The Secrets We Kept

The power of literature to change minds, move emotions, and raise questions is well-known. For Teddy Helms, it was the words of Russian writers who got him through his depression after his brother died. Despite his parents’ best efforts, he reflects, “[I]t wasn’t my parents or the doctor they forced me to ‘just talk to’ that pulled me out of it; it was The Brothers Karamazov. Then Crime and Punishment, then The Idiot, then everything the man ever wrote. Dostoyevsky threw me a rope in the fog and began to tug” (195). Through literature, Teddy was able to reevaluate life and what was meaningful to him. He changed his major from prelaw to Slavic languages and thus was able to have a career in the Agency’s Soviet Russia Division. The idea of literature as a balm and a weapon appears here in the former sense.

Like Teddy, the CIA considered literature to have power over people and so hired agents “who believed in the long game of changing people’s ideology over time” by disseminating “books that made the Soviets look bad: books they banned, books that criticized the system, books that made the United States look like a shining beacon” (197).