The KGB Double Agent Who Stopped Armageddon with Ben McIntyre

Dan Snow's History Hit

This episode explores the true story of Vladimir Kuzichkin, a Soviet KGB officer codenamed Agent Redwood, who became a double agent for British intelligence during the

Key takeaways

• A Soviet spy working for British intelligence helped prevent a potential nuclear conflict during the Cold War.

Main topics

• Cold War espionage
• The Soviet Union's influence in post-revolutionary Iran

Notable quotes

"This is a story of how this spy cracked open the KGB for British intelligence, risking everything, and in doing so, changed the course of history."

Conclusion

Vladimir Kuzichkin's decision to become a double agent was driven not by ideology but by personal

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History It 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 historyit.com slash subscribe. Speaker 2 (0:31) Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Some stories are so wild, so far-fetched, that they can scarcely be believed. Speaker 1 (0:41) And that's what I love about history. Speaker 2 (0:43) 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. He is 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. Speaker 2 (1:51) 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. Speaker 2 (2:14) 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. Speaker 2 (2:55) This is a wild ride. It's the story of Vladimir Kuzichkin, Agent Redwood, right here on Dan Snow's History Hit. Speaker 2 (3:15) Ben McIntyre, great to have you on. What's going on? What's going on? 1981, it's the forgotten little mini-freeze at the end of the Cold War, isn't it? Speaker 3 (3:23) Well, it's Speaker 2 (3:23) actually Speaker 3 (3:24) 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. Speaker 2 (4:34) Yeah, because Ben, the vast protest against the Shah... had obviously Islamists among them, but also lots of very secular, kind of urban intellectuals, vast numbers of students, men and women. I mean, it was a much more broad-based coalition. Well, it was broad, Speaker 3 (4:49) but it was inchoate. 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 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. You know, it's when the Islamists 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 Speaker 2 (5:55) that happened. So it's a fault line. It's got lots of oil. As we now know, it sits across some quite interesting and important trade routes of the world. But next door, Afghanistan, it's just been invaded by the Soviet Union. 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. Speaker 3 (6:17) 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 has 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 re-establish 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, I mean, the most mild of them is to use special forces to take in what were called man-packed nukes, which were portable nuclear weapons. small ones, and then 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. And 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 Speaker 2 (8:07) guess let's come into the spy story. This is the... CIA, MI6, KGB, at their most well-funded, I suppose also their most experienced. I mean, they've now spent decades going after each other. They know their opponent and they've perfected their tactics for going after each other. They're familiar foes, Speaker 3 (8:27) undoubtedly, but yet the KGB is still an opaque organisation 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 444 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 Speaker 2 (10:12) jeopardy here. And what does spying mean? 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 Speaker 3 (10:32) 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 early 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 ROCX 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 ROC-X 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 this incredible golden spying opportunity, his heart drops. I mean, having