The Best Kept Secret: An Untold Story of a Cold War Operation

摘要

Alfred Reisch's Hot Books in the Cold War, published shortly before his death in 2013, is the first comprehensive account of a still classified covert operation funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that began in mid-1956 to publish and distribute books and periodicals destined for readers in six "targetcountries"-the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. Reisch refers to it as "the book distribution program"; inside the Agency it was called simply "the book program." For many years it remained a secret of sorts, even though several people who were involved in, or benefited from, it knew or suspected that it was a CIA operation. The book program escaped the exposes of other covert operations that surfaced in the radical left-wing and even mainstream press in the 1960s and during the revelations from congressional investigations in 1970s.