193. The KGB in Iran: Defecting to MI6 with Ben Macintyre (Ep 1)

A KGB officer is recruited by MI6 in Iran at a time of revolutionary upheaval. His intelligence helped shape the Cold War. But how far is agent Redwood motivated by some rather personal difficulties? 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

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• 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?

  KGB officer is recruited by MI6 in Iran at a time of revolutionary upheaval. His intelligence helped shape the Cold War. But how far is Agent Redwood motivated by some rather personal difficulties? Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm David McCloskey.

• 0:41Gordon Corera?

  And I'm Gordon Corera.

• 0:42David McCloskey?

  And welcome to a very special series as we delve into the amazing story of an MI6 agent known as Redwood. His real name is Russian Vladimir Anatolovich Kuzitschkin. He's a man who embodies, I think it's fair to say, some of the very complex human motivations of those who end up spying for other countries. I would wager that Kuzitschkin's name is not particularly well-known.

• 1:09Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 1:10David McCloskey?

  Among espionage history aficionados. The story is pretty shadowy up until this point, but the amazing tale has finally come out, or is coming out, hasn't it, Gordon?

• 1:20Gordon Corera?

  That's right. Thanks to the writer Ben Macintyre, author of many wonderful books, including on Gordievsky, as well as others, Second World War onwards, and the author of the new book, Redwood, which is out now. And we're very pleased to say Ben is with us to talk about this story. Welcome, Ben.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Delighted to be here.

• 1:37Gordon Corera?

  It is a very unusual story, it's fair to say. As we kind of teased at the top, come for the spying, stay for the discussion of erectile dysfunction. We shall get to that later. It's a fascinating story, Ben, and it's also one which is amazing as a human drama, but also, I guess, even resonates up to today in terms of Iran and its importance.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, it has huge, and to me, when I started this project, entirely unexpected, modern echoes. Some of the main characters in this story on the Iranian side are the same people who are still in control in Tehran. And, and this, in a way, is the origin story, one of the origin stories of the Iranian regime. It is one of the reasons why the Iranian regime is the way it is today, is down to this one spy. And it's, in a way, that's why I love this story, is it's both, it has both a kind of huge macro significance. It's, it's, it is a globally important story. That's, that's something, as you guys well know, that you can't say of many spies, that they actually change, strategically change the dials

• 2:42Speaker 02

  of history. But Redwood really does. And yet it boils down, in a way, to a highly personal, very private, very secret, personal problem that he himself had. So it combines, I loved writing it, because it combines both the human and the global political in a way that is, is, when it happens in spy world, pretty magical.

• 3:08Gordon Corera?

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• 6:10David McCloskey?

  So Ben, I mean, maybe we start with the human. Can you set up who Redwood was, is? Who is this Vladimir Kuzitschkin?

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Kuzitschkin was a classic recruit to the KGB, or appeared to be in the 1960s. His, you know, he, his, his father, or the man he thought was his father, was a KGB officer. He'd been brought up in that very closed, rather privileged world of a Soviet KGB family. He was in the army for his national service. He was then classically recruited by the KGB. But right from the beginning, Kuzitschkin was slightly different from his fellow recruits into the KGB. He, he was always somewhat alienated from the Soviet regime. He had, he had his doubts about it from the beginning. And one of the, one of the things that happened to him very early in life was that he discovered that the man who had brought him up as his father, a brutal, alcoholic, wife-abusing, violent man, was not

• 7:04Speaker 02

  his father at all. He wasn't related to him at all. His real father, it turned out, was someone else, who had died in his, when Kuzitschkin was about in his early twenties, and his mother sort of confessed that she had brought him up as someone that he wasn't. And that, I think, had a profound effect on him, in the sense that he realized you could be somebody on the outside and yet be someone completely different on the inside. And that, I think, is, in a way, that's the track on which his future life would run. But initially, he appeared to be a perfectly loyal and patriotic and determined and ambitious and, and very good KGB officer.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  I mean, he was selected for the illegals section of the KGB, Department S.

• 7:51Gordon Corera?

  Which we should explain, if people might know this from previous podcasts we've done, but that's the bit that sends people under deep cover abroad, not under diplomatic cover. So the Russians call it illegal, but it is the elite, isn't it?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  It is.

• 8:02Gordon Corera?

  I mean, that's what he'd been picked for.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  It is. And in the 1960s and 70s, it was one of the most powerful departments in the KGB, was certainly one of the best funded. And from the Western point of view, it was also one of the most mysterious. The West did not understand how the KGB planted illegals abroad. And, and it was a huge operation. I mean, nobody, to coin a phrase, nobody does it better than the Russians. And, and planting these people under completely fake identities in foreign countries was what Kuzitschkin did. So there's a sort of irony here, too. So his first major job for the KGB was manufacturing people who didn't really exist, creating false identities for people and then planting them abroad. And he excelled at it. He was really, he was very, very good at it.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  His degree was at the Oriental Studies Faculty in, in Moscow, and he spoke very, very good Farsi, the language of Iran. So he was always destined for a posting in Iran. And he was destined for high things. He was marked out right from the beginning as a, as a real high flyer within the KGB.

• 9:04Gordon Corera?

  And also as being quite tall.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Yes. This is the other, one of many distinguishing features of Vladimir Kuzitschkin, was that he was six foot four, going on six foot five.

• 9:13Gordon Corera?

  How tall are you, David? What's yours?

• 9:14David McCloskey?

  I'm six foot five.

• 9:15Gordon Corera?

  Ah, okay. So you could go, you could.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Gone toe to toe.

• 9:19David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  I don't think you'd have been able to go toe to toe with him in breadth. I mean, he was about three and a half foot wide as well as be, I mean, he was an enormous man. And at the time, six foot five was a height. Imagine trying to do counter surveillance when you're six foot five. It's not easy. Well, you will know, David. I mean, in America, you would blend in much easier with all those basketball players. But, but at the time, you know, in the, in the, in the 1960s and 70s, that was hugely tall, particularly in Soviet Russia. So he was distinctive in that way as well, extremely handsome. You know, in a way, sort of the perfect KGB officer.

• 9:56Gordon Corera?

  You're actually right, because Kuzitschkin was a shy, awkward young man, as tall people sometimes are.

• 10:01David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 10:01Gordon Corera?

  In your book. I mean, I was thinking, that's exactly like you, David.

• 10:04David McCloskey?

  Yeah, shy, shy and awkward.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Retiring.

• 10:07David McCloskey?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Except when drunk.

• 10:10Gordon Corera?

  So you also liked to drink.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Boy, did he like to drink. I mean, again, not unheard of in the Soviet era, but, and for tall people. But, but, but filling his boot.

• 10:20David McCloskey?

  Tall, shy, awkward, drunk.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, there we go.

• 10:24Gordon Corera?

  McCloskey, Kuzitschkin.

• 10:27David McCloskey?

  Word association.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  No, I mean, he, he sort of covered his innate shyness and awkwardness with alcohol. And I'm afraid the alcohol is a recurrent theme in his story.

• 10:37Gordon Corera?

  But he gets married as well, doesn't he?

• 10:38Speaker 02

  He does. He, he, he met and fell in love with a woman called Galina, who was a young, very pretty, very patriotic Soviet citizen, really. And, and theirs was a kind of perfect marriage in lots of ways, or appeared to be. You know, she, to be appointed abroad as a KGB officer, you had to be married. It was one of the rules that the KGB laid down because they believed, perhaps rightly, that a KGB officer was much less likely to defect if he was, if he was out there with his family. It's just going to be harder for him to do. So, so in a way, she was his passport to a foreign posting and he was her passport to a life of glamour abroad as the wife of a serving KGB officer.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Now, that was, that was like joining the absolute elite of the, of the Soviet Union. So theirs appeared to be the perfect partnership.

• 11:29David McCloskey?

  I was struck as I was reading the book and thinking that Galina and Kuzitschkin would be quite simpatico in their feelings toward the Soviet state because her family had been really ravaged during the terror. But she doesn't seem to share much of his sort of interior life and really dissent about the Soviet state. She's kind of happy to put it in the past and move on.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  That's right, David, but in a way that is not unknown as well. I mean, it's, you know, her reaction to the sort of horrors of the past was not to think about them, really. I mean, she was not a political person. She was in no way stupid, but, but she didn't, she wasn't, she was not engaged in the world in that way. She was quite a happy person. I think she was quite a sort of simple person in lots of ways. And Kuzitschkin did not share with her his anxieties and his growing disillusionment. We don't want to jump too far ahead in this story because this does happen sort of later, but his, he was dubious from the start about the party, the ideology, and to some extent, the KGB. And, but that disillusionment is gradual and spreading for him, and he never told Galina about it.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  So in a strange way, their story already had a secret in the middle of it.

• 12:43Gordon Corera?

  And they go to Iran. So he's posted to Iran 1977, I think.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right.

• 12:48Gordon Corera?

  So let's maybe paint a bit of a picture of Iran at that time, because it's still the Shah's time, backed by the West. But it's starting to disintegrate, isn't it?

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he, he arrives at what appears to be the height of the Shah's power. You know, the money is pouring in, the oil is pouring out, the Tehran is filled with expatriates. There are lots of Americans, there are lots of Brits. It's a great cosmopolitan, churning city. And underneath the surface, there is this growing fury, popular fury about the, the sort of excesses and the greed of the ruling class in Tehran, focused on the Shah. There's a, there's a boiling opposition movement. And it's very inchoate. I mean, we, we, looking back in history, you'd imagine that it was just pure Islamic rebellion boiling underneath.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  And that, there was a lot of that, but actually lots of sectors of Iranian society were turning against the Shah. And there was also taking place a kind of vigorous and vicious spy war. Because Tehran was a sort of crucible of the Cold War. It was, the Soviets were in there and the West were in there, and they were vying for control. The Soviet Union had one of the largest KGB stations in the world based in Tehran. And they were running lots of illegals and they were, they were locked in battle really with the Western intelligence services. And the Western intelligence services were backing the Shah's intelligence services.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  So Savak, the brutal security service of the Iranian monarchy, was clamping down on opposition brutally. With, with help from the West, it has to be said. And, and so you've got this churning spy war going on into which Kuzitschkin is sort of plunged overnight. And it's stressful. It is highly difficult. And he begins running his illegals in Tehran and outside the country as well. He knows a lot by this point, Kuzitschkin. I mean, he's been privy to some of the, the key secrets of, of the KGB. And he's now essentially in charge of running its illegal sections in the Middle East. So he's, he's rising through the ranks very quickly. But as he rises, the pressure levels are beginning to tell on him.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  And he finds this job, it's not an easy job that he's doing. It's also extremely dangerous. I mean, people are being picked up by Savak all the time. The KGB is finding it extremely difficult to plant its spies in Tehran. And there's, you know, there is real danger here. Savak are tough and, and brutal. These are, you know, some of them torturers and killers.

• 15:20David McCloskey?

  And one of his main jobs, I guess, is to build up contacts and presumably run assets inside the Iranian Communist Party, TUTA. Talk a little bit about that, because I think, you know, in, in sort of the sweep of the revolution, we, we lose sight, to your earlier point, that there actually was a sort of underground Marxist opposition to the Shah.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  There is, and it's, there was, and it's, and it's very fragmented. I mean, there, there are Marxist groups, there are Islamic Marxist groups, there are Marxist Islamic groups, you know, it's, it's a real hodgepodge. And the Soviets are trying to work out which horse to back. Some of the Marxist groups are so wild and, and kind of uncontrollable, but they're pretty heavily armed, a lot of them. But the key focus for the Soviet Union was the two-day party, which is the, which is the, the formal Communist Party of Iran. Long and distinguished history, been kicked out by the Shah. And after the Iranian revolution, which of course Kuzitschkin witnessed, I mean, he was there for the revolution,

• 16:24Speaker 02

  watching that bloody uprising in, in which Savak were wiped out and, and the Shah was sent packing. And there are groups fighting in the streets, there are gun battles. But the Soviet Union is backing the two-day party, which was then still quite powerful, particularly after the revolution, 1979 revolution. The two-day party in exile had come back into the country. They were armed, they'd, they'd been enabled, they had in fact sacked quite a lot of the sort of weapons, the arsenals of the, of the existing regime. So these were, these were important groups.

• 16:57Gordon Corera?

  And it is worth saying, isn't it? Because I think in our minds, the Shah goes and Ayatollah Khomeini comes in. And, but it's actually a much more fluid, messy period in which different factions are fighting for control after the Shah goes. There's this period of kind of political fluidity, which you get in the late 70s and early 80s.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  That's absolutely right, Gordon. It's, it's, it's also very unpredictable. It's not at all clear for a few years that the Ayatollah is going to be able to control this exploding country with all these different factions fighting it out. So at least for the first few years of the revolution, it, it, there's everything to play for. Now, as you guys know, you know, in a, in a world in flux, that's when the spies really get purchased. That's, that's when the spy war really begins to, to heat up. So even though the CIA is kicked out, even though we see the, the occupation of the American embassy, that, that appalling catastrophic kind of experience for, traumatic experience for America, which I think we are also seeing playing out today.

• 18:00Speaker 02

  The legacy of that is still very much alive. There's, there's no formal American presence, but, but nonetheless, they're trying to get their spies in. So, so are MI6. MI6 still have a, have a kind of skeletal operation going, going there. But it's, it is absolutely a, a world in bloody flux. And, and the different parties are fighting it out on the streets. And the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, then a fledgling organisation, is trying to get control on behalf of the Islamists.

• 18:30David McCloskey?

  And Kuzitschkin in this period of turmoil, I mean, this has to look like an incredible opportunity for the Soviet Union, right? Because it's, it's not at all clear exactly whether Khomeini is going to take over, or what form his government will take. There's a Marxist party, the two-day party that's coming back into the country. I mean, this, for Kuzitschkin, this kind of looks like maybe an opportunity to build his career.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And that is certainly the way it was seen by the Central Committee of the Communist Party back in the Soviet Union. This was a game changer for the Soviet Union. What they hadn't quite realised was, was that the Ayatollah hated communism almost as much as he hated the West. And that therefore, a small thing, you know, that it was, his whole policy was neither east nor west. But certainly initially, he was tolerant of the left-wing party. He didn't have much choice, the Ayatollah. So, so the, the two-day party was growing, the Communist Party was well armed. This looked to the Central Committee and therefore to Kuzitschkin and his KGB backers, this was a golden opportunity. They were going to, they were going to be able to right, as it were, the, the wrongs of the Shah era

• 19:36Speaker 02

  and get a, the very least, get a foothold in Iran.

• 19:40Gordon Corera?

  So that's Kuzitschkin in revolutionary Iran. But how does he end up as MI6's agent Redwood? We'll take a break and afterwards, we'll find out.

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• 22:55David McCloskey?

  Well, welcome back. We're with Ben McIntyre, talking about his amazing new book, Redwood, Vladimir Kuzitschkin. And we last slept him in Tehran, in this kind of broiling spirit of revolution. One of the things I love about the book, Ben, was you go into a lot of great detail. I don't want to give too much away, but a lot of great detail about the KGB's operations in Iran, in Tehran, in this kind of revolutionary period. I mean, could you give us some sense of what Kuzitschkin is actually kind of doing? These operations where he's drinking, he's trying to prepare himself for this kind of tense environment? I mean, maybe walk us into one of those, if you wouldn't mind, for kind of what he's

• 23:39David McCloskey?

  doing nuts and bolts on the ground as he's in his job as a KGB officer?

• 23:44Speaker 02

  So he quite quickly becomes head of the illegal section, Line N, as it was known within the KGB. So that's running the illegals, the sort of the undercover agents, not just in Tehran, but around it. But actually, he sort of becomes even more powerful than that, because he becomes effectively deputy resident there. He becomes the second guy in charge. So the KGB at this point is trying to recruit people within the regime. It is supporting the Iranian Communist Party. It is channeling funds and guns to them. But Kuzitschkin's main job is creating undercover agents. And he has dozens of them. I mean, he's got a very wide network, and he's very good at this stuff. I mean, I'll just give you one example. I mean, his two main agents were codenamed Conrad and Evy.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  And they were lifelong KGB officers. One was East German, one was Latvian. They had been trained in Moscow, and they had been married in Moscow as a fake couple. The KGB often did this. I mean, I'm sure some of your listeners will have seen The Americans, that TV series. Well, that's not a million miles away from what the KGB really did. In this case, what's I find so fascinating about it is they were thrust together in a spy marriage, and then they fell in love with each other. And the relationship endured. But so they were deeply implanted in Tehran society. He was a sewage engineer, she was a housewife. They went to all the coffee mornings, they went to the whole expatriate thing, they joined the drama circle. But they were top-level KGB spies.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  So they were gathering really useful intelligence, both before and after the revolution. And one of their best covers was they were both incredibly boring. They never said anything.

• 25:25David McCloskey?

  I would have thought every sewage engineer that I know is the life of the party.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Normally, they're just such fun. I agree.

• 25:32David McCloskey?

  No offense to sewage engineers, you might be listening.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  But, you know, it is actually a great cover. I mean, if you are gray and colorless, and you can turn up at the drama-reading circle, and nobody knows who you are, and nobody follows you in. But yet, they were producing some really high-grade stuff. They were considered by the KGB to be among their top spies, and they had a long history, too. So they were only one example. I mean, Kuzitschkin had dozens of these. And he was having to meet them, when he did meet them, in deep secrecy. Because of course, if the Iranian regime had found out that the Soviets had planted these people all over the country, they'd all have been taken in and executed, and so probably would Kuzitschkin. So, again, it's because it's important to the story, and we'll come back to it, the stress level is building all the time, as he gets more and more responsibility.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  And he's having to meet these people at brush-contact sites in Tehran. He's having to leave dead-letter box sites for them. He's having to, you know, all of that spycraft is incredibly tense. I mean, the Soviets have one big advantage in this, is that they had a radio interception unit inside their embassy, codenamed Impulse, which was able to pick up the radio frequencies of the security service, the police. And so they knew when they were under surveillance. Now, the Iranian authorities didn't know that. The West didn't know that either. But it meant that every time Kuzitschkin went out to meet one of his agents, Impulse would do a kind of search to make sure, or to try and establish, whether or not he was

• 27:05Speaker 02

  under surveillance. But it wasn't foolproof, because the Iranian security service could simply switch off its radios. For the first four years that Kuzitschkin was there, he never knew whether he was clean. He never knew whether he was fully safe. So every day carried with it the terror, really, that he was going to get caught and killed.

• 27:27David McCloskey?

  I think the stress level, it's so important structurally to understand the business and the people in it. Because if you're in finance or venture capital, you can be wrong nine times out of 10, but if you're right once and you get the payoff, it's great. So there's sort of this portfolio, you know. If you're in a normal corporate job, you can tend to be wrong occasionally and move on and move up in a company. You can't be wrong. If you think you're free of surveillance and you're not, and your illegals are killed and rolled up, arrested and killed, or disappeared, that's it.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  You're done.

• 28:04David McCloskey?

  It is, you have to be perfect every time.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  That is absolutely right. I mean, the worst that would happen to Kuzitschkin if his network unraveled was, I mean, the best that would happen to him was that his career would be over.

• 28:16David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  He'd be sent home.

• 28:18David McCloskey?

  That's the best case scenario.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  That's the best. The worst is that they're all killed, and so is he. You know, this is, I can't overemphasize this. This is the most hostile circumstance to operate as a spy in, because everybody's out to get you. And particularly because it's such a fragmented situation, there are lots of different groups competing. They all have checkpoints, they all have different forms of surveillance. So it's not, he's not dealing with a monolithic state like, you know, like the Iranian regime was before the revolution. It's not just Savak he's dealing with, he's dealing with everybody. And every day brought the possibility that it could all be over.

• 28:55Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. Far harder to be a KGB officer operating there than in the US or UK. You know, where the worst is you get a bit of a talking to from MI5, you know.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then they send you home, or they PNG you. This is, the stakes are much higher here. And you're absolutely right, David. One mistake, one small mistake in the tradecraft, and he's cooked.

• 29:13Gordon Corera?

  So we've got him under pressure, we've got a sense of his work. How is it that he ends up turning effectively, or wanting to work for MI6? I mean, how far is this ideological? We talked earlier about some of his kind of personal roots, maybe of a kind of internal descent. What's going on in his head over this period?

• 29:34Speaker 02

  There is definitely an ideological element to it. He is, he feels estranged from the society that he is working for, particularly the KGB. One of the trigger points for him, I think, was reading Solzhenitsyn's book, The Gulag Archipelago, highly illegal in the Soviet Union. He found a copy in Iran, and he read it. And it sort of opened his eyes to what the Soviet state was capable of. And bear in mind that, you know, in the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s, they didn't really know the full extent. I mean, you know, it had not all been revealed. And so that was a real turning point for him, too. But, and this is where we get to the more complicated and more strange part of this

• 30:16Speaker 02

  story, because the stress is having another effect on Kuzitschkin, looking back on it. His marriage is in real trouble, because increasingly, he suffers from erectile dysfunction. This was an affliction common, and those days, still common today, but without a cure, hence a source of amusement to people who don't have it, and a source of deep, deep psychological and emotional stress to those who did. And imagine you are a six-foot-four handsome KGB officer with a beautiful young wife, your career is going well, but you've got this secret, which is that your sex life

• 31:00Speaker 02

  has fallen off a cliff. It's a calamity for Kuzitschkin. It is a psychological crisis for him of...

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Of real dimensions, it's not something he can do anything about. He can't go to the Soviet doctors because then he'll have to reveal why. And also, the Soviet doctors in Tehran at that point were all KGB informants. And bear in mind that in a macho organisation like the KGB, to reveal that you had any kind of sexual problem would be a career-ending thing to do. You know, you would be a laughing stock. You know, this was not a sort of modern world where people's problems were discussed in an open way. Men still today don't talk about erectile dysfunction. It is still one of the taboos in our society. Then it was absolutely, you know, nobody talked about it.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  So he's got this inner secret, this thing that is actually destroying him. And it's only really explicable what he does next if you understand how much he loved his wife. I mean, in a way, this is a sort of twisted love story. He wanted to save his marriage. He was becoming desperate. He couldn't go to local doctors, he'd be found out. He convinced himself, really, that his problem was anatomical. He believed that what he really needed was a circumcision, that that would... And there is a form of erectile dysfunction that is caused by having an overtight foreskin. And Louis XVI suffered from it, it's called phimosis. And Kozichkin believed that's what he had. I don't think he was necessarily right.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  I think he was probably mostly stressed that was doing this to him.

• 32:39Gordon Corera?

  He's drinking heavily.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  And he's drinking heavily. So that's a pretty... Those are a combination. And Galena is also becoming deeply distressed about this. And she's beginning to take, you know, and she's taking it out on him. So she is berating him as being less than a man, you're not, you know, you're... So imagine what this is like. I mean, you know, spying is a pretty sort of machismo-ridden game anyway. And here he has this sort of enfeebling impotence that is really driving him mad. And he feels he has to do something about it. And what he does is very radical indeed.

• 33:15Gordon Corera?

  Yes, I mean, because... It's not necessarily the next logical step.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  Yes, the next logical step is not normally to approach MI6. But it is a kind of a weird decision to make. I guess if you're desperate... But in order to understand it also, one has to understand the way that Western medicine was perceived inside the Soviet Union. It was, Soviets ascribe to Western medicine an almost magical facility. They believed anything could be solved by the West with the right amount of money and the right doctors and the right medicines. And that was not, I mean, it wasn't peculiar to Kozichkin. A lot of Soviet citizens, perhaps wrongly, but I mean, this was a time when the Soviet medical system was also in freefall. I mean, it was coming apart. And he just knew he was never going to be able to solve it through normal channels, as it were.

• 34:02Gordon Corera?

  So I guess you could see, he's got a secret. And so you could approach someone else who knows about secrets and has access to the West. Spies, MI6.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you've got this combination of a medical problem and increasing ideological disillusionment. And they sort of come together. And they come together in the most sort of strange way, really. There is no CIA station in Tehran, they've all gone. There is a very small and very secret MI6 station.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  After the revolution, it's composed of one man, Ian McCready. Before the revolution, it's tiny and it's shrinking. And in fact, you know, the Brits are thrown out and then they're allowed to come back with a very skeletal group. But just immediately after the revolution, Kozichkin was invited to a wedding, an Irish wedding. One of the Irish diplomats was getting married and invited lots of diplomats, including some of the Soviets. And they were sitting in the church, waiting for the service to begin. And the organ was being played. And Kozichkin was transfigured, really, by the music. He found it so beautiful. He'd never heard music like that before. And he nudged the man, they were playing Leon Beulman's Sweet Gotique.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  And he nudged the KGB officer next to him and said, what's that? Who's playing that? And that KGB officer said, oh, the man playing the organ there is, we know him, he's an MI6 officer. And this was weirdly one of the triggers for Kozichkin because he thought, his immediate thinking was, well, there's nobody in the KGB, a million men strong who can play the organ like that. This must be a sophisticated, cultured... I mean, it sounds so strange.

• 35:41Gordon Corera?

  Everyone in MI6 plays the organ.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Exactly. But when the moment came...

• 35:45Gordon Corera?

  When you're down at the fort, it's actually, it's just...

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's one of the...

• 35:47Gordon Corera?

  It's just hard training programme.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it sounds, if you put that in a novel, people would say that's completely unbelievable. Of course, it's not true. But it is true, you know, that moment. So when the time came, after the revolution, and he heard, oh, there's a new MI6 officer has arrived, or someone we suspect of being an MI6 officer is... And bear in mind that the British Embassy and the Russian Embassy are bang next door to each other. There's one very narrow lane that divides them. And when he learns that MI6 has a representative next door, he thinks, right, the way I'm going to deal with this is I am going to approach them. I'm going to offer to spy for them for a year. And then I will defect and they will cure me.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Galena and I will head to the West and we will listen to lots of organ music and our sex life will improve and life will be grand. I mean, it sounds quixotic and unlikely, but that is what drove him.

• 36:44Gordon Corera?

  Could you set up that organist a little bit?

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 36:48Gordon Corera?

  Who is this MI6 official organist?

• 36:53Speaker 02

  So, odd as it may sound, there were quite a few classical musicians inside the British Embassy.

• 36:59Gordon Corera?

  It actually doesn't seem that odd.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  Doesn't seem that unlikely. But they had a little sort of string quartet. And one of them was a very accomplished piano and organ player. And he was frequently in demand, I mean, his cover was as a straight diplomat. I mean, he was what we would call a legal spy in the sense that he was there under diplomatic cover, but he was actually MI6. And he was much in demand, believe it or not, for weddings and funerals and, you know, those sorts of things. So he was, he was well, people didn't know he was MI6. He appeared to be the commercial attache. But it was, you know, he'd been there quite a long time and he was, he was well-known around the place.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  And the ondés within spy circles was that he was MI6. So it was known. In fact, he was, he was kicked out very soon after the revolution. He, you know, as was the whole of the British diplomatic corps, they were, they were, they were got rid of. And then allowed back in a very small way.

• 38:00Gordon Corera?

  So talk to us a bit about how the MI6 officer McCready and Kozichkin meet and how that recruitment process comes through. I mean, just give us a sense about how it comes about.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  So Ian McCready was a very young MI6 officer. He'd been trained in, at the fort. He had done one foreign posting in Africa, but this was really his, you know, he was really cutting his teeth. And when the British Embassy reopened in 1981, he was sent out under diplomatic cover. You know, he was, he was the only MI6 officer there. He was, he appeared to be organising sort of what little business was left there for British businessmen. But really, he was there to keep his eyes and ears open. It's a pretty bold move by the Thatcher government, actually, because the Brits were allowed to reopen their embassy on the grounds they did no spying.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  You know, they were told, you know, whatever you do, you can bring a few handful back. But if you bring a spy in here, we're shutting the place down. Thatcher and the then Foreign Minister Carrington said, well, let's take a chance.

• 39:05Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Which was a pretty bold thing to do, actually.

• 39:07Gordon Corera?

  What's the point of having an embassy if you can't have spies?

• 39:09Speaker 02

  Can't have spies. Well, funny enough, I mean, McCready's instructions, looking back on it, were rather comical. And when he said, well, what am I supposed to do there? They said, don't do anything at all. Just keep quiet, don't get into trouble, don't, you know, don't pop your head up. But he'd only been, he'd been there less than a year when he, when Kozichkin approached the British Embassy. I mean, he, he walked across the road. Now, his cover was as consul, so he was there to do consular duty effectively. And he walked into the British Embassy and said, I need to see the ambassador. He was under the misimpression that the, the person who was, actually, he wasn't ambassador, he was minister, but he was, he was sort of in control of the embassy, was himself an MI6 officer. Actually, he wasn't.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Nicholas Barrington was a straight diplomat, but the KGB had convinced themselves that he was. And Kozichkin had heard of this. So he approached Barrington, Nicholas Barrington, and said, look, I'm a KGB spy. I want to come over to the, to the West and I will spy for you. Didn't explain about the erectile dysfunction at that point. And Barrington was horrified, it was the last thing he wanted. But, you know, that was going to be a real problem for his little fledgling embassy that was under really tight surveillance. But he passed it on to McCready. And McCready is very interesting about this now. He said, you know, when he was at the fort, people would say to him, you know, you'll hear a lot of people here saying that, you know, the thing you really want in your life is a KGB officer to defect under your watch.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  But he said, one particularly canny instructor said, it's the last thing you want because you get that and it will turn your life upside down. And that is what happened. I mean, so the first thing that McCready had to try and do was to arrange a meeting with Kozicchin because there was real fear back in headquarters that this was a dangle.

• 40:54David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  You know, a walk-in, so-called CIA and MI6 are equally dubious about those because frequently they turn out to be plants. They turn out to be agents provocateurs who are there to try and embarrass the opposition. And, you know, Kozicchin was literally a walk-in. I mean, he'd walked across the road and into the building. And so there was great concern that this might be some attempt to, to sort of set up McCready. So it was highly dangerous. But he had to arrange a meeting with him and he, he did this by means of, I won't give away exactly how he does it, but there is, it's all in the book. But McCready

• 41:35Speaker 02

  arranged to pick up Kozicchin on a street corner, a particular point in his Land Rover, a sort of hidden area, sort of, a sort of dead drop site.

• 41:46David McCloskey?

  Of course he had a Land Rover.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Of course he had a Land Rover.

• 41:48David McCloskey?

  Do you get sent out as a, as a British intelligence officer with a Land Rover?

• 41:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, got to have a Land Rover. No, McCready's very firm on this. He says it was his Land Rover. You know, it wasn't given him by the embassy.

• 41:58David McCloskey?

  He drove it there.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  Funny enough, there were quite a few Land Rovers around. I did have to do a bit of research to find out how distinctive it was as a car. There were quite a few left over from when the Brits were there. So he hit him in the back of the Land Rover, drove off. And here's a, here's a strange thing, which is that McCready and Kozicchin had been trained in very similar ways. They both had been trained how to spot a dead drop site, how to evade counter surveillance. So on either side of the Iron Curtain, you've got these two huge spy organisations that are really learned in the same techniques. And so he didn't have to explain very much to Kozicchin about how to do this. Kozicchin knew how to do a pickup, how to do a dead letterbox, how to do a dead drop site. So he took him back to the northern compound of the British Embassy called Golhak and took him upstairs

• 42:45Speaker 02

  into the bathroom. Now, bear in mind, the Golhak compound, the British Embassy has two compounds, one in the south, one in the north. And the Golhak is really the residential one. That was where McCready was living with his young family. And they couldn't be sure that it hadn't been bugged because it had been left vacant at periods during the revolution. So he wasn't sure whether his house was bugged. He wasn't sure. But he thought the safest place to be was the bathroom. So he took Vladimir, imagine the scene. So he took Vladimir Kozicchin up to the bathroom. They turned on the taps. They turned on the Iranian radio to station, to try and drown out any bugs that were listening. And while, while, you know, Kozicchin sat on the laundry basket and McCready sat on the edge of the bath, he began to try and

• 43:30Speaker 02

  work out if this guy was for real. I mean, was he the real thing? Or was he being set up?

• 43:35David McCloskey?

  And he reveals this issue, his motivation in terms of the erectile dysfunction quite early, doesn't he?

• 43:40Speaker 02

  He does, he does.

• 43:41David McCloskey?

  He's pretty upfront about it. Yeah.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  In the, in the course of this first conversation, I mean, first, the first thing that, that Kozicchin does to establish his bona fides is to hand over a full telephone directory of all the KGB and Soviet diplomatic personnel in Tehran. And he identifies who is who within that. Now, that's, that's gold dust. That's not something a plant would ever do. And so from that moment, McCready knew that he would, this was the real thing, that he'd got someone. And bear in mind, this conversation is lubricated by a fair bit of vodka. I mean, Kozicchin has got his hands on a bottle of Stalichnaya. Well, in fact, McCready has given him a bottle of Stalichnaya. And there is this bizarre moment

• 44:22Speaker 02

  when this huge Russian leaned across to McCready and put his hand on his knee and said, "The relationship between a spy and a spymaster is more intimate than a marriage, isn't it?" And

• 44:36David McCloskey?

  You wonder where that's going.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  You do. And McCready wondered, he thought, gods, am I about to be propositioned by an enormous Russian homosexual spy? And the next thing Kozicchin said, I mean, he does have comical, Kozicchin said, "My problem is I have no power in the bedroom," he said. And, and McCready, by this point, his head was spinning and thought, what does he mean? Does he mean, is he talking about the power cut? So he's thinking, my God, what is going on here? And then

• 45:04David McCloskey?

  Are they speaking, what are they, what language are they speaking?

• 45:06Speaker 02

  They're speaking in English at this point. They spoke mostly in English. Both spoke fluent Farsi. So when their English, I mean, McCready's English was obviously English. And, and Kozicchin spoke pretty good English. But when it failed him, he would shift into Farsi. So it was a sort of mixture. And he said, "No, no, my power in the bedroom, my sexual power, I'm not, you know, I can't make love to my wife. And I believe that Western medicine will cure this for me. My deal is I will spy for you in position for a year and, and you will get me better. And, and then I will get out. Then you will arrange my exfiltration from Tehran."

• 45:43David McCloskey?

  And so begins the tale of this agent who will become known as Agent Redwood. And maybe at this point, we should address where that code name comes from, Ben, don't you think?

• 45:54Speaker 02

  Well, by all means.

• 45:55David McCloskey?

  Right?

• 45:56Speaker 02

  They are technically

• 45:57David McCloskey?

  The cryptonyms are random.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  Of course. They're supposed to be selected from a meaningless list of words. I've yet to come across an important spy that, whose code name did not have some sort of hidden double entendre in it. Spies can never resist selecting a code name that gives away a bit of it.

• 46:13David McCloskey?

  I think, I think, I do, I actually, I think MI6 cheats on the cryptonyms being random. I think the CIA

• 46:22Speaker 02

  Are better at it.

• 46:23David McCloskey?

  Are better at not cheating.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  They're more disciplined about not playing games with them.

• 46:26David McCloskey?

  Much more disciplined.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  No, MI6 to this day maintain, no, no, it's absolutely, we know this is a random, there was, there was a secretary called Ursula in MI6 who sold, not sold job, but her main job was to come up with meaningless words that you could then select from. So Redwood was chosen. He was codenamed Redwood. He was six foot four. He was the tallest tree in the forest. That seemed appropriate. There is of course another triple entendre in the word Redwood in that red is communist and wood was the problem.

• 46:57David McCloskey?

  That's the end.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  That's a cliffhanger.

• 47:00David McCloskey?

  We couldn't end the episode any, any better. But actually, the, the one thing we will say, and I've resisted saying it to this point, but this feels like the right opportunity. At some point in the history of The Rest is Classified, a company that makes pills to deal with this problem approached us and said, "Would you guys read an ad?"

• 47:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:23David McCloskey?

  And

• 47:23Speaker 02

  You were very keen on it, David.

• 47:25David McCloskey?

  And you, yeah, and you weren't.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  No, but you were very keen on it.

• 47:29David McCloskey?

  But I mean, in a way, it surprised me. And I thought, you know, what's going on there?

• 47:33Speaker 02

  I even wrote copy.

• 47:34David McCloskey?

  You, you did write copy. Have you still got the copy?

• 47:36Speaker 02

  And if, if you, if you subscribe to the Declassified Club, we'll, we'll, we may

• 47:42David McCloskey?

  We're gonna have a conversation with Ben on the tail end of this and you can get that. I will read the copy out loud.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  We should say, we'll, we'll end this first episode on this cliffhanger. Do come back for the second episode. And we will also be talking to Ben for a special Declassified Club members chat about, about writing these books and about the amazing work you've done. And such a kind of amazing collection of books from the Second World War through to the Cold War and what it's like. So do join up at therestisclassified.com. But otherwise, we'll see you next time.

• 48:13David McCloskey?

  See you next time.

• 48:18David McCloskey?

  Streaming October 30th on Paramount Plus. I'm Dexter Morgan. I've been killing killers for half my life. It gets to you. You're having a midlife crisis. I'm not ready for this. He's back. I'm older. I'm wiser.

• 48:34Speaker 06

  And sharper than ever. Things are gonna get messy. But if I can't believe in myself, I can't believe in anything. Dexter Resurrection. New season October 30th on the Paramount Plus Premium Plan. It's Monday at midnight. A competitor outranks you in AI search. Three of your best pages stop getting cited and two AI platforms start misquoting your prices. Luckily, Profound's AI marketer catches it all. It drafts content to win back visibility, refreshes those pages and writes outreach to correct your pricing at the source. By morning, it's ready for your review. This is why Walmart, Figma and Cursor rely on Profound. For AI-powered marketing, go to profound.com.

• 49:19Speaker 04

  Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. A fad to some, the future of money to others. We see crypto's trillion dollar swings. The end of jobs or the end of human struggle. We see the endless funds fueling the AI hype. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com.