WHEN he found out that his new employer was a front for the CIA, Isaac Patch was furious. He disliked the secret world, with its mixture of paranoia, incompetence and furtiveness. The agency was “unsavoury” and he hated having to lie about what he did.

But he detested Communism even more. As a diplomat he had seen the Soviet system first hand. In 1949, after the coup in Czechoslovakia, he and his family had been expelled by the secret police, at a bruising 24 hours notice. At the American embassy in wartime Moscow, he’d come to love Russia and to deplore the damage that Communism was doing to it.

He admired Russians—the humbler the better. Careless of hardship and risk, they would share their last bread with him, a strange foreigner wandering from village to village during his weekends. They even let him try to teach them his beloved baseball, enjoyably if unsuccessfully: “Russians ran the bases the wrong way, picked up the bases when we told them to steal, and swung the bat in the manner of a cricket player,” he recalled later. “The villagers crowded around the field and cheered every play, whether good or bad.”

Organising Russians abroad was equally difficult, and a lot less fun: he spent 18 frustrating months trying to set up a grand coalition of Soviet émigrés to oversee a new American (actually CIA-backed) broadcaster, which aimed to counter the Kremlin’s propaganda. Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe were, in the end, a great journalistic success, succouring millions behind the Iron Curtain from their base in Munich. But for all his linguistic and diplomatic skills, attempts to herd the feuding foreign representatives of the captive nations towards agreement proved futile.

Not a patch on him

So the lanky, mischievous New Englander leapt at a chance to help in a different way: to organise the translation into Russian of the world’s best books, and to distribute them to people who yearned to read them. Though Soviet occupation had cut off eastern Europe from receiving the largesse of the Marshall Plan, America could at least give the easterners moral, cultural and intellectual sustenance. It was to be a secret Marshall Plan for the Mind. Some spooks were sceptical. Mr Patch was politically unreliable. The books would never get through. Russians would not be interested in Western culture. The CIA provided just $10,000 initially and the annual budget was never much more than $1m.

That was tiny by the standards of cold-war espionage, but the impact was huge (as the Solzhenitsyn family would later testify). The books published by the Bedford Publishing Company ranged from technology to high culture. They included works that were banned in the Soviet Union for obvious reasons, such as George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. Others were by out-of-favour émigrés, such as Vladimir Nabokov (“Pnin”), or simply did not fit into the Soviet cultural canon (James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”). Some were specially commissioned accounts of Russian history, filling in the “blank spaces” left by Soviet lies and evasions.

Distributing the books was the main mission. Around a third were given to Soviet travellers in the West—even if they did not dare bring them home, they might at least read them while abroad. A bigger chunk went to Westerners visiting the Soviet Union. They could discreetly give them to their hosts. Some were sent by post, and the rest by what he euphemistically called “special routes”. Details of that, and much else besides, are still classified. But the programme, he later wrote, distributed over 1m books in 14 years.

All that was just his day job. In his free time, “big Ike” had turned his attention to something else: the burgeoning civil-rights movement. Injustice in America rankled no less than oppression in eastern Europe. Why should the black residents in Englewood, his home district of New Jersey, suffer from rigged elections, bad schools and irregular rubbish collection? He threw himself into that struggle, touring the American South with his daughter Penny, a much-jailed student activist who had cut her teeth in a campaign to desegregate a skating rink in Pennsylvania.

But by the early 1970s, the “fizz had gone out of the booze”. Bean-counters at the CIA cut his budget. And the big battles of the 1960s had given way to a souring radicalism which had little appeal. It was time to start anew. He took a final, disparaging look at the dirt and noise of city life, and headed for Terrible Mountain in Vermont, and a new career as a naturalist, creating an elaborate nature reserve with two museums, a swamp boardwalk and eight nature trails, plus one for evolution (it was 5,280 feet long, one for each million years of the planet’s history; man’s presence on Earth was the last, humbling, ten feet).

He loved the fauna and flora there, but it was the slumbering rocks that dotted the hillsides which aroused a passion bordering on madness. With crowbars, chains, ropes and pulleys, he and his children woke them up, lugging 186 of them to make a colossal triangle. Next came a menhir circle, and some carefully erected cromlechs. The prize project was a hilltop rock observatory, which he termed an American counterpart to Stonehenge. Something for future ages to puzzle over, he hoped.