Dan Snow's History Hit - The KGB Double Agent Who Stopped Armageddon with Ben McIntyre

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

This is an extraordinary story of espionage, betrayal and an unlikely friendship between spies on opposite sides - and of a man who risked his life and shaped the course of history, for a deeply personal and unlikely reason. In 1981, Washington feared a Soviet takeover of Iran could trigger military intervention and potentially a nuclear war. A KGB officer - Vladimir Kouzichkin - was stationed in revolutionary Iran. He was codenamed Agent Redwood and worked with British intelligence to expose the Soviet Union's operations in Iran... in exchange for a cure to a very private medical problem.Ben McIntyre's new book is called Redwood: The Most Extraordinary Spy of the Cold War and is out now!Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Listen to The Iranian Embassy Siege with Ben Macintyre:Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Yn4pGGxsG1YLI90kf4UkM?si=sUB3ShdzQiGEDeEj9fyBNgApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/the-iranian-embassy-siege-with-ben-macintyre/id1042631089?i=1000670522326Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail] Snow's History Hit is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up's History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like How William Concord England. What it was like to live in the Georgian era? And you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover.

Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's history here. Some stories are so wild, so far-fetched, that they can scarcely be believed. And that's what I love about history. You get to be blown away by the strangest, most unlikely and bizarre things that have ever happened on this planet. And those are exactly the kinds of tales that Ben McIntyre writes about. Here's the celebrated historian, the writer,

who so brilliantly finds these stories and then tells them to us. And every time he does so, he comes right here on the podcast with a glint in his eye assuring me that yet again, he's got a yarn more extraordinary and consequential than the last. And he's always right, because, folks, this is the craziest I've ever heard. What you're about to hear is a story that's never been told before. The story of a double agent who prevented Armageddon at the height of the Cold War. A Soviet double agent working for the KGB after the Iranian revolution.

He was in Tehran. And he knew that the Soviets were working with the Iranian Communist Party, the two-day party, to overthrow the fledgling Ayatollah's regime in 1981. In a plot that if successful, would have almost certainly resulted in Soviet forces moving into Iran to support this new communist government, as they had in Afghanistan, which in turn was a nightmare scenario for the Americans, and a contingency for which they were planning to deploy nuclear weapons. This is the story of how this spy cracked open the KGB for British intelligence, risking everything,

and in doing so, changed the course of history. Now, what makes this even more extraordinary is his reason, for doing so. A deeply personal reason that had consequences far beyond himself. This is the story of one man's courage, of a moving friendship between spies on opposite sides of a global conflict, of betrayal, of loyalty, and of how far a man will go for his marriage. This is a wild ride. It's the story of Vladimir Kuzitschkin, Agent Redwood, right here. on Dan Snow's history here. Ben McIntyre, great to have you on.

What's going on? What's going on? I mean, 1981, it's the forgotten little mini-freeze at the end of the Cold War, isn't it? Well, it's actually one of the coldest periods of the Cold War. I mean, we are closer to nuclear confrontation in 1981 than we are at any other point, really, I mean, barring the Cuban missile crisis. But Tehran, Iran is a particularly fascinating moment in that story, because the Ayatollah has come to power, but he doesn't have full control. there are different parties vying for power inside Iran, including the Communist Party,

which was then still quite powerful. So while the IRGC is clamping down, you've got the nationalists, you've got the liberals, you've got the communists, and you've got the Islamists, into this sort of boiling espionage cauldron walk the CIA, MI6 and the KGB. And it's that old great game story, really, of Russia and the West competing for power in Iran. Who's going to be up and who's going to be down? And it's by no means a done deal. It's not clear that this new regime in Iran is going to be as undemocratic, as brutal, as ruthless as it turns out to be, and as we are seeing today. And this story is absolutely central to that development. Yeah, because Ben, the vast protest against the Shah, had obviously Islamists among them, but also lots of very secular,

kind of urban intellectuals, fast numbers of students, men and women. I mean, it was a much more broad-based coalition. Well, it was broad, but it was in Kuwait. I mean, that was the problem was that everybody had expectations from the revolution. The only thing that combined them was let's get rid of the Shah. That was the only thing they agreed on. Beyond that, they disagreed on pretty much everything. There were Marxist Islamists, there were constitutional Islamists, there were Islamic Marxists, and boy, was it violent. The bloodletting in the streets, we've often forget this, but until the Ayatollah had got full control of the country, the bloodletting was appalling. I mean, you had armed Marxist groups going around executing people. You had the IRGC

doing the same thing. It was brutal. Is that right? Street battles. Okay. Street battles up and down and massive terrorist attacks by both sides. actually enormous massacres, arrests without trial. It's best, I think, to understand Iran in the sort of post-revolutionary period as a place of complete ferment. We see it as being somehow, and rightly, the birth of the Islamist state. It's when the Islamist take power in Iran. But that took a while, and the period we're talking about here is before that happened. And it's also why that happened. So it's a fault light. It's got lots of oil. As we now know, it sits across some quite interesting, important trade routes of the world. But next door, Afghanistan, it's just been invaded by the Soviet.

So it's actually a fault line of secularism, Islam, east and west. I mean, there are all sorts of those big global currents abroad in the world in 1981, all coming together in Iran at the time. Absolutely. And it is a front line of the Cold War, because you have the Soviets who, as you rightly say, have taken Afghanistan or are in the process of taking Afghanistan. That campaign is going well, by the way, in 1981. It is not turned into the appalling Vietnam-like situation that the Soviets faced as that campaign continued. They were doing very well. And you've got the CIA and America desperate to try to reestablish some sort of foothold in the Middle East. They wanted to reestablish relations with the Ayatollah's regime. They wanted the oil back, as they do today. So you've got the Soviet pushing in one

direction, and you've got the West pushing in the other, and they clash in Iran. So it's a nightmare for CIA and Pentagon planners is the thought that Iran could be taken over by the Soviet Union. That is the thing that keeps them awake at night, because if the Soviet Union takes over Iran, it takes over the warm water ports and the oil fields and wins the Cold War. So there is planning already taking place in the Pentagon for what to do if this happens. And the answer is nuclear. The Pentagon has a plan because it doesn't have enough conventional troops to stop a full-scale Soviet invasion. So there are plans of, I mean, the most mild of them is to use special forces to take in what were called man-pack nukes, which were portable nuclear weapons, small ones,

and then bring down the Albor, bring down the mountain range and actually destroy the mountain and block the passes into Iran from the north to try and stop Soviet armor from coming in. that was the mildest nuclear option. There were tactical nuclear weapons on the table as well, and hitting nuclear bases inside the Soviet Union. So this is the context in which to understand how this spy story plays out and why it is so significant. And I guess let's come into the spy story. This is the CIA, MI6, KGB, at their most well-funded. I suppose also they're most experienced. I mean, they've now spent decades going after each other. They know their opponent and they're They've perfected their tactics for going after each other.

They're familiar foes, undoubtedly. But yet the KGB is still an opaque organization to the West. They still don't know how it really functions. And they believe it to be all-powerful and incredibly dangerous. It's actually not. I mean, the KGB is in a state of decline by this point. Well disguised. But again, that is one of the things that emerges from this story

is this particular spy cracks open just what the KGB is really like. And yes, they are familiar with fighting each other, but the CIA has a real problem in Tehran because they've been kicked out. After the Iranian hostage crisis, the taking of the embassy, the holding of those diplomats for 44 days, the CIA has nobody in Iran. They are effectively blind to this potential nightmare. The only Westerners who really have active capability there are MI6,

and that is illegal because the Brits have been allowed to maintain a diplomatic representation there in 1981 on this strict understanding that they do not undertake any espionage because it's a deeply embedded idea in Iranian culture that whenever anything goes wrong in Iran, MI6 is behind it. Now, it's a not unreasonable view that, given that the Mossadegh coup of 53 carried out by CIA and MI6 operatives, was an appallingly cynical manipulation of Iranian politics. So the one thing the Brits are not supposed to do is have a spy in Iran, but they do. They have one.

And he's operating under commercial cover in the embassy. His name is Ian McCready. He's in his late 20s. He's got a young family. And it's a big gamble by the British government to send an MI6 officer out there. It's exactly what they're not supposed to do. So there's already jeopardy here. And what to spying me?

I mean, spying today, people will think of surveillance from space. they'll think of digital, they'll think of interceptions. I mean, is spying in the early 1980s, getting out, pounding the streets, meeting disaffected regime officials, trying to turn them? I mean, it's old-fashioned stuff. It's analog stuff. It's brush contacts, it's dead drop sites, it's trying to recruit agents. Although, interestingly, McCready's instructions on being sent out to Iran earlier in 1981 were don't do anything. Whatever you do, don't upset the Iranians, don't try and recruit anyone, just keep your head down because if you get caught, they're going to take us all hostage. They're going to take over the embassy and we've got a major problem.

So Ian was told, just play it cool, pretend to be the commercial guy, keep your eyes and ears open and report back to us. And you say analog. Analog is the word. I mean, he could only communicate with the UK using a thing called a Rockex machine, which was the wartime British equivalent of the enigma, which was an amazingly cumbersome machine that you had to, type on teletext type and then convert it with three encryption systems and a one-time pad. It took hours. And there were only two of these Rockex machines in existence, one in the basement of MI6 and one at the British Embassy in Tehran. So he is on his own trying to sort of send this stuff back, which is why when he is presented with his incredible golden spying opportunity,

his heart drops. I mean, having a KGB officer offer to spy for you is a double-edged sword. It might be a dangled. Initially, I think he thought it was the end of his career. This was a trap. He was going to be done. Well, tell me first about the KGB. I mean, it's funny, isn't it? Because the Ayatollah, the new Islamist regime in Iran, yes, they both dislike the West, but they're not obvious bedfellows, aren't they communists and Islamists? No, the Ayatollah's mantra is neither east nor west. He is a is as distrustful of communism as he is of capitalism. They're all Satan's. America may be the great Satan, but Britain and Soviet Union are the little satans, as is Israel. But the Soviets at this period, the KGB still had a very strong presence in Tehran. They had the largest KGB station

in the Middle East based in Tehran. They hadn't been reduced. They hadn't been kicked out. They played a very careful game, the Soviets, or trying to curry favor with the new regime. And the Communists at this point, the Communist Party in Iran, was still tolerated by the Ayatollah. They were allowed to operate openly, the two-day party. They were quite powerful still at this point, and that, again, is a critical part of this story. This is the moment when, I guess, we should probably introduce Vladimir Kozitschkin, who is Agent Redwood. So Kuzikin was a very senior KGB officer inside the Residentura. He ran all the illegals programs, the undercover spies in the Middle East. He was the only agent that had ever been tapped up who knew how the illegal system works. So he could break

open the KGB. And he offered himself to MI6. He was a walk-in in spy parlance, often something that spies don't really trust a walk-in, but he turned up and offered to spy for the West. And his reason for doing so, this is where this story gets very strange. His reason for doing so was quite different from any spy I've ever come across before. There's an old acronym in spying, which is that spies operate for one of four reasons. Money, ideology, coercion and ego. Mice is the acronym. Kuzikki was not like that.

He was alienated from the regime, so it was partly ideological. But his main reason, his absolutely fundamental reason for wanting to spy for the West and wait for it, is because he suffered from erectile dysfunction and believed that the West had medicines

that would cure it. What the hell? Exactly. That is extraordinary. To be a six-foot-four handsome macho KGB officer with impotence problems was a massive crisis because he was recently married. He adored his wife. But the stress of what was happening to him, I mean, look, this is one of those taboo subjects that people still find very hard to talk about. But what is so extraordinary in a way is that, because itchkin, who was a keeper of so many secrets, was prepared to hand this secret over. to an MI6 officer, effectively putting his life in complete jeopardy. He couldn't tell his KGB colleagues. They would have laughed him out of a job immediately. He'd have been finished. He couldn't tell the Soviet doctors because he didn't have any faith in them. And also they were all KGB. Like many Soviet citizens,

he had a sort of almost mystical belief in Western medicine. He believed that the West could cure his problem, get his life back on track, and he would then defect the West with his wife. The problem with this theory was that it was wrong. Ben, I mean, I imagine that stress is a key part of the erectile dysfunction problems. And becoming a, betraying the Soviet Union, knowing that you are now an agent of Western forces, that is going to be quite stressful. I mean, that is not going to, in the very short time, is not going to cure the dysfunction. I would have, that's my diagnosis. You're absolutely spot on because not only did it not cure it, it made it work. obviously. And McCready realized this.

Does he tell McCready, so he walks him off the street and does he tell him straight away? Is he honest with him? No. Okay. No. He is honest with him. So first of all, they have to arrange a meeting. And bear in mind that this is all done under the most incredibly hostile circumstances. I mean, there are checkpoints at every corner. They have to arrange a meeting, a secret meeting, so they can begin this kind of relationship. McCready has to work out if Guzichkin is a dangle. So it is all being conducted under conditions of the most ferocious secrecy in jeopardy. So what McCready does is he first of all arranges a meeting with him. And because it can produce a telephone directory identifying every single KGB agent in the Middle East, effectively.

Every single one. And that was his sort of bona fide dates. McCready then arranged a brush contact to pick him up in his Land Rover on a deserted Tehran Street and took him to the British compound in the north of Tehran. Now, McCready was not certain that the place wasn't bugged because it had been left vacant. He didn't know whether the IRGC had eavesdropping devices all right. So he took him up to the bathroom, believe it or not, of his house inside the compound, turned on the taps in the bath and the sink, turned on the radio to try and baffle any of the bugs, and began this debriefing process in which Kozitschkin began to reveal these incredible secrets, not yet the dysfunction element, but everything else. because it was a big drinker and McCready had produced a bottle of Stolichnir and the two of them. You can imagine the scene in this kind of bathroom wondering whether they were being overheard by the IRGC.

And halfway through it, Kazichkin put his hand on McCready's knee and said, you know, the relationship between a spy and a spy master is closer than marriage, isn't it? And McCready thought, I wonder what's coming here. And thinking at one point that he was about to be seduced, then because itchkin said, you know, the next thing he said, it's comical looking back on it, said, I have no power in the bedroom. And McCready was absolutely baffled because initially he thought, was he complaining about the electricity supply in Tehran? Because he kept going on and off, you know, is he worried about the lights in the bedroom? And he said, no, I have no sexual power in the bedroom.

And eventually it became clear that what he was doing was giving away this incredible personal, highly private secret. And what's extraordinary in a way is that McCready, so far from treating this as a joke, or trying to take advantage of it or trying to blackmail in with it, took it incredibly seriously, dealt with it with extreme sensitivity. And sent a telex back to MI6 headquarters, the like of which has never been written before or since, I suspect, which is help. How do I deal with a spy with erectile dysfunction?

What am I going to do? And to their credit, MI6 tried to deal with it. They consulted the chief medical officer of MI6. They sent him vitamin pills, little red vitamin pills. They sent him advice on lifestyle, cutting more sleep. But of course, it was then incurable. There was nothing they could do. The placebo effect of these little red pills worked for a bit.

But because it'skin quickly realized that he was not going to be cured. He believed his problem was anatomical, not psychological. He believed he needed to be circumcised and that that would solve it. Now, he couldn't get that in Iran. He could only get that in the West if he'd gone after the Soviet doctor. and said, I need to be circumcised. The doctor would have said, why? And he wouldn't be able to answer that question. Couldn't get it done locally. So he decided that he had to get out. He decided that he would spy for a year. And then, when he'd done a year, he wanted MI6 to spirit

him out of Iran. This is Dan Snow's history here. More after this. And just quickly, how much risk is he taking? What did the KGB do to people who, well, became traitors like this? the training course that Kozitschkin did in Moscow included, it is said, footage of a former traitor, Poliakov, being cremated alive as a little lesson to would-be potential recruits and would-be traitors, that that is what happens. Czichkin was facing terrifying jeopardy. Had he been caught, he would have been sedated, bundled onto a plane in bandages back to Moscow, where he would have been tortured and then he would have been executed. I mean, there is no doubt that he was risking his own life. Not in his own life, that of his family. I mean, the stakes for him were incredibly high.

They weren't much lower for McCready, I have to say. If he'd been caught in cahoots with a Russian spy, what the Revolutionary Guard would have done to them is anybody's bet before handing them over. They would have become pawns in a much, much bigger game. So this couldn't have been more dangerous, particularly for Kuzichkin, who was now not only spying for the KGB against the Iranians, but now spying for the Brits against the KGB. So it's about as dangerous as it gets. But for a year, nearly a year, McCready ran Kuzichkin in place. And it's an extraordinary story of what seems to us old-fashioned spying. It's dead-drop sites, dead letter boxes, brush contacts, minutely and carefully organized. McCready gave Kuzikkin a special miniature camera

called a Minox, which he would take into work every day and photograph every single document that he could get his hands on, everything. The eventual haul from the Redwood files amounted to four trunk loads of stuff. And they codenamed him Redwood. Redwood because he was six foot four. Redwood also because MI6 can never resist a punning codename and read for communist and wood for the problem. As well as getting this wonderful insight into what's going on inside the Soviet intelligence apparatus, what else in that year, are there any specific missions? Is there anything of lasting consequence that these two achieve together? Well, this is the nub of the story, and it takes us back to what we were talking about at the beginning. The main element that

Kozitschkin revealed was that the Soviet Union, through the KGB, was planning to mount and engineer a coup in Iran. They were going to use the Iran. They were going to use the Iraqiskin. Korean Communist Party, as I said, still quite powerful, as they had already done in Afghanistan, to overthrow the Mullers, to get rid of the Ayatollah, and then to have the Red Army roll across the borders from Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan. They were ready to go. The plan was in place. The money was going in. The guns were going in. The two-day was ready and primed. It had a secret military underground, ready to do this. The Soviets had their sabotage plan in place. It was extremely sophisticated. And the reason that Kuzitsky knew about all this was that he was the

linchpin of it. He was the person coordinating between the KGB and the two-day potential insurrectionists. So when he handed this over to MI6, there was a collective gasp because this was exactly the scenario that kept the CIA and the Pentagon awake at night, the thought that they could lose Iran to the Soviet Union. And as you say, it's not speculation. This is not sort of what-if counterfactual history. There were Pentagon plans to respond in the event of that with nuclear war. Well, I don't think Reagan would have had any choice.

There was no other way he could have stopped it. There weren't enough conventional forces in the area to hold back a full-scale Soviet invasion. And what's more, it was also clear from CIA intercepts that the Red Army was carrying out army maneuvers on the border, practicing precisely for this eventuality. All the elements were in place. And this is only a slight exaggeration, but all the elements were in place for World War III. Everybody involved in this story believed, perhaps wrongly, but genuinely believed that the Soviets were going to carry out this coup. It's just a matter of time. McCready believed it, KZichkin believed it, MI6, the CIA, the KGB, and the two-day party themselves believed this coup was going to happen, that they were going to be able to take over the country.

So just imagine what happened when that landed in London and Washington. And are London and Washington working in concert at this point, or are there differences in approach? As always with these sorts of cases, it's a need-to-know basis. And MI6 did not share the details about Kozitschkin until they really needed to. And that did not happen until Kuzikin was out. Because it was only once he was out that they felt they could go ahead, tell the US everything. And the consequences of that are what we feel today. So the Brits take it upon themselves to forestall this Soviet invasion, do they? That takes us to the next bit of the story. Perhaps we have to get him out first. Okay, let's get him out. Get him out. Okay, so right from the beginning, Kuzichkin has made it clear that he is not going to do this permanently.

He needs to get out. He will want to defect at some point. Nine months into the case, they've already amassed this incredible amount of material, and they're worrying about what to do with this information about the communist. minister coup, whether to tell Americans or not. And at this point, Vladimir Kuzichkin turned up, they already had an emergency signal in place so that he could contact McCready if he needed to be exfiltrated. And McCready had an escape plan worked out for how to get him out. An incredibly difficult thing to do, by the way. I mean, this is a police state, fully fortified. Every border was carefully covered. But nine months in, Kuzikkin alerted McCready to the emergency

signal and said, you have to get me out. I need to get out now. What had happened, McCready worked out afterwards, was that Kuzitschkin had told his wife, whom he still loved. He had said to her, I've done this for you. This is what makes this story so strange, is that in lots of ways, it's a kind of twisted love story. He was doing this because he wanted to save his marriage, because he loved his wife, a daughter. But she was a kind of simple Soviet soul. She never questioned the KGB. You know, she'd grown up during the purges. And it appears that when he confessed to her, instead of her saying, I'll come with you, she said, I'm not doing that. And he clearly feared that she was going to turn him in, that his own wife was going to end up turning him in to the KGB.

And so he had to run for it. And the story of the escape is astonishing. I mean, it is so close to disaster. Ben, you've come on this podcast and talked about extraordinary. extraordinary exfiltrations before. I can't believe you've got another one. This one was string and sealing wax. I mean, it was really close because there was a limit to what McCready could do. Eventually, they worked out the plan as follows. Kuzzyzkin would pretend to be a British diplomatic courier. They obtained a fake passport from MI6 sent through the diplomatic bag, which McCready doctored with coloured stamps to make it look as if this character Michael Rode, his fake name, had flown into Tehran airport and was leaving by the land route out of Turkey.

That was the only border they thought was feasible for getting him out. But it was a very thin operation. I mean, this man had to pretend to be a British diplomat. He had no knowledge of British diplomacy. He spoke English, but with a very heavy Russian accent. One, look at him and you thought, this is not Michael Road. So if he was challenged on that border, he was toast, he was finished. And what's more, the foreign office said McCready can't go with you. You have to go on your own because Francis Pym, then the Foreign Secretary. And bear in mind, MI6 has to have these operations signed off. They don't operate rogue. They need political oversight. And they got it. But Kazitskin was told, you've got to get out on your own. So he didn't even

have anyone who could appear to be the main British diplomat and get him out. So he was on his own. And the border was 14 hours drive away through the night. And what Kazitskin didn't know was that he was being tailed by the IRGC from the moment he left Tehran. When does he end up with the Brits? Does he end up sort of hiding out with the Brits or does he go straight from being a Russian KGB guy to picking him a passport and home to the border?

No, he goes straight to the border. He goes from his morning's work in the KGB Residentura in Tehran to climbing into his car and fleeing. So he's only got 12 hours before the KGB realized he's disappeared. So the clock is ticking from the moment he's on that road.

And I don't want to give it all away. No, people have got to read the book, of course. But the escape is absolutely fingernail shredding because it is so close to not working out. But they get him out, they fly him to Britain, they now have to decide what to do with this intelligence. Because there's a big debate within intelligence. What's it for?

Do you use it or you just gather it? Is it about knowing more or is it about doing more? And at that point, running the sort of, as it were, the operational end of things was a man called Chris Cohen, who went on to become head of MI6. And he was a pretty gung-ho character. And he said, there's absolutely no point in having this information about the two-day party, the communists coup, unless we use it. So he flew out to America. He persuaded the CIA not very difficult to go along with this plan. And then, believe it or not, Dan, they flew Redwood under MI6 escort to Islamabad in Pakistan. to meet with the Iranian intelligence service. So they decided we have to stop this. We have to stop this coup from taking place. So we have to tell the Iranians. The Iranians turned up.

The meeting went on for three days. Redwood, Kozitschkin, unburdened himself. They took all the trunks of intelligence. They handed it all over to the Iranians. Now, one of the reasons for doing this was also to try to create some sort of back channel to Iran at a time when relations between Iran and the West were, they were really bad. So this was highly illegal. Had this been known publicly, there would have been a massive, massive scandal.

Right, yeah, because the British and American government's intervening to protect the Islamic revolution here. Well, yes, that is right. But they didn't see it as that. I think they saw it as a way of stopping the Soviets and creating an avenue of communication. But, of course, you anticipate me, that is exactly what happened. So the IRGC said, thank you very much, went back to Iran, and within two months they had arrested 8,000 Iranian communists, of whom roughly half, we believe, were executed.

And that is the foundation stone of Iran's modern theocratic state. From that moment, the Ayatollah brooked no opposition. Everybody was wiped out, including those who were already in prison. It became an absolute bloodbath. That is where the sort of founding myth of Iran comes from. It is this moment when the Islamic revolution can say we are threatened on all sides, not just from the West, but from the East as well. Neither East nor West, we broke no opposition. So inadvertently, MI6 and the CIA ended up bolstering the Iranian regime, creating a monster. It's almost a carbon copy of what had happened in Afghanistan, where money was poured into the Islamic guerrillas, the Mujahideen, to fight. the Soviets and ended up creating al-Qaeda, ISIS, 9-11, and everything else that flows from it.

This is one of those stories about unintended consequences. And it's completely unknown. And it's a story that you can tell from two ways. It is both a triumph in many ways. You'll find people in MI6 today who will say, this was one of the great moments of the Cold War. we stopped in its tracks a probable coup and Soviet take over of Iran. We stopped it dead. MI6 once again punching above its weight, showing that it can do human intelligence better than anyone else, showing the Americans they've got better human resources. You know, it's a triumph, but it's also a complete tragedy. It's a disaster. It reinforces and bolsters the Islamic regime in two beliefs. One, that all opposition has to be removed because there are fifth colonists everywhere,

And two, whatever happens, the Brits are behind it. So it's very interesting. I mean, a lot of the sources for this book come from Iran. The Iranians are very proud of crushing the two-day party. What they never mention is that they were unable to do so by Western intelligence. And in particular, one Russian spy who did it for highly personal reasons. You listen to Dan Snow's history. There's more coming up.

How did you find out about it and have you been able to spend time? with anyone involved? I think I have now met all and spoken to all of the intelligence officers who are still around who ran this case. I mean, one of the reasons for that is that this is a story that is taught at MI6 training centres. It is in the bloodstream. It is one of the sort of case studies that they look at. So I've kind of known about it for a while because the host people have mentioned it to me over the years. I didn't really believe it to begin with. I thought it sounded It's so improbable and unlikely. But then as more and more people, well, there were at least two or three told me about it,

I thought, gosh, this is a thing. Then I met Ian McCready, the case officer who ran the whole thing, who has a absolutely phenomenal memory. I mean, he is able to recall what it smelt like in the street in northern Tehran on a Tuesday in 1982. And that's gold dust. So not Kozitschkin, alas, he died before I got onto this story. But I met his daughter, which answers a question that some of your listeners will, want answer, which was that was he cured? And yeah, he was. When he got back to Britain, they

arranged an emergency circumcision. As one of the MI6 officers said to me, it's quite hard to get hold of a kind of properly vetted circumciser with 24 hours notice. But they did. And Kuzhkin, I think probably psychologically more than anatomically, was cured. Once the stress had gone, he was completely back to normal. He met and fell in love with a French woman. They had a daughter. that side of his life became cured. And he ended up, I mean, his story is extraordinary because he, believe it or not, and if you put this in a novel, people would say that's preposterous. But he ended up as a highly successful acupuncturist in Western Superman,

living under an Irish name, completely assumed name, and with a very wide clientele that included, believe it or not, Alec Guinness. So at the time that Alec Guinness was filming Smiley, Oh no. He was in fact having acupuncture from a six-foot-four Russian spy called Vladimir Kuzitschkin, and he never knew it. Oh my goodness me. I don't know how you do, but it's unbelievable. Unbelievable. It's a bizarre story. One of the reasons I love it, I think, is that it's a huge story in lots of ways. It's a story that does affect our world. If Kuzikkin had not lived, if Kuzikkin had not had this problem, we would be living in a different world. We might not be living in a world. that existed at all if the whole thing had gone nuclear. I mean, that's a lot of what-ifs before you get there,

but the stakes could not have been higher. And yet they spring from one man's highly personal, very private problem. In a way, it's the interplay between the intensely personal and character-driven and these huge geopolitical ramifications. I mean, it feels to me like he's, we need to put him up there, thanks to your scholarship, we've been able to put it up with Klaus Fuchs and maybe perhaps Richard Sorga as individual spies that really have turned the tide of history. I think that is true. There are very few, by the way.

I mean, one of the odd things that no one in intelligence will ever tell you is that it doesn't make, usually make much difference. It doesn't alter the dials of history and in strategic ways. This does. This is one of those along with, I mean, I'd love writing about them, Operation Mint Speed. And there are others that really do. change the way states behave, change the nature of the battlefield. Well, because in this case, it's so striking that that coup was going to happen. I mean, no one is disputing that communist coup was going to happen. And in that event, well, well, no, we can't quite say that time.

We can't say it would have happened, but that everybody involved thought it was going to happen. So history in a way, I think is often about perception rather than reality, whether the Soviets would ever have done it. I don't think they realized quite how badly things were going in Afghanistan at that point. But they didn't, because actually they weren't going that. badly at that point, but it moved pretty quickly when it did. Would they ever have done it? Who knows? But everybody involved believed they were going to. And that was enough. That was enough

because, you know, nuclear wars can start on perception as much as anything else. The same was true of the Cuban missile crisis. Was Christchiev ever really going to activate those weapons? We don't know, but everyone believed he could. Presumably lots of the documents still classified. So are we going to find out more about this over the years? It depends really because I don't think MI6 will ever declassify its files. I mean, it never has. It never does. whether the KGB, you see, this is in a way what makes it so interesting. Because the reason this story has never been told before is because none of the participants wanted it to be told.

The Iranians don't want it told because it's the West again being cleverer than they are. The KGB didn't want it told because it's an embarrassment. They didn't spot this defector. 18 Soviet diplomats were kicked out of Iran as a result of this, and their entire two-day operation was dismantled. And sounds like agents around the Middle East. Yeah, yeah, they were.

And not just around the Middle East. he knew a lot. There was one key agent in Canada who was exposed as the result of Kaczychkin's brief. So he was a disaster for the KGB, so they didn't want it told. And MI6 and the CIA are ambivalent. I mean, the CIA, for obvious reasons, which is that the Iran-Contra scandal erupted very soon after this story. And had it been revealed that they were not only involved in that scandal, but were also at the same time trying to curry favor with the Ayatollah by handing him lists of victim targets. That would have been a disaster. And MI6 had and still has an ambivalent feeling about this story. In one way, they're very proud of it. In another, it's queasy making. Like all spy stories,

it's not a simple story of moral black and white. Is there something about dignity and perhaps some of the strengths of the West of liberal societies here as well? Because seeking medical help, not stigmatizing people who've got medical problems like this. I mean, there's something here about the sort of hidden advantages of the Western system that perhaps we take for granted that can give a more authoritarian, a cruel, or more barbarous system lethal vulnerabilities like this. I mean, if you'd been in a more understanding and sympathetic environment to talk about his health issues, then this may well not have happened. I think that's a really good point, Dan. I mean, look, in a tough system, in a really brutal authoritarian system, the discovery that you

had someone with erectile dysfunction who desperately did not want that secret to come out, would have been used as a lever. It would have been used as a form of blackmail and control. It wouldn't have taken long in the hands of the KGB to use such a secret to manipulate and then eventually destroy this person. M.I.6 didn't do that. On the contrary, it dealt with extraordinary sensitivity. And in a way, I think that's Dan to Ian McCready party. He established a relationship with this man. Men don't tend to talk to each other often about sexual problems. They'll talk about football until the cows come home, but they don't talk about... Or Cold War spies, but they do not talk about sexual problems, even though it is a problem

that persists today and is common to a huge chunk of mankind. It's still a taboo. But yet here you had two people from the 1980s. It was not a work world at that point. Men didn't talk about their problems. And yet, they managed to establish a bond of total complicity based on sharing this sort of sensitive subject. And I think that is not only interesting. It's kind of the core of this case that it's about a sort of shared humanity as much as it is about a kind of political aim on either of their parts. Yeah, interesting. And it's worth remembering, I suppose, that sort of sense of humanity. It's a civilised value, but also it's one that's given the West's, West Intelligence services a very real advantage in the great struggles of the 20th century. Yeah, I think that's absolutely

right. And it's why the Western intelligence services excel at human, at human intelligence, because in the end it is all about establishing relationships. And you can establish a relationship based on blackmail and brutality and threats, but that probably won't last. You establish a relationship based on a shared understanding and a reasonableness and a willingness to listen. That's a very different kind of relationship. Well, Ben McIntyre. Thank you very much indeed. Tell everyone what this smash hit is called. My next book is called Redwood,

the Cold War's Most Extraordinary Spy. Amazing. Well, you keep finding them. Thank you very much, Ben McIntyre. Thank you, Dan. Thank you so much for Ben McIntyre for joining me on the show. You're going to want to find out about the story in much more detail, of course. So please check out his book, Redwood, which is out now. And if you want more, Ben, we've got plenty of it.

Let me point in the direction of an episode we did with him a couple of years ago about the Iranian embassy siege in London. We recorded on the spot where it happened in Kensington. We've added a link in the show notes. Thank you very much for listening. See you next time. Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up's history and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England. What it was like to live in the Georgian era. And you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries plus new releases

every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history.com slash subscribe.