REDWOOD: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy, by Ben Macintyre
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 centers on the defection of the K.G.B. 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. Kuzichkin was sure that the cause was “anatomical,” an overly tight foreskin, and that a circumcision would resolve it. 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 Middle East.
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 neighboring 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 Oct. 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 (the standard rule that code names be unrevealing is, as Macintyre observes, ignored by every service on earth). Nobody in London noticed the additional double entendre until later — RED for communist, WOOD for the thing he could not achieve.
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 K.G.B.
Astonishingly, Macintyre writes, MI6 gave everything that Kuzichkin revealed to the ayatollah — “every Tudeh leader, every informant inside the government, every member of the military underground, every K.G.B. officer and spy in Iran” — with Kuzichkin himself presenting the evidence at a secret meeting in Islamabad.
MI6 had also revealed their source and plans to the C.I.A. 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.”
Casey likely kept the C.I.A.’s involvement concealed not just from the Soviets but from his own government, Macintyre explains, so President Reagan could truly claim ignorance of the damning fact that the United States was publicly denouncing the Khomeini regime while secretly cooperating with it. “It is unclear,” Macintyre hedges, “whether Bill Casey sought or obtained Ronald Reagan’s authorization.”
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. A far wider wave of killings followed in 1988, when Khomeini issued a fatwa against those who “make war against God,” and prisoners who had already completed their sentences were put to death. “The exact Tudeh death toll may never be known,” Macintyre writes. “The executioners were not counting.”
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 Mujahedeen in Afghanistan is well made.
But, of course, the consequences were foreseen, at least by some of the people who carried it out. Two senior officials said they would resign. One of them predicted that the people named in the REDWOOD files would meet “grisly ends.” British agents anticipated the crackdown. They were told, and yet they proceeded.
This doesn’t mean that Casey and the MI6 members who backed the plan were cleareyed about its prospects for success. By Cold War logic, the liquidation of a bunch of communists barely mattered, especially if it could keep Iran from becoming a Soviet satellite.
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 skepticism about the Soviet threat. In fact, the Tudeh Party wasn’t popular, even within Iran’s fractured left, especially after the party joined a crackdown against independent secular and Islamist leftists who turned against the ayatollah in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. And, despite this show of loyalty, the Islamic Republic was soon closing off the political space in which the Tudeh Party operated. By the early 1980s, its newspaper had been shut down and its official protection was wavering. Given the party’s isolation and the regime’s growing grip on power, a Tudeh takeover was far from inevitable.
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.
REDWOOD: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy | By Ben Macintyre | Crown | 393 pp. | $32
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