In a colorful display of deceit and cunning, the CIA launched hot air balloons from West Germany in the 1950s and sent them drifting across the Iron Curtain to deliver their prized cargo - George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm (1945).  

Balloons that dodged enemy fire in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia wafted into hostile territory like silent grenades. Operation AeDinosaur - as the literary spy mission was known - undermined Soviet censorship and used literature as a secret weapon to stir up intellectual debate about communism.

Orwell’s barnyard animals were not simply passive pigs and horses, nor the stuff of dreamy childhood bedtime stories.

Animal Farm was an anti-totalitarian novel published partially because the British author was disturbed at the UK left's whitewashing of Russian leader Joseph Stalin's atrocities and partially because of Orwell’s experiences in a Trotskyist group during the Spanish Civil War.

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Orwell, wounded in combat, later wrote that it became “difficult to think about this war in the same naively idealistic manner as before”. 

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E. Howard Hunt: Operation AeDinosaur 

The author was a fitting choice for the undercover operation - Orwell had popularized the phrase ‘Cold War’ when he used it in a 1945 essay.

The mission was one of several CIA-sponsored programs that included distributing banned books, periodicals, and pamphlets to the USSR and Eastern Europe in the '50s. As the CIA saw it, they were "reinforcing predispositions toward cultural and intellectual freedom, and dissatisfaction with its absence".

Animal Farm & Doctor Zhivago

In addition to Animal Farm, the CIA delivered the banned Russian book Doctor Zhivago to Soviet Union readers after a British spy photographed Boris Pasternak's text and shared it with his American counterparts.

Animal Farm had a special place in the CIA’s heart, however. The book’s barnyard animals - [spoiler alert ahead!] - overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters to set up an egalitarian society. Orwell’s power-loving leaders, the pigs, form a dictatorship even more oppressive than that of their former human masters, however.

It was a parable the CIA could exploit through ‘soft power’ - an animated movie might do the trick, as long as the book’s ending could be altered to fit the US Agency’s agenda.
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Animal Farm, the movie‍

E. Howard Hunt - later jailed as one of President Richard Nixon’s Watergate ‘plumbers’ - ran the CIA’s Psychological Warfare Workshop in the 1950s. He had a wide remit that included propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, and subversion.

Under his leadership, the CIA transformed into America’s ‘Ministry of Culture’, an Orwellian doublethink operation channeling anti-communist messages through blockbuster movies.

The spymaster decided he could win over American hearts and minds by making a full-length animated film based on Animal Farm, but the CIA and British Foreign Office’s clandestine Information Research Department weren’t the only ones circling to acquire the film rights. Eventually, the CIA prevailed when Sonia Orwell, after her husband's death, agreed to sell the rights if she could meet her hero Clark Gable.

British animators Halas and Batchelor were brought in to design Animal Farm’s memorable characters. The book ends - [another spoiler alert ahead!] with the animals and humans indistinguishable as corrupt, evil powers. In the CIA-funded movie, however, there is no mention of humans. Only the pigs are totally corrupt. The Americans didn’t mind. The movie opened to rave reviews. 

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Spies uncensored

UK spies also found a way to take advantage of Animal Farm, funding a newspaper comic strip in the early 1950s which ran in Brazil, Burma, Eritrea, India, Mexico, Thailand, and Venezuela.

The Soviet Union banned Animal Farm until the Cold War was almost over, however.  In 1988, the government newspaper Izvestia finally published two chapters of the novel.

“It is good that the prose of this great English writer reaches our readers, albeit late,” Izvestia wrote at the time.

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