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

Episode Date: September 13, 2026

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: https://bit.ly/4yAkNhq ------------------- 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: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠ 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

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 the rest is classified.com. KGB officer is recruited by MI6 in Iran at a time of revolutionary upheaval. His intelligence helps 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.

And I'm Gordon Carrera. 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 Anatolyvich 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. among espionage history aficionados. This story is pretty shadowy up until this point, but the amazing tale has finally come out or is coming out, hasn't it, Gordon?

That's right. Thanks to the writer Ben McIntyre, 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. Delighted to be here.

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. 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 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. It has both a kind of huge macro significance. It is a globally important story. That's something, as you guys well know, that you can't say of many spies. that they actually change, strategically change the dials 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, when it happens in spy world, pretty magical. This episode is brought to you by HP. In intelligence, you quickly learn that you are on the first. as strong as the network around you. It's rarely a single major event that undermines an operation. It's the gaps between systems. That's where information leaks. It's the same in business. Leaders face a constant battle against strict timelines, mismatch tools, and the worry their

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Learn more at Bloomberg.com. So then, I mean, maybe we start with the human. Can you set up who Redwood was, is? Who is this Vladimir Kuzichkin? Kuzikin was a classic recruit to the KGB, or appeared to be in the 1960s. His, you know, 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 was always somewhat alienated from the Soviet regime. He had his doubts about it from the beginning. And 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 his father at all. He wasn't related to him at all. His real father, it turned out, was someone else who had died when Kuzitschki was about in his early 20s, 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 very good KGB officer. I mean, he was

selected for the illegals section of the KGP Department S. Which we should explain if people might know this from previous podcasts we've done. But that's the bit that's sense people under deep cover abroad, not under diplomatic cover, so the Russians call it illegal. But it is the elite, isn't it? It is. It is. And in the 1960s and 70s, it was one of the most powerful departments in the KGB. It 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 it was a huge operation. I mean, nobody, to coin a phrase, nobody does it better than the Russians. and planting these people under completely fake identities in foreign countries was what Kuzikin 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. His degree was at the Oriental Studies faculty 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 real high flyer within the KGB. And also as being quite tall. Yes.

This is the other one of many distinguishing features of Vladimir Kuzitskin was that he was six foot four going on six foot five. How tall are you, David? I'm six foot five. Okay. Yeah. So you could have gone, you could have gone toe to toe with him. I don't think you'd have been able to go to toe to toe with him in breadth. I mean, he was a big guy.

He was about three and a half foot wide as well as being. 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 at the time, you know, in the 1960s and 70s, that was hugely taught, particularly in Soviet Russia.

So he was distinctive in that way as well, extremely handsome. in a way, sort of the perfect KGB officer. You actually write, Kucigin was a shy, awkward young man, as tall people sometimes are in your book. I mean, I was thinking that it's exactly like you, David, again. Yeah, sorry, yeah, sorry. Retiring. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Except when drunk. So he also liked to drink. Boy, did he like to drink. I mean, again, not unheard of in the Soviet era, but, and for tall people. But filling his boots. Tall shy, awkward drunk. Yeah, there we go. McCloskey.

Because it's good. Okay. Word association. But yeah, no, I mean, he sort of covered his innate shyness and awkwardness with alcohol. And I'm afraid the alcohol is a recurrent theme in his story. But he gets married as well, doesn't it? He does. He met and fell in love with a woman called Galina, who was a young, very pretty, very patriotic Soviet citizen, really.

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 was 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. Now, that was like joining the absolute elite of the Soviet Union.

So this appeared to be the perfect partnership. I was struck as I was reading the book in thinking that Galena and Kuzichkin 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. your life and really dissent about the Soviet state. She's kind of happy to put it in the past and move on. That's right, David.

But in a way, that is not unknown as well. I mean, 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 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 Kuzitskin did not share with her his. anxieties and his growing,

we don't want to jump too far ahead in this story because he does happen sort of later, but he was dubious from the start about the party, the ideology, and to some extent the KGB. But that disillusionment is gradual and spreading for him, and he never told Galena about it. So in a strange way, their story already had a secret in the middle of it. And they go to Iran. So he's posted to Iran 1977, I think.

That's right. That's right. 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? And 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. 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 sort of excesses and the greed of the ruling class in Tehran, focused on the Shah. There's a boiling opposition movement. And it's very inchoate.

I mean, looking back in history, you'd imagine that it was just pure Islamic rebellion boiling underneath. And 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 locked in battle, really, with the Western intelligence services, and the Western intelligence services were backing the Shah's intelligence services. So Savak, the brutal security service of the Iranian monarchy, was clamping down on opposition brutally. With help from the West, it has to be said. And so you've got this churning spy war going on, into which Kozitschkin 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 key, secret. of the KGB, and he's now essentially in charge of running its illegal sections in the Middle East. So he's rising through the ranks very quickly. But as he rises, the pressure levels are beginning to tell on him. 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 brutal. These are, you know, some of them torturers and killers. And one of his main jobs, I guess, is to build up contacts and presumably run assets inside the Iranian Communist Party, Tudor. Talk a little bit about that because I think, you know, in sort of the sweep of the revolution, we lose sight to your earlier point, that there actually was a sort of underground Marxist opposition to the Shah. There is, and it's, there was, and it's, and it's very fragmented. I mean, there are Marxist groups, there are Islamic Marxist groups, there are Marxist groups, there are Marxist-Islamic groups.

You know, 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 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, 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 watching that bloody uprising

in which Savak were wiped out 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, and 1979 revolution, the two-day party in exile had come back into the country. They were armed, they'd been enabled, they had in fact sacked quite a lot of the sort of weapons, the arsenals of the existing regime. So these were these were important groups.

And it is worth saying, isn't it? Because I think in our minds the Shagos and Ayatollah Khomeini comes in. 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. That's absolutely right, Gordon. 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, there's everything to play for. Now, as you guys know, in a world in flux, that's when the spies really get purchased. That's when the spy war really begins to heat up. So even though the CIA is kicked out, even though we see the occupation of the American embassy,

that appalling, catastrophic kind of experience for traumatic experience for America, which I think you are also seeing playing out today. The legacy of that is still very much alive. There's no formal American presence, but nonetheless they're trying to get their spies in. So are MI6. MI6 still have a kind of skeletal operation going there. But it is absolutely a world in bloody flux,

and the different parties are fighting it out on the streets. And the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, then a fledgling organization, is trying to get control. on behalf of the Islamists. 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 not at all clear exactly whether Khomeini is going to take over or what

his government will take. There's a Marxist party, a two-day party that's coming back into the country. I mean, this, for Kuzikkin, this kind of looks like maybe an opportunity to build his career. 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 realized was that the Ayatollah hated communism almost as much as he hated

the West and that therefore, a small thing, you know, that his whole policy was neither east nor west. But certainly initially, he was tolerant of the left-wing party because he didn't have much choice, the Ayatollah. So the two-day party was growing. The Communist Party was well-armed. This looked to the Central Committee and, therefore, to Kozitschkin and his KGB backers, this was a golden opportunity. They were going to be able to

write, as it were, the wrongs of the Shah era and get a, the very least, get a foothold in Iran. So that's Kazitschkin 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. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers. The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Think of some things that glow. Okay, fireflies, glow sticks, the northern lights. They're very cool. But what if we could replicate that glow inside our bodies and what if doing so could help us save lives?

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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 Kuzhkin'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 Evie. And they were lifelong KGB offices. 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'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 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. 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. 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. I would have thought of every sewage engineer that I know took in the life of the party.

Normally, they're just such fun. I agree. No offense to. No, no. Sorry. You might be listening. 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, Kozitschkin 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 Kuzichkin. So again, 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. 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,

code-named 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 Kuzikkin 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 under surveillance.

But it wasn't foolproof because the Iranian security service could simply switch off its radios. For the first four years that Kuzikin 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. I think the stress level is 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. You're done. You have to be perfect every time. That is absolutely right. I mean, the worst that would happen to Kuzikin if his network unraveled was.

I mean, the best that would happen to him was that his career would be over. Yeah. He'd be sent home. That's the best case. That's the best. The worst is that they're all killed and so is he. Right. 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, 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. 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, here. And then they send you home or they PNGU. 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. 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? 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 story, because the stress is having another effect on Kozitschkin, looking back on it. His marriage is in real trouble because increasingly he suffers from erectile dysfunction. This was an affliction common.

in 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 has fallen off a cliff. It's a calamity for Zichkin. It is a psychological crisis for him 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 organization 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. 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. 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 Femosis. And because itchkin believed. that's what he had. I don't think he was necessarily right. I think he was probably mostly stress that was doing this to him. He's drinking heavily. 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. Yes. I mean, because it's not necessarily the next logical step. Yes, the next logical step is not normally to approach MIS. But it is kind of a weird decision to make. I guess if you're desperate. But in order to understand it also, So one has to understand the way that Western medicine was perceived inside the Soviet Union.

Soviets ascribed 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 Kuzitschkin, 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 was. I guess you can 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. 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.

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, because itchkin 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 Kaczygkin was transfigured, really, by the music. He found it so beautiful. He'd never heard music like that before. And he, he nudged the man, they were playing Leon Buhlman's Sweet Gautique, and he nudged the KGB officer next to him and said, what's that? He's playing that. And that KGB officer says, oh, the man playing the organ there is that we know him. He's an MI6 officer. And this was weirdly one of the triggers for Kuzikkin because 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.

Everyone in MI6 plays the organ. Exactly. But when the moment came... When you're down at the fort, it's actually... Yeah, it's one of the... It's just an organ. 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. 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.

Could you set up that organist a little bit? Who is this MI6 official organist? So, odd as it may sound, there were quite a few classical musicians inside the British embassy. It actually 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 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. And the Ande, within spy circles was that he was MI6. So it was known. In fact, he was kicked out very soon after the revolution. as was the whole of the British diplomatic corps, they got rid of, and then allowed back in a very small way.

So talk to us a bit about how the MI6 officer McCready and Kuzichkin meet and how that recruitment process comes through. I mean, just give us a sense about how it comes about. So Ian McCready was a very young, MI6 officer, had been trained 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 businessman. 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. 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, and said, well, let's take a chance. Yeah. It was pretty bold thing to do, actually. What's the point of having an embassy if you can't have spies? I 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 are 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 there less than a year when he, because it's going to approach the British embassy.

I mean, 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 person who was, actually, he wasn't an ambassador, he was minister, but he was sort of in control of the embassy, was himself an MI6 officer. Actually, he wasn't. Nicholas Barrington was a straight diplomat.

But the KGB had convinced themselves that he was, and KZchkin 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 West, and I will spy for he. He 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. But he said one particularly, Kani 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 Kozichkin because there was real fear back in headquarters that this was a dangle. Yeah. You know, a walk-in, so-called CIA and MS-X are equally dubious about those because frequently they turn out to be plants. They turn out to be a jean provocateur who were there to try and embarrass the opposition. And, you know, Kuzikin was literally a walk-in.

I mean, he had walked across the road and into the building. And so there was great concern that this might be some attempt to sort of set up McCready. So it was highly dangerous. But he had to arrange a meeting with him. And he did this by means of, I won't give away exactly how he does it. But it's all in the book. But McCready arranged to pick up, because it'skin on a street corner, a particular point, in his Land Rover, a sort of hidden area, a sort of dead rock.

Of course he had a land rover. Do you get sent out as a British intelligence officer with a land rover? Yeah, got to have a land rover. Yeah, got to have a lander. No, McCready's very firm on this. He says it was his land rover. It wasn't given him by the embassy. He drove it there.

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 strange thing, which is that McCready and Kuzitschkin 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 organizations that are really learned in the same techniques. And so he didn't have to explain

very much to Kuzhkin about how to do this. Kuzhikin 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 Golhack and took him upstairs into the bathroom. Now, bear in mind, the Gull HAC compound, the British Embassy has two compounds, one in the south, one in the north. And the Gull Hack 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 Kozitskin up to the bathroom. They turned on the taps. they turned on the Iranian radio to try and drown out any bugs that were listening. And while, you know, Kuzichkin sat on the laundry basket and McCready sat on the edge of the bath, he began to try and work out if this guy was for real.

I mean, was he the real thing or was he being set out? And he reveals this issue, his motivation in terms of the erectile dysfunction quite early, doesn't he? He does. He does. He's pretty upfront about it. In the course of this first conversation, I mean, first. The first thing that Kuzikin does to establish his bona fidease 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 gold dust. That's not something a plant would ever do. And so from that moment, McCready knew that 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, because it's skin has got his hands on a bottle of Stilich. Well, in fact, McCready has given him a bottle of Stolich Naya. And there is this bizarre moment when this huge Russian leaned across to McCready and put his hand on his knee and said,

the relationship between a spy and a spy master is more intimate than a marriage, isn't it? You wonder where that's going. You do, and McCready wondered, he thought, gods, am I about to be propositioned by an enormous Russian homosexual spy. And the next thing Kazitskin said, I mean, he does have comical answer. Kuzkin said, my problem is I have no power in the bedroom, he said. 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. Are they speaking? What language are they speaking? 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 because he spoke pretty good English. But when it failed him, he would shift into farcey. 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 you will get me better. And then I will get out.

then you will arrange my exfiltration from Tehran. 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? Well, by all means, right? They're completely random. Of course.

They're supposed to be selected from a meaningless list of words. I've yet to come across an important spy whose code name did not have some sort of hidden Dubloent tundra in it. Spies can never revisit. resist selecting a code name that gives away a bit of it. I think I do, I actually, I think MI6 cheats on the cryptograms being random. I think the CIA are better at it. Are better at not chained.

They're more disciplined about not playing games with them. Much more disciplined. No, MI6 to this day maintain, no, no, it's absolutely, you know, this is a random. There was a secretary called Ursula in MI6, who sold, not sole 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. That's the end. We couldn't end the episode any better. But actually, no, 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? Yeah. And you were very keen on it, David. And you weren't. No, but you were very keen on it. But I wrote, in a way that surprised me. I wrote, you know, what's going on that?

I even wrote copy. You did write copy. Have you still got the copy? And if you subscribe to the declassified, to the Declassified Club. We'll, we may. We're going to have a conversation with Ben on the tail end of this and you can get that. I will read the copy out loud.

We should say 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 writing these books and about the amazing work you've done. Such an amazing collection of books from the Second World War through to the Cold War and what it's like. So do join up. but the rest is classified.com.

But otherwise, we'll see you next time. See you next time. 350 passengers. The great game. Strategic struggle between Britain and Russia. We assess our Prime Minister. With high confidence, it was Russian. Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people. Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself. You want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done... Nothing! We would need to understand the policy context.

All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today. And disseminated into an operation order, or Fraggo. A Fraggo that says to... ...kill the President of Russia. Yes. New from Gullhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off? You're my soldier, are you? Sergeant Tom McDuffie.

An audio drama journey like no other. Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons. Devised as a technically rigorous, geopolitical action thriller. We have two-tides-friendly key. Where Britain plays its strongest hand. He's the best. Against its strongest foe. Bear Hunt.

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