194. The KGB in Iran: Appeasing the Ayatollah with Ben Macintyre (Ep 2)

A KGB officer who has secretly gone over to work for MI6 in revolutionary Iran. But will MI6 be able to get him out of the country when things go wrong? Listen as David and Gordon are joined by renowned author and journalist, Ben Macintyre, to discuss his latest book: ⁠⁠⁠Redwood⁠⁠.⁠ ------------------- ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: therestisclassified.com/newsletter ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restisclassified Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee 🌍 ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Video Editor: Joe Pettit Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03David McCloskey?

  For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books, join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com.

• 0:25David McCloskey?

  A KGB officer who has secretly gone over to work for MI6 in Revolutionary Iran. But will MI6 be able to get him out of the country when things go wrong? Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm David McCloskey.

• 0:38Gordon Corera?

  And I'm Gordon Corera.

• 0:39David McCloskey?

  And we left off last time in this two-part series about a wonderful new book that is just out, Redwood. We left off with Redwood, this Russian KGB officer who's been recruited or really volunteered to work for MI6 in Iran, in part because of some ideological motivation, in part because of some very personal problems. He's begun to pass intelligence to MI6 and we are still joined by Ben Macintyre, who was with us today to speak about Agent Redwood and his wonderful new book of the same name. So Ben, thank you so much for being back with us.

• 1:19Gordon Corera?

  Thank you both. So this is a chance, I think, Ben, to look at how Redwood is run in Iran and we'll also get to him getting out, but also his legacy, which is fascinating, isn't it? Because I think it tells us a lot about how Iran is going to change and how the Ayatollah is going to cement his hold on power, but particularly the Revolutionary Guards in Iran and how they are going to come to power and exert increasing influence over the country.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, I think, understanding modern Iran, the nature of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, how that regime came to be the way that it is, this is one of those hidden stories that actually helps to explain why the West is locked in conflict with Tehran a generation later. But what makes it so interesting, I think, is that very, very few people know the role played by the West in that.

• 2:16Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. And that's what's so remarkable about your book, which is really bringing to light this story, which I think was not just misunderstood, but not really known about in any way before.

• 2:29Gordon Corera?

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• 5:31Gordon Corera?

  So Ben, let's talk a little bit about the context. So he's now working for MI6. We left with that in the last episode, because Zichkin has been recruited by McCready or volunteered to work for MI6. And he's being run, and he's passing intelligence at an important moment in Iran at this time, isn't he?

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, he is able to crack open the illegals network for the West. I mean, he is able to explain how Department S, the largest department in the KGB, works, how they make people's false identities. And bear in mind that this area of KGB activity was very mysterious to the West, and it was kind of the last big secret, if you like, about the KGB, that they'd never had an officer from the illegals department as a double agent before. They literally did not know how it operated. And Kozitskin, who had a phenomenal memory, was able to give them chapter and verse on not just how the whole thing was

• 6:34Speaker 02

  organized, but where these different illegal agents were. And they weren't just in the Middle East. I mean, Kozitskin was so senior that he knew of other names of other people around the world, and he knew of various KGB assets in the West. So he was incredibly useful. He was also able to explain that the Soviet Union was backing the Communist Party, the Iranian Communist Party, then still pretty powerful, growing, tolerated by the Ayatollah's regime at this point. And what Kozitskin revealed was hair-raising, because he was able to tell McCready, the MI6 officer, that not only were the Soviets growing in power in Iran, they were actually planning and had a

• 7:18Speaker 02

  blueprint for a coup, that they were seriously plotting to set up the Iranian Communist Party in an armed insurrection, overthrow the Ayatollah's fledgling government, and then get backing from the Red Army, which would then roll across the border. Now, for the West, this was the nightmare scenario, because if Iran fell to the Soviet Union, Moscow would have control of the warm-water ports, the Strait of Hormuz, and the oil fields. The Soviet Union would win the Cold War. Now, the Pentagon had contingency planning for this, and the response, one of the main responses, would have been nuclear. There were not

• 8:02Speaker 02

  enough conventional forces in that theater to be able to repel a full-scale Soviet invasion, which was being considered. And one of the responses would be, there were various levels of nuclear response. One of them was to send in special forces with things called Manpack nukes, which were portable mini-nuclear weapons, and bring down the mountain ranges in the north of the country, to collapse the mountains into the passes and try to block Soviet armor from coming in. That was how serious it was going to be. So, you know, a nuclear response by America would undoubtedly have triggered a nuclear response from the Soviet

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Union. So this was what the West was terrified of. And bear in mind that the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union had just taken place.

• 8:54Gordon Corera?

  December 1979.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  December 1979, a communist regime in Afghanistan was bolstered by the Red Army coming in and taking over the country. It seemed entirely feasible from the West that the next domino to fall would be Iran. You know, there is a 1,400-mile border between Iran and the Soviet Union. There was now because of the takeover of Afghanistan. You know, this seemed like a very, very real possibility. And the key thing that Kozitskin revealed was that he personally was the linchpin. He was the person who had been contacting on the KGB's behalf

• 9:36Speaker 02

  the Communist Party members, funneling money to them, organizing the arms dumps, making sure that this potential coup, as he described it himself, was ready to go. Now, whether it would have happened, we don't know, but the planning was undoubtedly in place for it. And for MI6, this was a game changer. I mean, this was intelligence of, operational intelligence of such strategic importance that it was too valuable to use for the moment.

• 10:06David McCloskey?

  There's also a very interesting character who's just taken over the CIA, Bill Casey, notable Cold Warrior, mumbling, it's helpful sometimes if people don't know what you're saying, it can be interpreted in multiple ways. But he is also deeply worried about Iran. And I mean, he's deeply worried about Afghanistan. I mean, famously, he'll oversee the covert action program to send weapons and Stinger missiles to the Mujahideen. But you have this sort of confluence of, you know, British fears of a new great game, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Americans involved, looking at Iran in the wake, of course, of the hostage crisis in 79. Talk a little bit about the connection between the Redwood case

• 10:50David McCloskey?

  and the Americans and kind of how they swirl together.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  For Casey, and for Reagan too, this was both an opportunity and a nightmare. You know, this was what various American administrations had always feared might happen. It would absolutely swing the course of the Cold War. And you've got an administration in Washington that could see this as the next domino. You've got MI6 thinking, we've got really, really important operational intelligence here. You've got a sort of elderly... Leadership in Moscow, Brezhnev, who are completely unpredictable. They've just invaded Afghanistan. It seems highly possible that they will, the next stage will be Iran.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  And you've got people in the Central Committee in Moscow who are dead keen on this operation. You know, that backing the Iranian Communist Party, perhaps 30,000 members, heavily armed. Seems like, you know, another throw of the dice. It seems like a really, so everybody in this story, from Kozickin to McCready, to Moscow, to Washington, believes this is a very real probability.

• 12:02Gordon Corera?

  So Kozickin is right at the centre of this fascinating global moment. And as we talked last time, he is under pressure himself. Now he's living this double life, he's working for MI6. I think they start giving him pills to deal with his problem, but still not quite working out.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Well, as we, as we said in the last episode, Kozickin's motivations are both ideological and medical. He suffers from erectile dysfunction. He is desperate to save his marriage. He believes wrongly that the West has medicines that will cure it. I mean, one of the fascinating things about this story is that in a kind of spy film, if, you know, somebody revealed a secret as intimate as this, you know, a wicked spymaster would use that as a way of blackmailing him into kind of cooperating and it would become a lever and a kind of, that's not what happened in this case. MI6 dealt with this very human and very common problem with extraordinary sensitivity. McCready said to him, look, Vladimir, we will do our best. We will try to help you.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  We will get the top medical people that we can, that we can find and we will try and help you with your problem. And that is what they did. The chief medical officer of MI6 wrote out advice to him. Now, of course, there was no magic cure. There was no, Viagra had not been invented. There was no pill that was going to make this better. Kozickin believed there was, but there wasn't.

• 13:24Gordon Corera?

  None of this. They tell him that.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  They did. They, they made it clear that there's no.

• 13:28Gordon Corera?

  But they gave him some kind of herbal pill or something?

• 13:30Speaker 02

  They gave him vitamin pills. They gave him little red vitamin pills. They gave him advice. They said, you know, cut down on the drink, try to, I mean, one of the ironic pieces of advice they gave him was, you know, try and cut down on the stress.

• 13:42Gordon Corera?

  While working for MI6.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  They were adding to the stress. McCready says very, you know, feelingly, you know, we made his problem worse. You know, he was not only spying for the KGB against the Iranians, he was spying for MI6 against the KGB.

• 13:55David McCloskey?

  It's hard enough to try to orchestrate a communist coup in Iran, but also to be working for MI6 at the same time.

• 14:00Gordon Corera?

  That's stressful.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's highly stressful. So as, you know, they made the problem worse while trying to make it, but, but they did take it seriously. They didn't, they, this was not a laughing matter in MI6. They, they knew that they had a very human problem here. And, and as you guys know, people who are recruited as spies, as double agents, are not necessarily made of, you know, heroic material. People, people come to this world for complicated motives, not all of them creditable, sometimes bizarre. Sex is, is quite frequently a motivating factor in, in these stories. You know, it's not unknown for, you know, sex addiction or a, or a breaking down marriage or secret homosexuality, or, or, or these things can all be part of, of, of something that drives you to the other side.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  And Kozickin's story is, as I say, not uncommon and they took it very, very seriously. They could not cure it. They couldn't do it. The placebo effect of these little red pills seems to have had some kind of marginal effect for him. But the marriage was, was disintegrating. It was coming apart. So you've got him at the same time as producing this gold standard level of intelligence to the West. You've got his own private life disintegrating.

• 15:12David McCloskey?

  And I guess his, his posting in Tehran is due to end in the middle of 1982.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:18David McCloskey?

  Where presumably he's going to go back to Moscow and have some kind of desk job, which would be hugely valuable to MI6, were he able to produce intelligence from inside the Soviet Union. But he's kind of thinking at this point, there's no way I'm going into that cooker and working for you. I want out.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  Well, you're absolutely right. I mean, the, you know, the, the, the thing that you most want as an intelligence agency is to have your own spy deep inside the enemy's camp, in head office, able to, you know, that's, that's absolute gold dust. And a lot of pressure was put on Kozickin to try to persuade him. I mean, McCready repeatedly said to him, please, please go back, you know, we will look after you. We, same with Gordievsky, you know, we will keep an eye on you. We will have an exfiltration plan for you. Please do this, please go back, you know, we'll make it worth your while, we'll offer you lots of money and so on. Money was never a motivating factor for Kozickin. He didn't need or want money particularly. But at one point he did say, look, I'll go back, I'll, I'll, I'll do this for you. But McCready was too canny to believe that.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  He, he knew that Kozickin would want out and that that moment was approaching. And so McCready had to frame up an escape plan. I mean, he had to have an exfiltration ready for the moment when Redwood would turn to him and say, that's it, I've had enough.

• 16:39Gordon Corera?

  So he builds a plan which involves getting him across a land border.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, getting an agent out of a police state like Iran was going to be incredibly difficult. I mean, there, there was one plan at one point that McCready thought he might be able to get him to row in a boat into the middle of the Caspian Sea and they'd send a submarine, a mini submarine to pick him up.

• 16:59Gordon Corera?

  That's very Bond.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  Very Bond. And of course MI6 said, no way, and we don't have a mini submarine and that's not going to happen. So really, and, and, you know, or the Soviet border was impossible. He'd be going back into the cauldron, you know. So really the only border that was going to work was, was Turkey to the West. But I mean, it was heavily militarised and they came up with a plan. I mean, it was, as McCready himself says, it was a pretty thin kind of plan. I mean, he, he was going to be disguised as a British diplomat. They were going to give him a fake British passport and he would pretend to be a diplomatic courier and try and bluff his way across the border. McCready would accompany him and, and they would try and get out that way.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  I mean, McCready himself knew that the chances of this working were pretty slim.

• 17:48David McCloskey?

  I do think there's, there's often an assumption that as soon as a spy service recruits someone, they come up with a very sort of mechanical, well-thought-out exfiltration plan. And it's very rarely the case. I mean, I think it's kind of, you're winging it a little bit a, a, as you go, right? And, and in this case though, I mean, getting him out as a diplomatic courier, what about Galena?

• 18:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:14David McCloskey?

  Because does she, she doesn't seem like she would fit with him as a British diplomat in that cover.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Absolutely right. I mean, she spoke, he, his English was good, but heavily accented. She spoke virtually no English at all, trying to smuggle her out as the spouse of a British diplomat. I mean, two minutes of interrogation and that wasn't going to work. So, yeah, I think you're right. I mean, I think the exfiltration plan, and this is a cynical thing to say, but only has to be good enough to persuade the exfil tree, that exfil tree, if there's such a word, that.

• 18:49Gordon Corera?

  There is a plan.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  That there is a plan and that it's, that it has a decent chance of working. You know, I mean, Kozickin was a professional.

• 18:55David McCloskey?

  Right, so he also probably knows that for his, his agents, he wouldn't have something cooked up that's, you know, ready to go and perfect.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  This is a hail Mary. I mean, for him, so he obviously is framing at the same time exfiltration plans for the two-day party. Because if it goes wrong for the communists, the, the Iranian communists, they need the plan to get them out. But that's much easier because there's this massive Soviet border. You know, you just give them a false passport and they can walk across into, getting across into Turkey disguised as a British diplomat, that is, that's much, much harder.

• 19:29Gordon Corera?

  So the plan exists, but it does feel like under the pressure that he feels, he decides he just wants to go. And he almost kind of precipitates a, a crisis, doesn't he? He, he, he pushes this because I think he, he's done and he wants out, rather necessarily because he needs to get out. Is that fair?

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Something happened.

• 19:50Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  About nine months into the, into the Redwood case, he cracks. And McCready's view and, and, and, and the circumstantial evidence backs this up is that finally Kozickin told Galena what was going on, that one night he sat her down in their apartment and explained what he'd been doing, that, that he'd been spying for the other side and urged her to come with him. Said, we will escape to the West, this is our opportunity. And it seems she said no. She, as I said at the top of the programme, yes, last time, you know, she, she was a sort of simple believing pro-KGB Soviet citizen. And, and McCready believes that in her mind, this was catastrophic.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  This was an absolute disaster.

• 20:39David McCloskey?

  The marriage wasn't healthy at that point either.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  The marriage was not healthy, it was breaking up, you know. And here suddenly her husband, I mean, she still loved him, but here he was, you know, turning on her, turning to her and saying, I've got a plan for us. I've been doing something secret for nearly a year now. I haven't told you, um, we're going to betray our countries and we're going to go. And she, it seems, sort of understandably said, that ain't happening. And from that moment, I think he was also terrified that she might turn him in. I mean, who knows about the dynamics of other people's marriages? But, you know, she came from a world in which, you know, the, the Soviet Union in the 1930s encouraged people to, to turn on their, on their nearest and dearest. You know, if your country was being betrayed by your husband, you turned him in. So he was terrified.

• 21:25Gordon Corera?

  I guess he's now got to tell McCready. Maybe, maybe it's a good moment to just talk a bit about how he contacted the Brits generally. I mean, how easy was it for them to make emergency contacts or any contacts?

• 21:36Speaker 02

  So in the nine or 10 months that Redwood is running actively in Tehran, he and McCready have developed a system of contacts and communications. They are both, bear in mind, trained professional intelligence officers. They know what they're doing. And, and interestingly enough. Long before they kind of knew each other, they had scoped out the same bits of Tehran to try and find dead drop sites and contact places. And because these things are hard to find in a crowded city, somewhere where you can have a brush contact with someone, pass on information without being overseen. And McCready was amazed. He said, you know, some of the things, places I'd identified, had also been identified by Kozickin. He said, oh, yeah, I know that corner. I know where we're going to do that. And as I said

• 22:20Speaker 02

  before, in the last episode, Kozickin had the inestimable advantage of having the impulse feed to his car. So the impulse feed was the interception system that the Soviets had to pick up Iranian surveillance. So they could really tell their officers and their agents when they were being followed. So Kozickin relied heavily on that. When he was going to a brush contact with McCready, he would be listening in on his own radio in his car to check whether he was being followed or not. What he didn't know was that the Iranians had rumbled this system too, and were periodically turning off their car radios so that they could follow unseen. And that will play a part in Kozickin's

• 23:02Speaker 02

  escape. So they had this system of meeting every fortnight or so. McCready would give Kozickin reels of film. He'd already issued him with a little Minox camera, the great spy camera, for him to take photographs of documents. He'd issue him, give him five or six rolls of fresh film. McCready would hand over the undeveloped film of what he'd for. I mean, this is incredibly dangerous. I mean, I can't stress how much, you know, Kozickin is going into the office pretending to be the consul, actually working in the KGB residentura. When everyone else goes off for lunch, he stays there with his Minox camera and is photographing everything he can lay his hands on. He doesn't even know what he's handing over. He's just going through the files. McCready has no time to

• 23:46Speaker 02

  develop this stuff. It's all going back in the diplomatic bag to London. So the Redwood trove is almost overwhelming for P5. P5 is the Soviet Eastern European desk in MI6 headquarters. They're getting this vast amount of material. They can hardly cope with how much is coming through. It's all got to be translated. It's all going to be analyzed. It's all going to be worked out, whether it's operational or non-operational intelligence. Does it get used? Who does it get shared with? Is it passed on to Whitehall? The number of people privy to the Redwood case was tiny. I mean, it was really only ever about half a dozen people inside MI6. Top voices in the Foreign Office were aware of it. Obviously,

• 24:28Speaker 02

  you know, it had to be signed off at various levels. But the level of secrecy was extraordinary. And yet they were having to deal with a huge amount of stuff that was coming in. And over the whole of this is the need for an emergency signal, because they know that the clock is ticking right from the beginning. That Kozickin has made it clear from the top that he's not going to do this forever. And it becomes clear he's not going to go back to Moscow. So they know they're going to have to, they're going to have to get him out at some point. And then this crisis happens in his life. And he contacts and says, I've got to get out. You've got to activate this system. You've got to get me out. And two things happened very quickly. One is that they have to get authorization for an exfiltration. I mean, it's often thought that somehow MI6 operates independently of the government. It doesn't. Oh, no.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  It really doesn't. You know, so they have to, they have to make a submission to the authorities. They have to get authority to do this. And the Foreign Secretary at this point is Francis Pym. The Falklands War is raging, by the way. It's at its height. So that MI6 is not really focused on this, on this issue. And the first thing that Francis Pym says is, okay, we can get him out, but you, Ian McCready, you can't go. Because I think he clearly calculated that the diplomatic fallout from having, you know, having an MI6 officer intercepted at the border would be just too great. So if Kozickin was going to do this, okay, but he'd have to go out pretending to be a British diplomat on his own. And so that is what they tried to do.

• 25:56David McCloskey?

  And I think we should say, there's an incredible amount of detail in your book about this exfiltration, the tradecraft behind it, the ins and outs of how it all happens. We don't want to spoil it here. Read the book to get those details. Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about the incredible impact that Redwood has after he escapes from Iran.

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• 28:47Speaker 02

  Welcome back. So we left with Redwood on his way out. Then we're not going to go through all the amazing details you've unearthed about this story of the exfiltration, which is so dramatic. That's all in the book. We definitely want people to go buy that book and get into that kind of granular detail about it. But it is fair to say, it doesn't go entirely according to plan, does it? Well, exfiltrations almost never do go according to plan. They're such dicey things. I mean, you know, any number of variables. So yeah, I mean, we can leave Redwood. He's on the road to Tehran. He doesn't know whether Galina, his wife, who, and he's doing this

• 29:28Speaker 02

  for her, by the way, you know, he's trying to save his marriage, and yet it's all gone wrong for him. But we can leave him here. He's on his way to the Turkish border. He doesn't know it. He's being tailed by Iranian surveillance. He's on his own as well, isn't he? He's on his own. He's got no backup. He hasn't got McCready with him to, who is clearly a British diplomat, you know, who can do all the talking. He's got to bluff his way with a fake passport and fake stamps through one of the most heavily militarized borders in the world.

• 30:02David McCloskey?

  And Galina's not with him.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  No. He's had to leave Galina behind. She has said she's not coming.

• 30:08David McCloskey?

  Wow.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  He doesn't know if she's going to turn him into the KGB. You know, so he's got that ticking in his head, too. Has she told him? You know, she, in fact, had gone back to Moscow to see her mother, who was ill. Kozickin didn't know if she just was walking into the Lubyanka to turn him over. I mean, so he's got, he's being chased by everybody. And it is an amazing story in the book, you know, getting picked up by Revolutionary Guards at the border. All these amazing things happen. I mean, you can't quite believe he's going to make it. Spoiler alert, to some extent, he does. Well, because I would never have been able to tell this story if he hadn't. If he had made it. So I think we, I think we're not giving too much away from the book to say he does. And he's met on the other side by an MI6 team. But what's so

• 30:54Speaker 02

  interesting about this story is that's not the end. And it's actually his importance after he gets out, which is so interesting and so, I think, important about this, this case. Yeah, in some ways, you know, getting out is the beginning of this story. I mean, there are two types, I mean, broadly speaking, there are two types of intelligence. There is operational intelligence and there's, as it were, political non-operational intelligence. Now, you can share non-operational intelligence as widely as you want to as an intelligence agency. You can decide who your customers are and who, which allies you're going to share it with, how strategic. I mean, often it's very, very important. But it doesn't tend to be operational intelligence, the nuts and bolts, the stuff about whose agents

• 31:38Speaker 02

  are where and who's running who and who are the double agents. Now, there's a trove of that stuff in Redwood. There are lots and lots of names. There are lots and lots of people that he has already identified. And that's operational intelligence that hasn't been shared with others. I mean, the Americans know or strongly suspect that MI6 has an agent inside Tehran, because there are.

• 31:59David McCloskey?

  They haven't shared that. Obviously, the Brits have not shared his identity with the Americans. Have they shared the product up to this point?

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Bits and pieces. As you know, David, you know, there's this.

• 32:12David McCloskey?

  I thought our two agencies shared everything.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  We know, we know that on both sides, they will share only what the other side needs to know. They'll be generous with the need to know, but they're not going to give away everything. So the Americans had worked out that they had somebody, as they did with Gordievsky. They'd worked out this stuff is too good not to have a high-level source. But deliberately or otherwise.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  MI6 had allowed the CIA to believe this source was in Moscow. They did not say where he was, they did not say who he was, they did not say which department he was in. They were very carefully covering their tracks, as is the convention, and both sides do this. You don't give away anything that's going to jeopardize him. Once Kozickin is out, that reservation is off the books.

• 32:59Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  And they are able finally not just to start piecemeal handing out to different intelligence agencies, allied ones, the names of people that they know that Kozickin has identified. They have this one huge secret that nobody knows outside MI6, which is the Communist Party plot. The fact that the Soviets were planning, by Kozickin's account, to take over Iran. That the nightmare scenario that has been sort of sitting at the forefront of Cold War planning for decades is a reality. There's a sabotage plan in place by the KGB. There are gun stashes, there are stockpiles, there is a money trail, there are net, you know.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  Kozickin is able to identify chapter and verse of a looming Soviet Communist plot in Iran. And MI6 told the CIA, Chris Cohen, who was then head of security, he would go on to become head of MI6, was a kind of gung ho tough kind of Cold Warrior figure. And for him, and I've had this confirmed by numerous sources, you know, for him, this was operational intelligence of such importance that it had to be used. There's a big debate in intelligence, as you know, about, you know, what do you do with it? Is it just stuff that you gather so that you know a bit more than the opposition? Or do you use it?

• 34:28Speaker 02

  Do you use it as an offensive weapon against your rivals and your enemies? Do you make use of operational intelligence? Now, Cohen was in absolutely no doubt, they had to tell the Americans, and they had to stop this thing. This was a Cold War opportunity. So bear in mind, at the same time as this is happening, in Afghanistan, the CIA is pouring money and weapons to the Mujahideen to fight the Soviet Union. From Bill Casey, the head of the CIA, the CIA chief's point of view, this was just an extension of that battle. This was another opportunity to deal with the Soviet threat, to, you know, to stop it in its tracks. So Cohen flew out to Washington, met with Bill Casey, brought with him trunkloads of photographic material

• 35:12Speaker 02

  to prove the state of the two-day plot. And Casey, it seems, said, right, we go for this. We have to tell the Iranians. We have to stop this. The only people able to do this are the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the Islamic government there. There's a secondary consideration here, which is not only is, if it works, are they going to be able to stymie this Soviet plot at birth? It might be a way to establish a conversation with the Iranians. This is the gold dust of, of, it has, this has been the holy grail of Western diplomacy in the Middle East for 50 years. How do we talk to the Iranians?

• 35:56Speaker 02

  How do we get a purchase on these people? How can we start a conversation? This is very early on in that debate. And here seemed to be a golden opportunity to curry favor with the Ayatollah and his people. We'll give them this kind of regime-saving intelligence and they'll love us. You know, once again, we'll be friends.

• 36:12Gordon Corera?

  They'll be so grateful.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  They'll be so grateful, we're friends with the Iranians, we can re, I mean, Casey, it seems mad now and naive, but Casey really believed that there would be a way to rekindle the oil relationship with Iran. That those oil fields that, you know, had been so heavily exploited under the Shah, that there would be a way of having a conversation. And the Islamic nature of the regime was secondary to the Cold War prism through which they saw this problem. And one has to emphasize that because they were making a decision, which in the parameters of the time, was perfectly logical. It was, we've got to stop this, we've got to stop this Communist coup from happening. Otherwise, we're going to lose the Cold War.

• 36:56David McCloskey?

  Is it your sense in looking at the story that a coup was actually imminent or would have happened? Or was this something that was on the shelf that could have been activated in the future? And so Casey and Cohen are looking at this and saying, right, this is a potential asset down the road. Let's deny the Russians this asset.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  I think it was on the shelf, but I think it was half off the shelf too, actually. I mean, everybody in this story believed that it was imminent, that it was going to happen.

• 37:29David McCloskey?

  Including Kozickin, presumably.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  Kozickin believed it, McCready believed it, MI6 believed it, the CIA believed it, the Soviets believed it. And perhaps most importantly of all, the two-day party, you know, this Communist organization within Iran also believed that this was what was going to happen. They had already established a military underground wing, they had access to weapons. They believed that destiny was on their side in that kind of, in that way that Communist thinking does. You know, this was going to be the next revolution.

• 38:01Gordon Corera?

  So they're going to organize a summit meeting effectively in Islamabad, Pakistan, to pass on details.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this, it sounds extraordinary now, given the nature of our current relationship with the Iranian, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard and the Iranian regime, that something like this could have taken place. But again, one has to bear in mind that the Iranian regime had not solidified into, into the brutal, repressive, completely theocratic regime that it would become. It was all still kind of up for grabs. And so, yes, I mean, through the agency, they arranged a meeting. Islamabad seemed the logical place to do this. Interestingly, of course, recent negotiations between the West and Iran.

• 38:45David McCloskey?

  You go to talk to the Iranians.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, have also taken place in Islamabad. It's brokered by the Pakistani intelligence service, with which the CIA has very good relations because of what's happening with funding the Mujahideen and so on. So the secret meeting, and here's the most extraordinary thing, they don't just hand over the intelligence, they produce redwood. They fly Vladimir Kozickin out to Islamabad to meet the representatives of the Iranian regime in person.

• 39:12David McCloskey?

  It's how you make it credible, right?

• 39:14Speaker 02

  It's how you make it credible. And, you know, and he speaks perfect Farsi. So they fly him out, he's accompanied by two MI6 officers, they're shepherded into Pakistan intelligence headquarters. And there waiting are a delegation from Iran. Now, bear in mind that Pakistan's played a very good game at this point, as it often does in the Middle East. You know, it's talking to both sides, it has very good relations with the West. It's also talking to the Iranians, you know, it was one of the first countries in the region to support the Islamic Revolution. You know, they're brilliantly playing both sides. So it's all done under their auspices. And over the course of three days, Vladimir Kozickin describes what he knows about this,

• 39:54Speaker 02

  as he sees it, looming Trojan horse is the way he described it, that there was, that was all ready to go. And he gives them absolute chapter and verse. He explains where the Communists are operating, where the safe houses are, the names, the money trails, the gun stashes, everything. And the Iranians say, thank you very much. Well, actually, they don't, they're pretty stony-faced, they just sort of.

• 40:19Gordon Corera?

  They shove it into boxes.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  They shove it into boxes, they take it back. But that, the day they fly back, they contact, they get hold of Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, and say, we got a problem here. And the aftermath is brutal and spectacular.

• 40:39Gordon Corera?

  And bloody.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  And incredibly bloody. I mean, within a couple of months, thousands of members of the Iranian Communist Party are rounded up by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. And hundreds, if not thousands of them, are executed. I mean, it's very hard to know what the final butcher's bill is for this. But the ferocity with which the IRGC assaults the left, the Communist left in Iran, is total and absolute. And it is the foundation stone in many ways of the theocratic regime. From that moment on, the Ayatollah and his thugs tolerate no opposition, whatever.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  They're going for it and they systematically begin to wipe out all, I mean leftist nationalist, everything. It is an unbelievable bloodbath. We'll probably never know the full toll, but it's absolutely spectacular. And so in one way, this, you can read this as a highly successful Cold War operation at a stroke, which I'm pretty sure is how Casey and Co. in Reddit, at a stroke, they have wiped out the Iranian Communist Party, the threat of this, you know, behemoth rolling across the border of the Red, that's not gonna happen. It's that, that's finished. And so, you know, I think there was rejoicing in parts of Whitehall

• 42:03Speaker 02

  and the Pentagon and Langley when this came through. Great, we've done it, we've done it. What did not happen was an improvement of relations with Iran, because so far from currying favour with the Ayatollah, they, they, they saw this is yet more machination by the West. You know, this is yet again, the West, you know, meddling in our affairs. So if you read the, the official histories of the revolution, this is one of the foundation myths. This is, this is, you know, the moment when the Ayatollah clamps down on the left. It's when he proves it's neither east nor west. It's, you know, it is a foundational myth and it appears everywhere. What they do not mention anywhere is that they got

• 42:45Speaker 02

  the intelligence from the West, because that would undermine the independence, you know, the brutal independence of, of the Iranian regime. So they don't, they don't want to admit.

• 42:54David McCloskey?

  There's no upside to crediting.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  There's no.

• 42:56Gordon Corera?

  MI6.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  And so far from opening a sort of cheerful conversation with Washington, you know, it compounds the idea that all Washington wants to do is kind of get their hands on our oil, which is kind of true. And that is also true today, you know, but you can read this story in two ways. And in a way, that's why I find it so interesting. It is a Cold War triumph. I mean, you'll find people in MI6 today and in CIA who will say, yeah, we did it. We did it. We, we, we stopped this secret threat. But the human toll is huge and it helps to create a monster.

• 43:29David McCloskey?

  Yeah, I, I was thinking about some other examples of intelligence sharing with hostile or sort of semi-hostile states. I mean, there's, there was counterterrorism cooperation with Assad Syria. There's counterterrorism cooperation with Putin's Russia occasionally, with the SVR and the FSB. There, there are rumours of, of even agency contacts with the Chinese over North Korea, you know? And I think they have these kind of relationships can have a tendency to be quite transactional.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:58David McCloskey?

  You know, it's just, it's, there's a mutual benefit for sharing particular information and they quite often don't translate into some kind of strategic partnership.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  And throughout the Cold War, we know there were back channels.

• 44:11David McCloskey?

  Right.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  On both sides, when it served the interests of both sides. But you're right, it doesn't translate into an overall relationship.

• 44:18Gordon Corera?

  I mean, this reminds me a little bit of when MI6 cooperated with Gaddafi's Libya.

• 44:23David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 44:23Gordon Corera?

  And they started handing over details of dissidents and, you know, got involved in rendition operations. And again, it was like, we're currying favour with the Libyans, you know, maybe we can kind of build up a good relationship with them. But there were moral complexities to such actions. And I think, I mean, even at the time with Redwood, some of the officers in MI6 seemed to have worried about the kind of morality because of what, you know, you rightly call the butcher's bill of this.

• 44:50David McCloskey?

  Because everyone knew what was gonna happen when that intelligence was passed to the Iranians, right?

• 44:55Speaker 02

  I don't know that they knew quite how ruthless and brutal and total would be the, you could tell, I mean, you wouldn't require an enormous amount of foresight to work out that they weren't gonna be, these people were not gonna be told, you're naughty little communists and we just don't do it again. They were gonna, you know, and that you're right, on, on, even on P5, on the desk in, in MI6, there were voices, often women's voices, I have to say, raised saying, there is a, there is a humanitarian aspect to this, if that's the right word. There is a, there is a moral aspect to this. We are sending these people to their deaths. But, but this was the Cold War. People die in wars. And the senior leadership of both the CIA and MI6 said, we're fighting proxy

• 45:37Speaker 02

  wars all over the world. What makes this one different? This is an opportunity to, to kill off the danger. And if that means some dead communists, well, you know, it was only later, I think, that the queasiness really sets in. I mean, there is a vigorous debate on, on the desk about whether or not Redwood should do it in the first place. But MI6 was not a democracy, as, as one of the officers said to me, you know, the bosses wanted it, it was gonna happen. So it happened. It was afterwards that they began, there was an uneasy feeling, as there was in Afghanistan, that we have backed people to, to fight the Soviets and in so doing, we have created something terrible, or helped to create something

• 46:17Speaker 02

  terrible here. We know that the, you know, from the Mujahideen in, in Afghanistan, spawn al-Qaeda, spawn ISIS, spawn Osama bin Laden, that, you know, 9/11, the Afghan, well, this is the outcome of unintended consequences. You know, you, you can't see the future and, and in the, in the parameters of the time, it was defensible and they, and it is still defended. I mean, McCready believes and others believe that this was ultimately the right thing to do. If a few lives were lost, that was nothing like as many lives that were, were gonna be lost if the situation in Iran triggered nuclear conflict. You know, this was, if you're, if you're comparing, you know, butcher's bills.

• 46:58David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  You know, the possibility.

• 47:00Gordon Corera?

  It's a possibility though, isn't it?

• 47:02Speaker 02

  It's a possibility.

• 47:02Gordon Corera?

  You're balancing a possibility against, against a reality. It's hard.

• 47:05David McCloskey?

  It reminds me of the, uh, what was it? The Merdegon line where, you know, he's, again, Iran, decades later, justifying an Israeli assassination campaign and saying, we're, we're killing to save lives, you know, we're whipped today. I mean, how did, how did Redwood react to this? What was his, because participating in that meeting in Islamabad, I assume he's a savvy guy. He understands a bit of how this is gonna be used, but how does he reckon with what he did?

• 47:31Speaker 02

  Well, of all people, actually, Redwood had had sort of closest eyewitness evidence of what the Iranian Revolutionary Guard were capable of. You know, he'd lived through the revolution. He'd watched this sort of fledgling group, you know, beheading people in the streets. He really knew what they, what they could do. He was a good soldier. You know, he did what he was told. He, he obediently set off there. In his later life, it's one of the things that he, that drove him to where he ended up. He, he, he never forgave himself. He believed that he had inadvertently, he never blamed MI6 for this, interestingly, but he believed that he, he wished he'd not done it. He wished it hadn't, he, because of course it didn't create what they all wanted, which was a kind of conversation

• 48:14Speaker 02

  with the Iranians either. It did, it did, he thought he might be contributing to world peace in the end, what he didn't realise.

• 48:20Gordon Corera?

  But in the end, I mean, his own agents, people he ran as agents are gonna get killed.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:25Gordon Corera?

  You know?

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, the two-day party is rounded up. All of his contacts, he's given the names. I mean, he's given the safe houses. They're all wound up and, and lots of them end up in Evan Prison and end up in front of firing squads.

• 48:39Gordon Corera?

  And as we said, I mean, I think the contemporary relevance of this story is so interesting because it is about the rise to power of a slightly more paranoid Iranian state and of the Revolutionary Guards as the kind of arm of the state to crush opposition. And what we've seen in the last few months even, is them move even closer to the centre of power. This was, you know, Red, the Redwood case was, was an early stage in that. And if you like, we've seen, you know, following the killing of the Supreme Leader recently by US and Israel, another step of, of them actually becoming the power centre in Iran.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  Absolutely. It's interesting you should mention Khamenei, who was killed in the first Israeli airstrike. I mean, he, he was among, at this point in 1982, he's among the hardliners. He's one of those who is saying, we got to unleash the Iranian Revolutionary Guard on the two-day party. You know, we've got to get rid of them. And paranoia is absolutely the right word, Gordon, because here was proof, written proof, that there was a fifth column, that, that, you know, it came from the left rather than from the imperialists. But, you know, it enabled the regime to say, we're under threat. There are internal traitors. There are external forces that are pushing them to treachery. We need to eradicate the lot because the future of the Islamic revolution is at stake here. So it, it really does become

• 49:56Speaker 02

  in a way, the story that the regime tells to itself. And, and what struck me as so interesting was that as I was writing the book, I had to, I had to rewrite the final chapters because, you know, the main figures in the story that I wrote from 1982 are some of the main figures today. You know, they're some of the main targets. They were in their youth then, they were in their twenties and thirties. Now they're in their eighties or nineties, you know, they're a gerontocracy now. But they're the same people and they've used this story internally to bolster their power.

• 50:27David McCloskey?

  The paranoia, you know, because I, I'd have to think all of these characters on the Iranian regime side in the early eighties already suspected the worst from today Iranian Marxists. But then to have Western intelligence services, who you as an Iranian who lived through 1953, you've lived through the CIA's support for the Shah and Savak, you see the Brits and the Americans as this kind of all-seeing, all-powerful entity. They come to you with information from a Soviet KGB officer that they've recruited, they've plopped him down in this chair in Islamabad. They've just given you hard evidence that all of your paranoia is true.

• 51:08Gordon Corera?

  It cements the idea, doesn't it?

• 51:10Speaker 02

  And you've embedded that in.

• 51:10Gordon Corera?

  That they are all-powerful and able to manipulate everything, doesn't it?

• 51:14David McCloskey?

  Right.

• 51:14Gordon Corera?

  Which is what they kind of have continued to believe.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  Well, you can imagine, I mean, the first reaction to this trope was pure scepticism. What, what are the Americans and the Brits up to now? Are they feeding us false information? Are they deliberately setting us against the Soviets for their own ends? What is this? So internally, within the Iranian regime, there was a huge debate about what to do, as there had been before in, in MI6, about what to do with this operational intelligence? Is it fake? Are we being sold a pop here? You know, and, but it was the, it was the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who were the real hardliners. They said, there's no doubt about this. And we, oddly enough, the Iranian intelligence sources are quite open on this. I mean, for such a paranoid regime, you can access the debate that is going on inside the regime because they love this story. They don't love the Western part of it. They

• 52:02Speaker 02

  don't like the idea that MI6 and CIA are behind it. You don't find that in any of the books. But you do get the story of, this was the great moment when the Ayatollah, the Imam clamped down, saving us from the enemy within. That's.

• 52:15Gordon Corera?

  So, so Ben, as we come to a close, I suppose we should just, we won't give away too much about Redwood himself and what happens to him. I do notice he becomes an acupuncturist at one point in Peter's Field. I mean, but should, should we say what happens to his personal problem which drove so much of this? I don't know how much you want to say, but.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, one of the main sources on this book. Was Redwood's daughter.

• 52:40Gordon Corera?

  Which would suggest a daughter born after.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Daughter born after.

• 52:44Gordon Corera?

  Which would suggest the problem had been solved.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  His afterlife, yes, I mean, he was, he, he was cured.

• 52:50Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  The stresslessness of his latter life was part of it.

• 52:55David McCloskey?

  Did he give up the booze?

• 52:56Speaker 02

  He did not give up the booze. He did not give up the booze. And, and the booze took him in the end, I'm afraid. I mean, sad to say, he, his afterlife, the afterlife of defectors is never uniformly happy. You know, you arrive with this great secrets for a while, you're a celebrity. And as time goes on, and it doesn't often take very long, you're no longer the focus of, of attention. Because Ichkin did manage to fashion for himself a, a happy life at times. You know, he, he developed a, a relationship, he did, you know, he, he had a child. He became, as you say, the most successful acupuncturist in Western Supermarkt.

• 53:35Speaker 02

  I mean, if you put that line in a novel, people would say, this is ridiculous.

• 53:40David McCloskey?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna put it in one.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could put it.

• 53:42David McCloskey?

  I'll see if my editor takes it out.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  They would take it out immediately, David.

• 53:45Gordon Corera?

  They would, they would.

• 53:46Speaker 02

  It's just so unlikely. But, you know, he was plagued by his demons, um, the memories of what had happened, what he had done. And the booze, you know, and, and, and, and, and so he never, I think he never fully recovered. But it, but it's not an, it's, it's not a tragic story. It's not, he, you know, he, in some ways, he achieved what he wanted.

• 54:06Gordon Corera?

  And it is, it is actually, I found the afterlife very interesting. And, and the details of that, we should say, again, are in Ben's excellent new book, Redwood, which I loved and, um, which is out now. And we should say that we're also going to be talking to Ben for club members, a little bit about the writing of these and other books, aren't we? And which we can kind of delve in a bit more about how, you know, these remarkable stories get told. So do join up. We're going to talk about our, also our personal experience and some of these issues as well. So do, do join up. That's how to sell people to join a club, isn't it? But Ben, we should say, thank you very much for joining us and telling us this amazing story. Thanks, Ben.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  It's been a huge pleasure.

• 54:49Gordon Corera?

  Thank you, Ben.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  Thanks, Ben.

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