The Doctor Zhivago operation is John Kiriakou’s account of a joint CIA-Vatican effort to smuggle Russian-language copies of Boris Pasternak’s banned novel into the Soviet Union. Because the Soviets were watching the American tent at an international book fair in Brussels, the CIA had the Vatican distribute the book instead: Soviet visitors to the Vatican tent were quietly steered to a back room stocked with copies.[1][2][3] Kiriakou says people would tear out ten pages at a time, tape them around their legs to re-enter the USSR, then reassemble and share the book — even KGB minders carried copies home.[4] He calls it the essence of Cold War influence work: “declare victory in small increments,” content to make one citizen question the government.[5]
Kiriakou has repeated the same account in a separate interview, again describing the Vatican translating the novel into Russian and placing it in the Vatican’s own tent — this time dating the book fair to 1959 — so that Soviet visitors cleared to travel abroad could tear the book into sections, tape the pages to their legs, and smuggle them back into the USSR.[6]