REDWOOD

From the acclaimed author of Operation Mincemeat (2010), etc., a tangled tale of spy versus spy in which all parties involved suffer damage.

Vladimir Kuzichkin stood 6-foot-4, tall enough that he couldn’t easily avoid anyone tailing him through the streets of Tehran. A KGB officer of rank and reputation, writes Macintyre in this fast-moving account, Kuzichkin conjured a program to coordinate with Iran’s communist party, the Tudeh, to rise against the regime of the newly installed ayatollahs after the fall of the shah in 1979. Along the way, though, Kuzichkin changed (slow) horses, offering his services to an MI6 operative in the British Embassy. What caused him to defect? Well, having read a forbidden copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, he realized, “I myself now belonged to the organization which was the direct perpetrator of all that terror.” He bemoaned the corruption and inefficiency of the Soviet system. But, more than anything else, it seems he wanted access to Western medicine to treat what would now be taken care of by a little blue pill: “Kuzichkin’s impotence was his overriding, overwhelming burden, the driving psychological impetus behind his decision to swap sides.” He spilled secrets, including a planned Soviet invasion of Iran and the identities of his Tudeh contacts. MI6 and the CIA in turn fed much of that information to the government of Ayatollah Khomeini, supposedly the West’s mortal enemy, for, among other aims, they “hoped to make friends with Iran by identifying the Reds under its beds.” Belatedly, after the slaughter and imprisonment of thousands of communists, they realized that they’d made a mistake: “Gradually it dawned on Western analysts that removing the last bastion of opposition in Iran had actually bolstered the regime’s strength.” In essence, while Kuzichkin lived out a rather wretched life in an English backwater, his quest for a miracle cure helped nurture the totalitarian state we know today.

As ever, Macintyre delivers an improbable but impeccable tale of true espionage.