SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Ben Macintyre's become known as a master of espionage stories that are true - "Agent Zigzag," "Operation Mincemeat," "A Spy Among Friends" and more. His latest tells the largely unknown story of a KGB spy who offers information to Britain while working in Iran in 1981. It's the height of the Cold War. Just two years earlier, the Ayatollah Khomeini had dispatched the Western-supported shah of Iran, and now the USSR sees a chance to install their own regime. The book is called "Redwood: The Untold Story Of The Cold War's Most Extraordinary Spy." Ben Macintyre joins us from the studios of the BBC in London. Thanks so much for being with us.
BEN MACINTYRE: It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me on.
SIMON: Take us into this extraordinary scene - 1981, Tehran, a 6-foot-4 Russian spy, Vladimir Kuzichkin, sits on a laundry basket. The British spy, Ian McCredie, is sitting on a closed toilet with the water running.
MACINTYRE: Yep (laughter).
SIMON: And the Russian says, will you help me?
MACINTYRE: That's right. It's a bizarre story, this. So Kuzichkin was a major in the KGB, a very senior intelligence officer, and he had walked into the British Embassy in Tehran a few days earlier and offered to spy for Britain. He knew a lot of secrets, Kuzichkin. He knew, for example, and most importantly, that the Soviets were planning to set up the Iranian Communist Party to take over power from the ayatollah and his Islamist group and invite the Red Army in to support them. This was just after Afghanistan. So this was the next domino.
And the reason that Kuzichkin knew about it was that he was the linchpin of the conspiracy. He was the one funneling the guns and the money and the intelligence to the Tudeh Party, as it was known, which means party of the masses, the long-established Iranian Communist Party. So he had big secrets to tell. But he had a secret of his own, and his reason for flipping to the West, if you like, was unlike any spy that I've ever come across before. He suffered from erectile dysfunction and believed that the West had medicines that would cure it.
SIMON: I'm sorry. I...
MACINTYRE: I know that. It sounds absurd. It sounds totally unlikely. To understand it, one has to realize that Kuzichkin, like many Soviet citizens, had an almost mystical faith in Western medicine. And he was really suffering. He was desperate to get this problem addressed because his marriage was falling apart. He adored his wife. He was trying to save his relationship, and the only way he could think to do it would be to get medical help from the West.
SIMON: Britain and Russia had a history of contention in Iran, didn't they?
MACINTYRE: Absolutely. I mean, going back to the days of what was called the Great Game, imperial Britain, Victorian Britain and czarist Russia had been tussling over Iran for two centuries by this point. In the modern times, in the Cold War, in a way, the Great Game had given way to a battle - a similar battle, but this time between the capitalist West, led by the United States and Communist Soviet Union, and they were jostling for position.
So under the shah, America and Britain had been in the ascendant. The shah had been a bulwark, really, against communism. With his fall, the Soviets saw an opportunity. And the stakes, in many ways, could not have been higher because if the Soviets had gone through with this plan - and we're getting into kind of counterfactual history, but it was a very serious operation, this. If they'd got control of the Iranian oil fields and the Strait of Hormuz, they would have won the Cold War. And the U.S. already had contingency plans in place to deal with just this eventuality, and those plans were nuclear. So hanging over this story is the potential fear of a nuclear confrontation.
SIMON: Ben, how'd you find out about this?
MACINTYRE: This case is taught in MI6, the British foreign intelligence service. It's one of the case studies that they look at when they're training because it raises certain ethical concerns. So I have known about this story for some time. When I first heard it, I didn't believe it. It just did not seem to me to be possible. And then I met Ian McCredie, and his account is so detailed and so compelling. That's really how the story came to me, and it's been really kept very quiet for a very long time, for good reasons.
SIMON: Well, remind us what those good reasons might be.
MACINTYRE: Everybody in this story had a reason to keep it quiet. I mean, we'll jump ahead a little bit here, but after Kuzichkin was out, it was decided by MI6 that they had to tell the CIA. The CIA under Bill Casey agreed to a very, very bold plan. They decided the way to stop this potential Soviet incursion into Iran was to tell the Iranians. In top secret, they decided that in order to hold off this Cold War calamity, they'd have to tell the ayatollah's people.
Now, this was a time when the U.S. and Iran were at daggers drawn. I mean, it was after the U.S. hostage crisis. There weren't supposed to be any diplomatic relations. So this was also seen as a way of potentially opening up an avenue of conversation with Iran.
And so they arranged a secret meeting, and the entire intelligence trove relating to this possible coup by the Iranian Communist Party - who were then still tolerated by the Ayatollah, quite powerful, quite well-funded - all of this was handed over to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And within two months, something like 8,000 members of the Iranian Communist Party were rounded up, of whom roughly half were executed. We don't know the exact death toll, but it was huge.
SIMON: In 2026, we have to ask, 'cause the United States is off and on bombing targets in Iran, had said the U.S. goal is regime change. That may be tamped down now. Are there clues from this period in 1981 that you think would be good for the world to bear in mind now?
MACINTYRE: As a historical story, it has such strong modern resonances. The young Revolutionary Guards, who clamped down so hard on the communists in 1981, went on to become senior figures in the Iranian regime. The first Israeli airstrike last February, took out Ali Khamenei and a man called Ali Shamkhani who was his defense minister. These are critical people in my story - in the "Redwood" story because they played a huge part.
So the very young revolutionaries of 1981 were the very old regime, octogenarian stalwarts of 2026. They're the same people. This absolute determination to clamp down on internal dissent really does go back to this period when the ayatollah was trying to get full control, and it established the way that regime thinks and the way it behaves.
SIMON: I don't want to give anything more away, but by 1986, Vladimir Kuzichkin was living under a different name in Britain, practicing acupuncture, and he had a client straight out of a movie.
MACINTYRE: (Laughter) If you put this in a novel, people would say, this is preposterous. You have to take this out 'cause it's completely incredible. He retrained as an acupuncturist with the help of MI6. And one of his main clients was Alec Guinness, the actor. At the time that Alec Guinness was filming "Smiley," the second-most famous...
SIMON: Yeah.
MACINTYRE: ...British fictional spy, he was actually getting acupuncture, having needles stuck in him, from a very tall Russian spy and had absolutely no idea that was going on.
SIMON: (Laughter) I love that. A wonderful coda in the book. Ben Macintyre. His new book, "Redwood." Thank you so much for being with us.
MACINTYRE: It's a pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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