November came in with a bang—or rather, a blast. The Soviets shot Sputnik II into space—this time carrying a dog named Laika. Kathy hung a Lost Dog poster in the break room with a picture captioned MUTTNIK: LAST SEEN ORBITING THE EARTH, but it was promptly removed.
Tension at the Agency increased, and we were asked to stay late for the men’s after-hours meetings. Sometimes they’d pick up a pizza or sandwiches if we had to stay past nine. But often there were no breaks and no food, and we made sure to pack extra lunches, just in case.
The Gaither Report soon followed, informing Eisenhower of what he already knew: that in the space race, nuclear race, and almost every other race we were further behind the Soviets than we had thought.
But as it turned out, the Agency already had another weapon in its pipeline.
* * *
—
They had their satellites, but we had their books. Back then, we believed books could be weapons—that literature could change the course of history. The Agency knew it would take time to change the hearts and minds of men, but they were in it for the long game. Since its OSS roots, the Agency had doubled down on soft-propaganda warfare—using art, music, and literature to advance its objectives. The goal: to emphasize how the Soviet system did not allow free thought—how the Red State hindered, censored, and persecuted even its finest artists. The tactic: to get cultural materials into the hands of Soviet citizens by any means.
We started out stuffing pamphlets into weather balloons and sent them over borders to burst, their contents raining down behind the Iron Curtain. Then we mailed Soviet-banned books back behind enemy lines. At first, the men had the bright idea to just mail the books in nondescript envelopes, cross their fingers, and hope at least a few would make it across undetected. But during one of their book meetings, Linda piped up, suggesting the idea of affixing false covers to the books for better protection. A few of us gathered every copy we could find of less controversial titles like Charlotte’s Web and Pride and Prejudice, removed their dust jackets, and glued them to the contraband before dropping them into the mail. Naturally, the men took the credit.
And it was around that time that the Agency decided we ought to dive even deeper into the war of the words, graduating several men within the ranks to create their own publishing companies and found literary magazines to front our efforts. The Agency became a bit of a book club with a black budget. It was more appealing to poets and writers than book readings with free wine. We had our hands so deep in publishing you’d have thought we got a cut of the royalties.
We’d sit in on the men’s meetings and take notes while they talked about the novels they wanted to exploit next. They’d debate the merits of making Orwell’s Animal Farm the subject of their next mission versus Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. They’d talk books as if their critiques would be printed in the Times. So serious, and yet we’d joke that their conversations felt like ones we’d had back in our undergrad lit classes. Someone would make a point, then someone else would disagree, then they’d go off on some tangent. These discussions went on for hours, and we’d be lying if we said we hadn’t caught ourselves nodding off once or twice. Once, Norma interrupted the men by saying she firmly believed the themes Bellows explores far outweigh the sheer beauty of Nabokov’s sentences, and that was the last book meeting she ever took notes at.
So there were the balloons, the false covers, the publishing companies, the lit mags, all the other books we’d smuggled into the USSR.
Then there was Zhivago.
Classified under code name AEDINOSAUR, it was the mission that would change everything.
Doctor Zhivago—a name more than one of us had trouble spelling at first—was written by the Soviet’s most famous living writer, Boris Pasternak, and banned in the Eastern Bloc due to its critiques of the October Revolution and its so-called subversive nature.
On first glance, it wasn’t evident how a sweeping epic about the doomed love between Yuri Zhivago and Lara Antipova could be used as a weapon, but the Agency was always creative.
The initial internal memo described Zhivago as “the most heretical literary work by a Soviet author since Stalin’s death,” saying it had “great propaganda value” for its “passive but piercing exposition of the effect of the Soviet system on the life of a sensitive, intelligent citizen.” In other words, it was perfect.
The memo passed through SR faster than word of a break room tryst during one of our martini-soaked Christmas parties and spawned at least half a dozen additional memos, each seconding the first: that this was not just a book, but a weapon—and one the Agency wanted to obtain and smuggle back behind the Iron Curtain for its own citizens to detonate.
EAST
1955–1956
CHAPTER 10
THE AGENT
Sergio D’Angelo awoke to his three-year-old son beside his bed babbling on midsentence about a dragon named Stefano—a large green-and-yellow papier-mâché creature they’d seen at a puppet show back in Rome. “Giulietta!” Sergio called to his wife, hoping she’d take pity on him and fetch their child so that he could sleep another hour. Giulietta ignored his pleas.
Sergio’s mouth was dry and his temples throbbed from too many vodka shots the night before. “To the Italians!” his coworker Vladlen had cried, raising a glass to the group gathered for the Radio Moscow party. Sergio laughed and drank without pointing out that he was but one Italian, not plural Italians. Sergio led the charge to the dance floor. Handsome and dressed as though he’d stepped off an Italian film set, he had his choice of dancing partners. And he chose them all, until Vladlen tapped him on the shoulder to tell him the music had ended a half hour ago and the café owner was throwing them out. A petite woman with whom Sergio was dancing to no music invited them back to her apartment to continue the revelry, but Sergio declined. Not just because his wife was waiting for him at home, but because, despite the next day being Sunday, he had work to do.
Sergio translated bulletins for Radio Moscow’s Italian broadcast, but he’d also come to the USSR for another reason: he was a would-be literary agent. His employer, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli—the timber heir and founder of a new publishing company—wanted to find the next modern classic and was convinced it had to come from the Motherland. “Find me the next Lolita,” Feltrinelli had instructed.
Sergio had yet to find the next smash hit, but a bulletin that had come across his desk the previous week offered a promising lead: The publication of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is imminent. Written in the form of a diary, it is a novel that spans three quarters of a century, ending with the Second World War. Sergio telegraphed Feltrinelli and was given the go-ahead to attempt to secure the international rights. Unable to get hold of the author by telephone, Sergio made plans with Vladlen to visit Pasternak at his dacha in Peredelkino that Sunday.