The spy who came in from the Cold War

Ben Macintyre's Redwood explores a Cold War spy defection that had deadly consequences for Iran

By Joseph Finder Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy

by Ben Macintyre

Published by Crown

393 pages ₹1,099

  

The British writer Ben Macintyre has made an illustrious career of taking dusty government archives and transforming them into propulsive nonfiction thrillers. His Operation Mincemeat was adapted for both screen and stage, and  A Spy Among Friends became a TV series. With his latest, Redwood, he has done it again. The story centres on the defection of the KGB major Vladimir Kuzichkin, who was stationed in Tehran during the chaos following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. 

The reason for his defection wasn’t ideology or money but sex. Specifically, he suffered from erectile dysfunction. Afraid that the Iranians or the Soviets might discover his impairment, he insisted the operation be performed in the West. “Kuzichkin was the first spy in history,” Macintyre writes, “to demand, as the price of defection, the removal of his foreskin”. That insistence, Macintyre argues, altered the history of the West Asia. 

 

The stakes were enormous. The fall of the Shah had deprived Washington of its closest ally in the region, the hostage crisis had severed relations with Tehran and the Soviet invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan had increased fears of a greater Kremlin expansion. Iran, which shared a long border with the Soviet Union and was now at war with Iraq, seemed particularly vulnerable. Western intelligence was especially concerned about the Tudeh, Iran’s pro-Soviet Communist Party, which had penetrated the government and the military. What they didn’t know was how extensive the penetration was — or when Moscow intended to exploit it. 

On October 1, 1981, Kuzichkin entered the British Embassy in Tehran, presented himself as a vice consul with an “urgent” matter to discuss, and told Nicholas Barrington, Britain’s senior diplomat in Tehran, that he wanted to spy for Britain. MI6 code-named him REDWOOD. He stood over 6 feet 4 inches, a head taller than his case officer; the cryptonym was chosen for the world’s tallest tree. 

For eight months, Kuzichkin spied from the Soviet Embassy, and what he produced was extraordinary. His intelligence portrayed the Tudeh Party as a Soviet-funded puppet, directed (and very likely armed) by the KGB. Astonishingly, Macintyre writes, MI6 gave everything that Kuzichkin revealed to the Ayatollah — with Kuzichkin himself presenting the evidence at a secret meeting in Islamabad. 

MI6 had also revealed their source and plans to the CIA director William Casey. In 1982, Casey gave the operation “full-throated American support”, believing that he was thereby “signing the death warrant of the Communist Party in Iran”, Macintyre writes, which meant putting “the lives of several thousand people at risk”. 

In Macintyre’s telling, the American spy chief was working from an interagency memo warning that the Soviets could take Iran in nine to 14 weeks, a scenario that raised the possibility of an American nuclear response. But not everyone shared the panic. Macintyre himself doubts that Moscow intended to invade. The evidence for such a plan was thin. The Tudeh Party was too weak to seize power on its own, and, in the short term at least, the Kremlin also had reasons to tolerate Khomeini: However hostile he was to communism, he was even more hostile to the United States. 

To forestall a danger that might have been largely imaginary, between 6,000 and 10,000 Tudeh members were apprehended and locked up, Macintyre claims, and hundreds or perhaps thousands of people died. Tudeh leaders were tortured, forced into televised confessions, and, in some cases, executed or lynched. 

Macintyre’s verdict is that “the REDWOOD case was both a success and a failure, a ploy that ended in victory and defeat, a significant achievement and a grave mistake, proof of the fickle pattern of unintended consequences”. By stoking the Islamic Republic’s paranoia and brutality and helping the mullahs to consolidate power, America and Britain, he writes, “inadvertently helped create the monster” they now condemn. 

Macintyre’s larger point — that the Iran of 2026 was not foreseeable from Century House in 1982 — is unarguable, and his parallel to the arming of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan is well made. 

One of Macintyre’s more audacious conclusions is that had Viagra existed in 1981, Kuzichkin might not have defected, and there might have been a successful Tudeh coup after all with the help of Soviet firepower. The Cold War might have ended differently, or catastrophically. It is a startling counterfactual, and one somewhat at odds with Macintyre’s own scepticism about the Soviet threat. In fact, the Tudeh Party wasn’t popular, even within Iran’s fractured left. 

The book’s last pages are its saddest. Resettled as Alexander Larkin, a British citizen, Kuzichkin drank, ranted about hit men and was once picked up naked at a Somerset service station. One evening in 2009 he sat down with a bottle of vodka and the film Amadeus, a story of betrayal. By morning there was nothing left in the bottle, and Kuzichkin was dead. (As of this writing, Wikipedia still has him living.) “In his cups”, Macintyre reports, he grieved the people he had helped send to their graves. The defector reached a harsher verdict than his historian does. But only one of them was there.

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The reviewer, who writes frequently about Russia, is the author of 17 novels including, most recently, The Oligarch’s Daughter

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