The bathroom is small, tiled and loud. Somebody has turned on every tap, and the water drums into the tub while two men sit close together and talk under the noise. One is a major in the KGB, a big, restless Russian who once played in a Moscow rock band. The other is a young British diplomat who is not really a diplomat. Outside the walls of the compound, revolutionary Tehran is arresting and executing people it suspects of working for foreigners. Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy by Ben Macintyre is the story of what was said in that room, and of what happened, years later, to people who never knew it existed.
Two Men and a Running Tap
The Russian was Vladimir Kuzichkin, an officer in the KGB directorate that managed deep-cover agents abroad, posted to Iran in 1977 under consular cover. The Briton was Ian McCredie, left behind in Tehran as MI6’s sole man in the country after the revolution emptied the embassy. When Kuzichkin decided in 1981 that he was finished with the Soviet system, it was McCredie who received him, and McCredie whose friendship would carry him through the most dangerous year of his life.
Macintyre had McCredie’s full cooperation, and it shows. The meetings in the bathroom, the codewords, the improvised tradecraft of a station with almost no staff: all of it has the vividness of memory rather than the flatness of a file. The book carries no official blessing, and the author makes a point of saying so.
Why a KGB Officer Walks Away
A reading group will want to begin with motive, because Macintyre gives several and refuses to rank them. Kuzichkin had come to despise the corruption and cynicism of his station. He was appalled by the Soviet war in Afghanistan. He was also suffering from impotence, a humiliation he half believed a Western doctor could cure, and the book is unusually candid about how much that private despair shaped a very public betrayal.
That candour is part of what makes Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy by Ben Macintyre such rich material for discussion. Spy histories often present defectors as either heroes of conscience or mercenaries. Kuzichkin is neither. He is a gifted, vain, generous, frightened man whose reasons were tangled together, like most people’s.
The Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy, Reconsidered
What Kuzichkin knew mattered because of where he was. The KGB had spent years cultivating Iran’s communist Tudeh Party, which by 1981 had members embedded across the new Islamic Republic, even at the top of the navy. Moscow’s hope was influence, and perhaps eventually power. Kuzichkin could name names.
The book’s middle stretch is a thriller in all but label. There is a nervous first approach to the wrong man, a meal in a restaurant named after an American city, a clandestine camera, and finally a desperate escape overland to the Turkish border. Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy by Ben Macintyre handles these set pieces with the brisk, wry control that made Operation Mincemeat and Agent Sonya so popular, and it rarely wastes a page once the operation begins.
Redwood and the Untold Story of a Cold War Marriage
Running beneath the spycraft is a quieter and sadder thread: Galina. Kuzichkin’s wife was in Tehran with him through all of it, and when the moment came to leave, she did not go. What she knew, and when, is a question the book circles repeatedly without ever quite answering.
Groups that come to Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy by Ben Macintyre for the tradecraft may leave talking mostly about this marriage. It is where the book is most tender, and also most honest about the limits of what a historian can know about two people alone in a room.
The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Costly Tip-Off
Then the book does something few spy histories dare to do. It follows the intelligence out of the files and into the world. Some months after Kuzichkin was safely in Britain, Western intelligence passed what he had revealed to the Iranian regime itself. The regime used it to annihilate the Tudeh. Its leaders were tortured and made to confess on television, and thousands of members were imprisoned. Many were executed in the years that followed.
Macintyre does not pretend this was a clean trade. A Soviet-backed plot may have been stopped; a theocracy was certainly strengthened, and it later turned its violence on many others. The final section of Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy by Ben Macintyre follows that shadow almost to the present day, and it leaves a reader feeling differently about the whole cheerful caper that came before. Readers who want the bare facts of the man himself can find a short summary of Kuzichkin’s life, though the book goes far deeper.
A few reservations are worth putting on the table:
The opening chapters on the revolution and the hostage crisis are handsome but long, and the spy is a while arriving.
Because the main living source is British, the Iranian dead are more often described than heard.
A closing flight of speculation about alternative histories adds little.
Questions Worth Arguing About
Start with the handover. Was sharing Kuzichkin’s intelligence with Khomeini’s government a necessary move against Soviet expansion, or a betrayal of people who had nothing to do with the deal? Ask whether the answer changes if you judge it from 1982 or from today.
Then ask about the defector. Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy by Ben Macintyre gives Kuzichkin a mixture of political, moral and deeply personal reasons. Does the personal motive make him less admirable, more human, or simply more believable?
Finally, ask about Galina. She stayed, and paid for it. Did he abandon her, or did she choose? Ask the group whether the book is fair to her, and whose version of events they trust.
For further reading, London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe is another work of narrative nonfiction in which secrets and power collide with a single family. The Women of Arlington Hall by Jane Healey follows wartime women codebreakers into a world where Soviet espionage is never far away. The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali shows the Iranian decades this book passes through from the inside. And Winterveil by Ava Reid pictures a Cold War that never ended.
Where It Leaves You
The book ends far from Tehran, with a man living under a borrowed name in an English seaside town and a British friend who never stopped visiting. That closing distance is the point. Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy by Ben Macintyre begins with a secret whispered over running water and ends by counting everyone it touched. It is slow to gather speed, but it is Macintyre’s most morally serious book, and it gives a reading group more to fight about than almost any spy story in recent memory.