Ben Macintyre is the author of “Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy,” from which this article is adapted.
On a hot autumn evening in Tehran, two professional spies, one Russian and the other British, sat drinking in a small, white-tiled bathroom on the top floor of a house in the semi-abandoned compound of the British Embassy.
Vladimir Kuzichkin, a major in the KGB, was over six feet four inches tall and as broad as a bullock. The wicker laundry basket beneath him creaked dangerously. The MI6 officer, Ian McCredie, perched on the toilet, refilled his guest’s glass with vodka and wondered if he was dreaming. To cover the sound of their voices, the cold taps were running into the basin and bath, and a radio played. McCredie suspected his home was bugged from attic to basement by the Iranian secret police. If the Islamic Revolutionary Guard overheard this conversation, they would both be arrested, interrogated, imprisoned and possibly executed, once the torture was completed.
The year was 1981, two years after Iran’s revolution. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini presided over an increasingly hard-line Islamic regime. Tehran was a boiling crucible of espionage, bloodletting and score-settling, as Islamic fundamentalists, nationalists and Marxist groups fought for power. Competing Iranian intelligence services spied on everyone, as well as on one another. Thousands of the ousted shah’s supporters were in hiding, in exile or dead. Suspected counterrevolutionaries, foreign spies, leftists, fifth columnists and unbelievers were being rooted out and eliminated by fanatical Islamist enforcers. But the revolution was still young, unstable and vicious, and the ayatollah’s grip on power had not yet tightened into theocratic despotism. Civil war raged while Iran simultaneously fought a ferocious war against Iraq. For the rival spies of East and West — the KGB, CIA and MI6 — there were rich pickings to be found amid the chaos and the carnage, which is what made Kuzichkin’s story so valuable — and so very dangerous.
The KGB officer knew of a Soviet plot that could tip the balance of the Cold War.
What he described had the potential to trigger nuclear conflict: plans for an armed coup by Soviet-backed Iranian Communists, a bold plot to seize power from the clerics, establish a new government on Marxist-Leninist principles and invite in the Red Army. Russian tanks would roll across the borders from Soviet Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan (invaded by Red Army troops almost two years earlier).
Kuzichkin described in detail what he called the “Trojan horse” in Iran: a Communist underground military network with caches of weapons, money, a disciplined party organization, a KGB sabotage plan and the support of the Central Committee in Moscow. At any moment, like Odysseus’s Greek warriors hidden inside the wooden horse within the walls of Troy, the Communists could emerge and take over. That would leave the Strait of Hormuz in Soviet control.
Iran’s Communist party, the Tudeh, had been steadily gaining strength ever since the revolution — supported, encouraged and financed by the KGB. It was the last remaining significant opposition party, warily tolerated by the Islamist government of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Kuzichkin told McCredie that the Communist plotters were waiting for the right moment to strike, seize power and invite the Red Army into Iran.
A Soviet occupation of Iran was the West’s worst nightmare. With its power extending all the way to the Persian Gulf, Moscow would control the warm-water ports and the oil fields. The U.S.S.R. could win the Cold War. If the United States had to resort to nuclear weapons in response, the world might be transformed and possibly destroyed. The coup might happen tomorrow, next month or never. Kuzichkin knew all this because it was his task to liaise with the Iranian Communists. He was the linchpin of the conspiracy.
And now he was offering to swap sides and share this terrifying secret with the West. MI6 and the CIA would then have to decide whether to share that intelligence with the Iranian regime and stymie the coup plot before it happened. Kuzichkin’s information could thwart Soviet ambitions to take over Iran.
But first, he needed something in return.
Water sloshed down the drains, and Kuzichkin emptied his glass. McCredie refilled it.
“I have big problem,” said Kuzichkin, his heavily accented English slurring, the color rising in his wide, handsome face. Then the huge spy leaned forward and placed a hand on McCredie’s knee. “Will you help me?”
The MI6 officer nodded, wondering what could possibly be coming next.
Kuzichkin’s problem was one that many men experience, but few acknowledge. Some never admit it to themselves. It is a burden that can drive a man mad, wreck relationships and destroy love. It is an emasculating medical and psychological affliction shrouded in mystery, shame and the most intimate embarrassment.
Kuzichkin was convinced that Western medicine would save his marriage and change his life. His psychological agony was so severe he was willing to risk everything to alleviate it.
McCredie nodded again, patting the massive hand that gripped his leg. “We can help you,” he said, wondering if that was true. In the time it took to run a bath, Kuzichkin became a double agent, his betrayal purchased with an extraordinary promise to solve an ordinary but then-insoluble human problem.
This was the beginning of a spy story that would eventually lead to the destruction of the Tudeh Party in Iran, preempting Moscow’s secret plan to oust the mullahs and install a Communist government with Soviet backing. The coup was averted. Kuzichkin may have helped to prevent a nuclear confrontation. If the Russian spy had not sought Western help to cure his bedroom affliction, the world would be a very different place — and might not exist at all.
McCredie had never encountered anyone so tall. When Kuzichkin got to his feet to leave, he towered over the Englishman, swaying slightly like a mighty tree in a gentle breeze.
MI6 gave him the code name Redwood.
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