Meanwhile, someone called Igor from Sovexport Films in the building across the Imprint office tried to recruit Knightley. Igor he dealt with and dismissed straightaway, Knightley writes in the chapter Recruited by the CIA and the KGB.
But the truth about Imprint came to him 20 years later when he was in Washington working on a documentary. He had gone to meet Harry Rositzke, former chief of the Soviet Bloc division of the CIA. At lunch, Rositzke remarked he had been in India in 1960-64 as the CIA station chief. Knightley said he too had been in India then, working for Imprint.
Knightley goes on to write: "Rositzke grinned. 'I know it (Imprint) well,' he said. 'It was one of my little operations. Shake hands with your ex-boss.' I must have gone grey, because he added with some concern, 'Didn't you know?' And then he explained it all to me. The CIA had become concerned about Soviet influence in India in the early 1960s. Not only was the Indian government friendly with Moscow, but the bazaars of India were being flooded with cheap but beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated children's books about Soviet folk heroes.... 'A whole generation of Indian kids was growing up to believe that the only heroes in the world were Russian ones,' Rositzke said. 'We had to get in there with some American folk heroes before it was too late'."
It was consequently decided to float a pro-American magazine. The spinoffs of a publishing house were many: a legitimate bank account to provide funds for covert activities, a safe house for agents; a listening post for gossip. Knightley writes, "...as intelligence operations go it was one of the more benign ones, but it was still something of a shock to learn that, however unwittingly, I had been an employee of the CIA." Imprint had several eminent editors until it wound up in 1986.
