George C Minden, who led a Cold War of words

GEORGE C MINDEN, who for 37 years ran a secret American programme that put 10 million Western books and magazines in the hands of intellectuals and professionals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, died on April 9.

He was 85. Minden was president of the International Literary Centre, an organisation financed by the Central Intelligence Agency, which tried to win influential friends by giving them reading material unavailable in their own countries.The material ranged from dictionaries, medical texts and novels by Joyce and Nabokov to art museum catalogues and Parisian fashion magazines.The people who received the reading matter were generally Communists or professionals and intellectuals working for Communist regimes.They thought the books were being donated by Western publishers and cultural organisations.The CIA’s purpose was to offer an alternative, culturally engaging reality that had the implicit effect of promoting Western culture.Minden did not see a need to bluntly refute Marxist dogma, on the theory that people could use common sense and their own observations to reject Communist arguments.The project became something of a personalised book club; files were kept on recipients’ reading tastes, so as to better satisfy them in the future.It replaced earlier, frankly propagandistic programmes, including mass dropping of anti-Communist leaflets from high-altitude balloons.Minden wrote in an internal memo that the West’s main obstacle was “not Marxist obstacles, but a vacuum”, and that “what is needed is something against frustration and stultification, against a life full of omissions”.John PC Matthews wrote in 2003 in The International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence – in one of the few public discussions of the programme – that the initiative sprinkled reality into an “unnatural and ultimately irrational” system.When Communism collapsed, in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in the Soviet Union in 1991, Matthews, who had worked in the book programme, suggested that Minden had laid the foundation for a smoother relationship among opinion leaders in a post-Communist world.”Intellectuals in the East understood intellectuals in the West because they had been reading the same books,” he wrote.George Caputineanu Minden was born on February 19 1921, in Bucharest, Romania, where he grew up in a wealthy, cosmopolitan household.He learned to speak six languages, including Latin, and at 18 he inherited an estate that included vast oil fields.He graduated at the top of his class from the University of Bucharest’s law school.In 1946, as the Communists were taking control of Romania, he fled to England with his first wife, Margarete Schmidt.His lands and fortune were confiscated.- Abbreviated from The New York TimesMinden was president of the International Literary Centre, an organisation financed by the Central Intelligence Agency, which tried to win influential friends by giving them reading material unavailable in their own countries.The material ranged from dictionaries, medical texts and novels by Joyce and Nabokov to art museum catalogues and Parisian fashion magazines.The people who received the reading matter were generally Communists or professionals and intellectuals working for Communist regimes.They thought the books were being donated by Western publishers and cultural organisations.The CIA’s purpose was to offer an alternative, culturally engaging reality that had the implicit effect of promoting Western culture.Minden did not see a need to bluntly refute Marxist dogma, on the theory that people could use common sense and their own observations to reject Communist arguments.The project became something of a personalised book club; files were kept on recipients’ reading tastes, so as to better satisfy them in the future.It replaced earlier, frankly propagandistic programmes, including mass dropping of anti-Communist leaflets from high-altitude balloons.Minden wrote in an internal memo that the West’s main obstacle was “not Marxist obstacles, but a vacuum”, and that “what is needed is something against frustration and stultification, against a life full of omissions”.John PC Matthews wrote in 2003 in The International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence – in one of the few public discussions of the programme – that the initiative sprinkled reality into an “unnatural and ultimately irrational” system.When Communism collapsed, in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in the Soviet Union in 1991, Matthews, who had worked in the book programme, suggested that Minden had laid the foundation for a smoother relationship among opinion leaders in a post-Communist world.”Intellectuals in the East understood intellectuals in the West because they had been reading the same books,” he wrote.George Caputineanu Minden was born on February 19 1921, in Bucharest, Romania, where he grew up in a wealthy, cosmopolitan household.He learned to speak six languages, including Latin, and at 18 he inherited an estate that included vast oil fields.He graduated at the top of his class from the University of Bucharest’s law school.In 1946, as the Communists were taking control of Romania, he fled to England with his first wife, Margarete Schmidt.His lands and fortune were confiscated.- Abbreviated from The New York Times