That as recently as the early 1990s novels were considered “instruments of political warfare” by America’s top spy agency might strike you as outright fantasy or else fodder for sketch comedy (think Monty Python’s Killing Joke). And yet for decades, starting in the 1950s, the CIA covertly disseminated millions of books—including Russian translations of Orwell, Camus and Nabokov—to Soviet-controlled countries with the intention of “reinforc[ing] dispositions toward intellectual and cultural freedom, and dissatisfaction with its absence.” Perhaps more remarkable still, the agency concluded that its campaigns had been “demonstrably effective.” Read more…