ambushed as they landed, and then killed, on the tip-off from Kim Philby, the highest Russian agent to infiltrate British Intelligence, and in charge of anti-communist espionage. It was left to Smiley’s fellow SOE companion, Julian Amery, to murmur reflectively: ‘We might have saved Albania. We didn’t, and Albania became the Orwell caricature of communism.’

Philby looms large in Duncan White’s ambitious and constantly rewarding survey of writers who battled to get read in the Cold War. Although not strictly speaking an author, Philby was a mark of how far each side was committed to penetrating, understanding and subverting the other; a perversion, if you like, of the empathy that is the writer’s necessary condition, and which defines White’s chiefly Anglo/Soviet cast of novelists, poets and playwrights.

In the wake of the second world war, Russia and the West feared the domino effect of enfeebled countries like Albania falling into the clutches of imperialist capitalism or communism. Each side deployed literature as a frontline force in their struggle. For the CIA, which covertly funded magazines such as Encounter and Mundo Nuevo, books were ‘the most important weapon of strategic (long-term) propaganda’; for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in a different context, his precious notes and drafts of The Gulag Archipelago ‘were as dangerous as atom bombs’. Books were lobbed into enemy territory like grenades. Between 1952 and 1957, from three sites in West Germany, a CIA operation codenamed ‘Aedinosaur’ launched millions of ten-foot balloons carrying copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and dropped them over Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia — whose airforces were ordered to shoot the balloons down.

It was Orwell, ‘the iconic writer of a generation’, who gave the Cold War its name. He had had his acidic baptism in the Spanish Civil War, alongside Arthur Koestler and Stephen Spender. ‘We started off by being heroic defenders of democracy, and ended by slipping over the border with the police panting on our heels.’ Even though he had been shot in the throat by a nationalist bullet, Orwell was denounced as a ‘confirmed Trotskyist’ by a fanatical English communist, David Crook, who had been recruited to Stalin’s NKVD by the agent who later assassinated Trotsky, Ramón Mercader — and whose unrepentant Canadian widow I met years later in Beijing, where she and Crook were imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. It had not altered the course of her reverence. ‘When I was locked up, I read Volumes I-IV of Mao’s complete works three and a half times.’ And? ‘I loved his rare shafts of humour.’

Isabel Crook had obliterated from her memory how humour was a dangerous commodity in the Cold War. Along with 2.4 million others, the poet Osip Mandelstam was incarcerated for an epigram he wrote about Stalin’s grub-fat fingers — as was Solzhenitsyn, for cracking a joke about Stalin. Distinctly shy of humour was Mikhail Gorbachev, the Russian leader who did more than anyone to end the Cold War. When Václav Havel,  the Czech playwright-turned-dissident-leader, suggested coming to Moscow to smoke with him a ceremonial pipe of peace that Havel had been given by a North American tribe, Gorbachev stammered: ‘But I… I don’t smoke.’

For all its balloon-filling hot air, the Cold War was a deadly serious affair, even if it seemed hard to take seriously early on. Orwell’s factual account of his experiences in Spain, Homage to Catalonia, sold just 638 copies. Only when he was sent for review Koestler’s fictionalised account of the same conflict, Darkness at Noon (half a million copies were sold in France alone), did he recognise that fiction, rather than journalism or memoir, was, in White’s words, ‘the most effective way to communicate the essence of totalitarianism’.

The American novelist Mary McCarthy later explained it like this:

Readers put perhaps not more trust but a different kind of trust in the perception of writers they know as novelists… What we can do, perhaps better than the next man, is smell a rat.

Written to undermine Stalinism and the rabid purges that Orwell witnessed in Spain — ‘the special world created by secret police forces, censorship of opinion, torture and frame-up trials’ — Animal Farm was completed in three weeks. Nineteen Eighty-Four took three years longer. Published in 1949, and set, not in Russia, but in a future Britain which, White nicely reminds us, had become a mere colony of the US, renamed ‘Airstrip One’, it was immediately recognised as ‘the most powerful weapon yet deployed in the cultural Cold War’.

Behind the Iron Curtain, Stalin’s chief cultural propagandist, Andrei Zhdanov, insisted that Soviet literature was ‘the most advanced literature in the world’ because ‘it does not and cannot have other interests besides the interests of the state’. In pursuit of ‘socialist realism’, brigades of writers were encouraged to write collective novels about the factory to which they had been assigned. The penalty for not doing so was in general as dire as the result. The poet Anna Akhmatova, who, like Solzhenitsyn, had to tear up and swallow or bury her work, reckoned that ‘not a single piece of literature’ was printed under Stalin’s poisonous rule.

One of myriad mediocre talents hitched to communism’s disintegrating band-wagon was the Russian novelist Alexander Fadeyev. Co-founder and chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers, he had signed letters which led to his fellow authors being arrested, and sometimes worse: an estimated 1,500 writers lost their lives in Stalin’s purges, among them Mandelstam, Isaac Babel and Boris Pilnyak. But the price of selling his soul to ‘the satrap Stalin’ became too high, and on 13 May 1956 Fadeyev shot himself. His suicide note mourned how literature had been ‘debased, persecuted and destroyed’, and the best writers ‘physically exterminated’.

Dissident writers were treated less barbarically in America. One famous leader of the communist cause was Howard Fast, who at a protest against anti-communists was observed ‘fighting with a Coke bottle in each hand’. Still, his books were burned and removed from libraries in Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunt, and Fast was sent to prison at Mill Point where he conceived his novel Spartacus, which became a self-published bestseller and Hollywood movie.

Nor was the US spared its enemy’s hypocrisies and complicities. America’s declared pre-war wish to champion self-determination lost out to the stronger impulse to contain the spread of communism and find new resources, as in oil-rich Iran, where a joint CIA–SIS coup toppled the elected leader. Elsewhere, America propped up repressive right-wing dictatorships in South Vietnam (as fictionalised in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American), Cuba (Our Man in Havana) and South and Central America, the supreme act of hypocrisy being the Iran-Contra Affair.

It’s a big subject. White wants us never to forget that ‘the Cold War was a conflict of truly global scope’, and though not pretending to be comprehensive, his research is impressive, presented in crisp, efficient prose with an eye for the encapsulating detail (e.g. Ho Chi Minh catching frostbite while queuing to pay homage to Lenin’s corpse). Even so, his parameters are a bit loosey-goosey. While prepared to bring Nicaragua into his sphere of interest, he strangely neglects to travel further south, most glaringly to Chile, where the CIA’s overthrow of the communist president Salvador Allende merits just half a paragraph.

Many of this period’s outstanding writers were the products of Latin America’s Guerra Fría, yet White finds no space for Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez or Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Nor does China get a look-in; or East Germany, where writers such as Christa Wolf became irrelevant overnight once the Berlin Wall was broached. A further absence is a considered voice from the other side — for example, a poet like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who appeared to straddle the divide; or a representative of the victorious Spanish Nationalists like the novelist Camilo José Cela, a censor for Franco who in the epochal year of 1989 won the Nobel Prize. Perhaps the subject is too big.

That said, Cold Warriors fascinates in the areas it does choose to cover, and serves as a nostalgic reminder of a time when literature was a life-or-death matter. White writes: ‘It is hard to imagine the publication of a novel precipitating a geopolitical crisis in the manner of Dr Zhivago or The Gulag Archipelago.’

As for the future, Václav Havel, the Czech writer who lived to become president, predicted two possibilities only. Either ‘the independent life of society’, that seemed won when the Cold War ended, will grow and grow until society changes. Or else, we are doomed to face what happened in Albania — ‘some dreadful Orwellian vision of a world of absolute manipulation’.

Novel explosives of the Cold War. By Nicholas Shakespeare. The Spectator  , August 24, 2019.

In the 1950s, the CIA believed books could change the world. The organization gave millions of dollars to publishers and literary magazines. They printed special lightweight copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which were then loaded onto balloons and sent across borders. They sent Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man through the mail to specially-chosen addresses around the world.

On the other side of the Iron Curtain, 700 of the Soviet Union’s most famous writers gathered in a grand auditorium to listen to speeches denouncing modernist literature in general, and the work of James Joyce in particular. Soviet Realism was the only acceptable style in which novelists can work, and praise for the state literary technique was effusive. Across the street from the conference, an enormous banner read: “Writers are the engineers of human souls,” a phrase coined by Stalin himself.

Cold Warriors, the historian Duncan White’s definitive new account of the literary personalities who fought the Cold War, is full of anecdotes like these, which tend to sound more like the fever dreams of a delirious librarian than historical fact. Art has always been political. Books change the world. As literary culture has shrunk in size and influence, those sentiments sound more like pedantic tweets than concepts most human beings actually believe. Nevertheless, Cold Warriors is an exhaustively researched defense of those principles, which half-a-century ago were broadly embraced by both writers and the governments happy to fund their work.

The book, out August 27 from Custom House, describes how writers like Mary McCarthy, John Le Carré, and Graham Greene fought on the front lines of the ideological battle between capitalism and communism. White’s narrative, which follows writers as they fight, write, spy and give speeches through the latter part of the 20th century, begins in 1937 with Orwell catching a bullet in the neck fighting fascists in Spain and doesn’t quit until well after the dissolution of the USSR.

White shows us a world in which politically significant novels can’t be printed fast enough to keep up with demand, so popular that they’re sold secondhand like tickets to the first run of Hamilton, at “seven or eight times the cover price.” When new editions come out, people line up around the block to get them.

But while literary culture had enviable popular appeal during the Cold War, its central place in culture made it the subject of intense government scrutiny, in both the USSR and the West. Novelists were considered powerful allies but also nasty enemies, and in the years after World War II, literature was used as a political weapon by clandestine intelligence services on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The KGB, CIA and M16 recruited writers freely — and whoever they didn’t directly recruit, they indirectly funded. Good writing won hearts and minds; by the same token, a few wrong words offending the powerful could land a writer in prison, exiled, or killed outright. Some writers went to the wrong kinds of conferences; shortly afterward they died in suspicious circumstances. When the Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova became too difficult to handle, her son was abducted to make sure she wouldn’t misbehave. Others were punished more directly, with a bullet to the back of the neck.

White’s meticulous account of these times unfolds a bit like a thriller itself. When Graham Greene thinks the Soviet secret police are out to get him after the liberation of Paris in 1945, his first thought is not to flee, but instead to get a gun — from Ernest Hemingway. Literary figures continue to socialize at an alarming rate in this book, since readers learn early on that when writers fraternize with each other, they get up to no good. At conferences they are “whisked from banquet to banquet in Rolls-Royces, toasted with champagne, and celebrated in song.” They attend secret meetings, hang out with dictators, or, on the Soviet side, even dare to recite anti-government poetry to their nearest and dearest friends, who subsequently inform on them to the secret police.

A good chunk of this book is spent in prisons, where Arthur Koestler and Isaac Babel endure harrowing conditions because of the words they’ve written. Koestler’s novelization of his imprisonment and break with Soviet communism went on to be published in 1940 as Darkness at Noon, which sold an absurd amount of copies and made Koestler a household name. Babel wasn’t so lucky. I held my breath reading over the details of his last days — broken by torture, he repudiated what he had written, informed on his friends, and then in his desperation, tried to take it all back. In the space of a morning he was tried, pronounced guilty and shot.

In the USSR, poets were feared for what they could do. Even in the horrific purges of the 1930s, a certain reverence was held for writer-prisoners — they were killed not because they were useless layabouts, but because they were considered particularly dangerous people, a fact clarified by the propaganda battle fought over the publication of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The book was banned in the Soviet Union, but a smuggled copy made it to the West, where it became a bestseller, due in no small part to the promotional efforts of the CIA.

The agency then got their hands on a Russian language manuscript and sent copies of the banned book back behind the Iron Curtain. By that time, White documents how the literary struggle of the Cold War had grown far more sophisticated than a naked clash of ideology: “CIA were invested in the idea that literature that did not look like propaganda was much more effective at winning hearts and minds than polemical material — this had been their whole rationale for backing the non-Communist left and magazines like Encounter … Doctor Zhivago was not written as propaganda or out of ideological fervor, but nevertheless it was banned by Moscow, and this suited the CIA’s needs perfectly.”

The free circulation of Pasternak’s literary achievement was a huge coup for the American side, who had managed to weaponize both propaganda and high art. In a similar episode of art being used for a wider political agenda than it was first conceived, Orwell was horrified by the reaction to his bestseller 1984 — it was anti-Stalinist, but Orwell was a hardcore leftist, and he believed Britain’s best chance at flourishing in the future was a smooth transition to socialism. He was forced to address the issue directly in his essay “Why I Write,” but that didn’t stop reviewers from calling 1984 an attack on socialism and Britain’s Labour Party, which White diagnoses as “the first signs of the novel’s future as a bible of hard-right libertarians … Orwell was critical of the Labour Party but only for not going far enough; he wanted to see the House of Lords and titles abolished, and an end to the elite public schools.”

One thing all the writers in Cold Warriors seem to have in common is an inexhaustible supply of dissent. They are never comfortable where they are; they share an almost pathological desire to break with the established political orthodoxy of whatever group they happen to be a part of at the time. They obsessively look for the hypocrisy, the complexity, and the tumult of the human heart, which is simply not a great way to get along with a political party. Whatever value as a propaganda tool they might have had, writers of this era were fiercely independent. Orwell went to Spain to fight fascists, but left horrified by the conduct of his own side, and determined to write about its failures.

The scale and stakes of literary conflict were fundamentally altered with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Contemporary literature may be aligned or opposed to the policy interests of regimes and administrations, but writers are no longer household names, and it’s hard to imagine even a literary sensation like Knausgaard or Ferrante having a big impact on the diplomatic balance between nations.

Still, the world of Cold Warriors lingers on. Reactionary forces are on the rise globally. Nationalism is ascendent. The cult of personality has gained fresh life. Skirmishes continue to be fought on cultural ground. On the internet, the progessive left and the alt-right battle in the comments section on YouTube, and art deemed “too political” (or, on the other hand, not political enough) is boycotted, censored, or deleted. Moderators at tech companies now arbitrate the kind of ideological conflict once handled by the clandestine intelligence operations of superpowers.

Elsewhere, critics of Putin like Masha Gessen carry on in the literary tradition of Arthur Koestler, brazenly speaking truth to power. And in China, where the totalitarian curtain never lifted, writers continue to be censored or imprisoned as a matter of routine. In an eerie echo of the Soviet suppression of the news of Pasternak’s death, the Chinese regime suppressed and censored news of the death of writer and activist Liu Xiaobo two years ago. In 2015 the Causeway Bay booksellers were snatched from their homes and underwent forced re-education to bring their politics closer to Communist party orthodoxy.

Cold Warriors shows a neglected aspect of well-trod history, a geopolitical reality shaped by writers as much as generals. It is the definitive rebuttal to what seems like an increasingly prevalent view: that literature’s battles have no effect on the wider world. Isaac Babel said it best: “No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.”

Before Oprah’s  Book Club, There was the CIA. By Ethan Dawson. The Outline,  August  26, 2019.