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“It’s about one man’s psychosexual secret – but if it weren’t for that very private problem, we might not be living in the same world today,” says Ben Macintyre. “In fact, the world might not exist at all.”
Book blurb bluster? “It’s no exaggeration,” insists the author and associate editor at The Times. “This guy is unlike any other spy that I’ve ever come across, and it’s the strangest, most fascinating book I’ve written” – which is quite a statement coming from the man who penned Operation Mincemeat, A Spy Among Friends and SAS: Rogue Heroes (all adapted for the screen and starring Colin Firth, Damian Lewis and Jack O’Connell respectively).
The spy he’s talking about this time is Vladimir Kuzichkin, effectively the deputy head of the KGB bureau in Iran; and the year is 1981. “That’s before the Ayatollah has got full control,” explains Macintyre, “and the Soviet Union is planning a coup. The guns are in, the money is in, the plan is in place and the sabotage is ready to go. If it works, the Soviets get the oil and the warm-water ports, and they have won the Cold War.”
High stakes, then. “The CIA didn’t know about the specific plot, but they’d been terrified about this prospect, so they had contingency planning ready if the Soviets attempted anything like this. And it was nuclear. The lowest-level response was that they would send in special forces teams with what were called ‘man-packed’ nukes – 160 portable nuclear weapons – to blow up the Zagros Mountains passes so the Soviets couldn’t come across that border. And if they’d done that, the Soviets would have responded with nuclear weapons, so this was a catastrophe waiting to happen.”
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But that wasn’t what Kuzichkin was worried about. “In spying, there’s the old acronym Mice – money, ideology, coercion and ego – which are the four mainsprings of motivation for somebody willing to become a double agent. But Kuzichkin’s reason is different: this 6ft 4in, very handsome Russian officer suffers from erectile dysfunction.”
That’s it? “This was a really devastating problem for him. It’s not a rare issue, even today, but it’s one that men don’t talk about. And for a Russian to suffer from this, in a macho organisation like the KGB, was just brutal. His marriage is coming apart and he believes that in the West there are medicines to cure the issue (which there aren’t, because Viagra hasn’t been invented yet), so he offers to hand over secrets to MI6.”
Naturally they designate him “Redwood” (“because they can never resist a punning codename”). But rather than use his secret to coerce him, “MI6 took it incredibly seriously. They tried, with great sensitivity, to help him, and the Service’s chief medical officer began sending him prescriptions.”
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From here, if you can believe it, things get even more unbelievable: there is old-school tradecraft (Kuzichkin received training in invisible inks and karate); a nail-biting but bonkers exfiltration attempt; and a couldn’t-make-it-up final act involving Alec Guinness. It makes for a sometimes comical, always gripping, utterly eye-opening book, but readers can safely suspend their scepticism because Macintyre’s sources are impeccable, from Kuzichkin’s long-time MI6 handler to one George W Bush.
The former president is a “very, very keen aficionado of espionage literature and had read some of my books” blushes Macintyre. “We had a meeting, and I told him about Redwood – which, of course, he didn’t know about; nobody does – and he very kindly arranged a meeting with... ah... various other characters... um... sort of... in that world...”
Unlike the journalist’s Second World War books, then, many of the protagonists of this one are still alive – and active. MI6 passed Kuzichkin’s intel, via the CIA and Pakistan, to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who brutally put down the coup with around 5,000 executions, ensuring the survival of the hardline regime that still rules Iran and, at the time of writing, the Strait of Hormuz.
“The funny thing – no, the terrible thing – is that I had to keep rewriting my last chapter because in that first Israeli air strike on Ayatollah Khamenei and his entourage [this February], a large number of people in the book were killed. They’re in their 80s now, but in their 20s they were young IRGC officers.”
It’s a story that continues to shape our world then? “On the one hand it was an extraordinary Cold War triumph, but it also effectively bolstered the power of the Ayatollah and his Islamist state and the IRGC.” MI6 and the CIA, says Macintyre, “helped create the monster” that’s menacing the Middle East and the world beyond it today. And it all comes back, he adds, to one “huge, handsome, very tough guy, with a problem he couldn’t share with anybody. He was deeply in love with his wife – and all this was motivated by a desperate attempt to save his marriage.”
Redwood by Ben McIntyre is released on Thursday 10 September and is available to pre-order now.
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