Lawfare Daily: The Spy Who Changed the Cold War in the Middle East

[Intro]

Ben Macintyre: Kuzichkin was really deputy head of the Rezidentura in Tehran, the largest KGB station in the Middle East. So, he had access to pretty much everything, and he was able to blow apart spy rings, undercover networks, and above all, this extraordinary looming plot to set up the communists as the government in Iran.

Mike Feinberg: It’s the Lawfare Podcast. I’m Michael Feinberg, senior editor at Lawfare, here today with journalist and writer Ben Macintyre.

Ben Macintyre: The whole theory that my enemy’s enemy is my friend has been disproved many times over history. It is thoroughly disproved here.

Mike Feinberg: Today we’re talking about his book, Redwood.

Recently published, this details a little-known event in Cold War history which had an outsize impact on how it would affect the balance of power between the USSR and the West in the Middle East.

You have made a sort of cottage industry out of exploring the lesser-known corners of the intelligence war, both between the Allied forces in World War II and also within the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Empire.

And in all of your books thus far, individuals who find themselves recruited by the intelligence services generally find themselves pressed into service by a series of motivations that the intelligence community has traditionally abbreviated as MICE. And that stands for money, ideology, coercion, and ego.

Your newest book, though, Redwood, about a case involving the Soviet Union up against MI5 and the CIA in revolutionary Iran, posits a slightly different term for the I in MICE.

Ben Macintyre: Absolutely.

Mike Feinberg: You may have written the first chronicle of an intelligence operation that was catalyzed into being by an acute case of erectile dysfunction.

Ben Macintyre: That is true, Michael. It is the first such case that I’ve ever come across. Tell me if you ever have. I mean, it is what makes this story quite bizarre in some respects. Money, ideology, coercion, and ego, those are the, that’s the easy kind of acronym, it’s rather reductive, that is often used. In the case of this particular spy, a man called Vladimir Kuzichkin, he was a very senior KGB officer operating in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Iran, so he’s in that hot cauldron of revolutionary politics, and money was never his motivation.

He volunteered to spy for the British. He was a walk-in, so he literally walked into the British embassy in 1981 and said he wanted to spy for the West, wanted to spy for MI6. His motivations were so far from the ordinary. Money never played a part. Ideology was in there. He was very alienated from the Soviet regime, and he’d had enough of the KGB.

Coercion, not at all. And ego, really not a factor either because his frailties were in many ways much more pronounced than his ego. He suffered from erectile dysfunction, which sounds comical, but for him was an absolute nightmare. He was trying to save his marriage. The stress of being a KGB officer in intensely hostile circumstances in Iran was getting to him, and he believed, as many Soviets did, that the West had medicines that would cure him.

Many Soviets had a kind of exaggerated belief in Western medicine, regarding it almost as a form of magic that would somehow cure anything. And he believed there were tablets that would save his marriage, get his sex life back on track, and he would then, you know, he... deal was he said, I will spy for the West for a year, and then I want to be resettled in the West with my wife, and I want to start anew.

So, he had this kind of fantasy of what was gonna happen. And of course, Viagra hadn’t been invented at this point. There was no cure for this. But MI6 couldn’t really say that. So, you’ve already, in this case, you’ve got a kind of problem, which is that MI6 has, says to him the, a man called Ian McCredie, he was the sole MI6 officer left in Iran, said to Kuzichkin, look, we’ll do what we can to help you, but there was precious little they could do to help.

So, the clock is ticking on this story right from the word go.

Mike Feinberg: Now, before we get into the specifics of the operation, can you sort of set the scene? Most Americans, when they think of revolutionary Iran, they immediately flash to the hostage crisis that involved the American Embassy. But your book, particularly in the early chapters, lays out a very strong case for why Iran was actually a key, what some historians would call unaligned state within the Cold War.

Why were MI6 and CIA on the one hand and the KGB on the other so interested in a tiny state that is, quite frankly, at this point, nowhere close to a world power?

Ben Macintyre: Well, I’d put that in some perspective. I mean, there is a one-word answer to that question, which is oil. You know, Iran was actually a key state in the Cold War.

We often forget this now, but the great powers had been fighting over Iran for 200 years, the Russians pushing down from the north, imperial Britain trying to hold the line in Iran to defend India, the jewel of empire. But that great game, as it was called, had given way really in the Cold War to a similar contest really, but this, now between communist Soviet Union on the one hand and capitalist West on the other, led by America.

So, with the Shah in power in the 1970s Iran was seen as a kind of buffer state against communism. It was thoroughly aligned with the West. The Shah was America’s favorite despot. He was autocratic. He, you know, he was prepared to follow the American line, and was prepared to hold off the Soviets.

I mean, he maintained relations with the Soviets, but he kept them at arm’s length. So, what you had really was MI6 and the CIA coordinating with the Shah’s brutal internal security service, the SAVAK who were extremely formidable organization, partly trained by the CIA, and they were fundamentally anti-Soviet.

So, the KGB was losing the spy war, if you like, in pre-revolutionary Iran. When the revolution happens, everything gets turned on its head. There is the hostage crisis. The Americans are effectively booted out of Iran. There were 50,000 Americans living in Iran before the revolution. The whole lot are forced out.

Diplomatic relations between America and Tehran cease. The British maintain a tiny skeletal diplomatic representation in post-revolutionary Iran, but they’re really very, very small. And for the KGB, this is an opportunity. This is their chance to move into what was effectively a vacuum of power. I mean, we often think of revolutions as changing societies overnight, you know, that they somehow transform everything.

That’s not quite true of Iran because although the Ayatollah and his Islamic regime were in the ascendant and had taken power, many other groups were competing for influence and power in Iran, most notably the Iranian Communist Party, then very powerful, growing very quickly, well-armed, backed by Moscow.

And for the Soviet Union, the Iranian Communist Party, warily tolerated by the Ayatollah still, was an opportunity. That was their opportunity to try to reestablish some control in Iran. I mean, and Kuzichkin, this character, this Vladimir Kuzichkin, his main job as a KGB officer was to coordinate with the Iranian Communist Party, the Tudeh Party.

And believe it or not, and this is where this story becomes so secret, is a plot was afoot. The Soviets had in mind to set up the Iranian Communist Party in a coup to overthrow the Ayatollah and his Islamic government and replace it with a communist government, and then the Red Army would roll across the border from Afghanistan to support it.

This was a very real possibility in 1981.

Mike Feinberg: So, explain to us you gave sort of an overview, but we have a KGB officer who is not just in possession of information about this plot, but is actually the one handling assets that would be involved in it. And, at a certain point, he decides, largely out of marital frustrations stemming from a dimming sex life due to the erectile dysfunction, that he is going to walk in to the British Embassy.

Now, walk-ins are very often treated with suspicion because there is a belief that they could be a provocation to get embassy personnel to do something they’re not supposed to, giving the host country a reason to kick them out. Or they could also be conduits for disinformation. So, walk us through what happens when the walk-in occurs.

Ben Macintyre: You’re absolutely right. Kuzichkin was the linchpin of this conspiracy. He was the KGB officer who was funneling money, advice, strategy, guns to the Tudeh leadership, to the leadership of the Iranian Communist Party. So, he’s absolutely crucial.

You’re absolutely right, Michael, that a walk-in is often perceived, at least initially by intelligence services, as, to use another piece of jargon, a dangle, a provocation, something that is intended to embarrass, you know, a rival power.

It’s an ambush often. On the other hand, walk-ins can also be incredibly valuable. Some of the most successful double agents in history have been people who have volunteered to spy. They haven’t been recruited. So, it’s a very fine balance, and this initial approach sent a thrill of anticipation, but also trepidation through MI6 because there were voices there saying, this is just too good to be true.

This is a, this person has literally walked across the road. I mean, the Soviet Embassy was right next door to the British Embassy. This was a walk-in who had walked roughly 20 yards in order to present himself to the other side. So, there was a big debate within MI6 about whether to follow up on this.

And bear in mind that the stakes were pretty high for everybody concerned. If the Iranians discovered that the Brits had a spy, had an MI6 officer operating in Iran, and they were allowed to have diplomatic representation on condition they did not engage in any espionage. Had McCready, Ian McCready, this MI6 officer, been caught engaging  in this kind of espionage, it would’ve been a huge scandal.

They would probably have occupied the British Embassy and taken hostages. It was that serious, so you can see why they were worried. Nonetheless, MI6 gave the go-ahead, and McCready arranged to meet Kuzichkin. They met. Well, the first important meeting took place inside McCready’s own home, in his own bathroom at the top of his, of the building.

They met in the bathroom because that was the room that McCready felt was least likely to have been bugged by the Iranian Intelligence Services. They turned on the taps. They turned on the radio to try and cover any eavesdropping, and Kuzichkin began to explain the kind of jewels that he was able to provide McCready with.

And one of the first things he provided was a complete list of the entire KGB order of battle in Iran, every single active KGB and GRU officer. Now, that’s the kind of information that was so valuable that it was clear from the get-go that Kuzichkin was not a dangle. He was the real thing.

Mike Feinberg: Okay, now there’s a question as I was reading your book that kept running through my head that speaks directly to the interactions and the moments we’re talking about.

And the question actually stems from another espionage case about which you also wrote a book, so I think you’re an ideal person to ask this to. By the late ‘60s, the British services had been relatively eviscerated by a series of moles popularly known as the Cambridge Spies. You wrote about one named Kim Philby, but there were at least four others.

There are some conspiracy theories that there were even more. Peter Wright, a former counterintelligence official in Great Britain, got himself in some trouble by positing very publicly who the additional ones may have been.

Ben Macintyre: He was wrong, by the way.

Mike Feinberg: He was very wrong.

Ben Macintyre: Yeah.

Mike Feinberg: And his own book is quite interesting to read for that very reason, particularly if you pair it with another book called The Spycatcher Affair, which is about the fallout from Wright’s book, Spycatcher.

Ben Macintyre: Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Feinberg: But anyway, the British services, it’s... I don’t know if it’s fair to say that they’re in shambles by the late ‘60s, but they are certainly not where they thought they were, and there is an element of distrust from other friendly services about how secure the British national security state really is.

And that’s the late ‘60s. And then in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, something has changed. The Brits are running not just Redwood, the subject of your book, but they’re also running Oleg Gordievsky, who is arguably one of the most important spies to ever work for Western intelligence agencies within the Soviet Union.

And I’m really curious, why did these career KGB officers, knowing how easily that MI6 had been penetrated by their own service in relatively recent history, still decide to trust MI6 with their own safety and security?

Ben Macintyre: It’s a very good question. You’re right. By the late ‘70s, MI6 was very much back on track.

British intelligence has always prided itself on a particular talent for human intelligence. It is one of the things that MI6 does extremely well. The training focus is very hard on that. And they do it in a slightly different way from the CIA. You know, there is a notion that you have to establish a relationship with your agent, that it’s all about maintaining a kind of rapport.

The CIA is much more compartmentalized. Their whole idea is that if you have an agent, any officer should be able to run them. That is not the case with MI6. So, it’s partly about personal relationships. It’s partly accidental, in truth. I mean, Redwood, the spy we’re talking about in Iran, turned to the British because there were no American spies in Iran.

I mean, the CIA station had been wholesale removed, evacuated and taken out. So, he might have gone to the CIA otherwise. Britain has always punched post-war above its weight in terms of intelligence. Now, whether that is the sort of James Bond effect, as some people think, whether it’s that there is just this mythical, partly mythical status that MI6 holds in popular imagination.

There was a recent survey, in fact that showed that even today, European intelligence agencies rate MI6 as the most effective intelligence agency. So, it has this reputation that preceded it. But the truth is, Michael, I think MI6 was rather surprised and indeed somewhat taken aback to have not one, but two KGB officers running simultaneously inside that hitherto really impenetrable organization.

No one had ever had one since Penkovsky, who was a GRU officer, inside the building, you know, looking outward. So, to have two, they, which was another reason why they were a little distrustful of their own spycraft, was an extraordinary windfall for the time.

Mike Feinberg: So, your statement about the British approaching asset recruitment much more from a relationship perspective rather than a transactional encounter is something that I think holds true even today.

When I left the U.S. intelligence community a little under two years ago, that was certainly the impression all of us had. And I’m curious, and I realize this may just be hypothesizing, but why do you think that is that the British services are so much more willing to serve not just in the role of a friend to assets, but almost at times as a priest confessor in a way that other Five Eyes intelligence agencies traditionally are not patient enough to do?

Ben Macintyre: Well, it’s very interesting, isn’t it? I mean, other intelligence agencies are somewhat fearful of a relationship between recruiter and the recruited. I mean, if it becomes too close, there’s a feeling that it might become compromised, that emotion will intrude, that all sorts of non-operational factors may become part of this relationship.

The British approach is different. There is a sense that once you have invested in recruiting an agent, that is a lifelong commitment, not just of support and so on, but of secrecy, that you have made a confidential, non-formal, but you’ve made a confidential oath to this person, and that lasts forever.

I mean, that is something that is gonna go on forever and ever. And I think it’s just a different sensibility, if you like. It doesn’t always work. I mean, the very personalized nature of agent recruitment in MI6 has also produced major problems over the years. I mean, you mentioned Kim Philby.

One of the reasons why he was able to survive as a KGB asset inside MI6 for so long was because he had this kind of lethal charm. He was able to establish these personal relationships with people who should have been able to see through him. They should have been able to work out what he was up to, but they were sort of blinded by this kind of, this relationship.

And it’s an, it’s a strange relationship, it has to be said, the relationship between a spy recruiter, an officer, and an agent, because while it may be one of friendship, it may develop into a close kind of harmony almost, and you’re right, you know, the, the spymaster becomes a confessor, a priest, a therapist, a doctor in this case.

They fulfill all sorts of roles. Nonetheless, the relationship is manipulative. It is manipulative by its very definition. MI6 and the CIA go abroad to recruit people to break the laws of their own country, to break the laws and to betray their own people, and to put themselves in extreme jeopardy.

And to do so for the sake of the, of one’s own country, for the sake of the UK and the USA. So, they are manipulating each other, and the spy, the, the recruit is also, has an agenda. Often they want something, money frequently, in this case a sort of cure for something that actually frankly couldn’t be cured.

But so, both sides underneath the surface of a kind of friendly relationship are actually using each other, and for me, that’s what makes this such a psychologically fascinating area really because it is already sort of, as it were, riven with contradictions. These are friendships, but they are very particular sorts of friendship.

Mike Feinberg: So, do you think that Ian and Vladimir, by the time that the latter ends up being exfiltrated from Iran, which we’ll get to in a second, do you think there is a genuine friendship there?

Do you think there are legitimate bonds, not just on a professional level, but on an emotional one?

Ben Macintyre: I do actually. I think this was a rather an exceptional relationship. I think by putting his life in McCready’s hands, by telling him the secret that he had told no one else. So, Vladimir Kuzichkin lived in a world of secrecy.

I mean, he was used to confidentiality and to keeping everything clandestine. But his own physical frailty, his ... And he was a 6’4, handsome, very macho Russian officer in a highly, you know, masculine organization. The KGB was all about, you know, physical male toughness. So, he had told no one this, this secret, and the fact that he had confided in McCready created a kind of bond of intimacy, I think, that lasted for the rest of Kuzichkin’s life.

I mean, they really remained friends. So, I think in some ways this relationship is exceptional. Another thing, another point to make is that it was forged in circumstances of incredible peril. Had Kuzichkin been caught by the KGB, he would’ve been bundled back to Moscow, where he would’ve been tortured and executed.

So, he was really risking his life. McCready was also risking a huge amount, and I think the fact that they were, they shared this danger together over the course of a year brought them really close together. It wasn’t that McCready was running Kuzichkin at arm’s length. He was having to meet him at brush contact sites and dead letter drops, and both of them were sharing extreme peril.

If the Iranians had caught them, they would’ve, you know, that would’ve been it. They would probably have ended up in prison and possibly have been executed.

Mike Feinberg: Yeah, just so people understand the stakes you mentioned a different spy for the West earlier, Penkovsky, and if I’m not confusing historical personages in my own mind, I believe he was caught by the Russians, executed in particularly brutal fashion, and the execution was actually filmed and shown to intelligence trainees early in their training as a cautionary tale for what would happen if you betrayed the Soviet Union.

Ben Macintyre: Yes. I mean, this is always been rumored. The actual film I’ve never seen, but I’ve been assured by several former Soviet intelligence officers that it exists. Penkovsky was a highly decorated general inside the Russian military intelligence who spied for both the CIA and MI6. He was jointly run, but he was caught, and his execution was, he was cremated alive, it is said, and that was filmed and shown to recruits, to KGB and GRU recruits as a kind of warning to say to them, you know, if you turn traitor, you may face this same fate.

The KGB were not gentle with people they regarded as traitors, and Kuzichkin and McCready would have been fully aware of this. It’s what gives the story its extraordinary poignancy, I think, is that in a way, Kuzichkin was doing this for love. He was trying to save his marriage. He adored his wife. He believed that this was a way that he was gonna find happiness for both of them.

I don’t want to give too much away, but in fact, it is that very love that leads in the end to the destruction of this case.

Mike Feinberg: We’re not gonna get into everything your book reveals, but, you know, initially Ian runs Vladimir as, you know, what in the professional world we would call a recruitment in place. He is working on behalf of the British, but he has not defected.

He has not signaled his new allegiance to anybody. He is essentially a mole in the KGB reporting to the Brits, and through some subterfuge and obfuscation, some of his reporting makes its way to the U.S. as well. But-

Ben Macintyre: It does. I mean, yeah, McCready issued him with a spy camera, a miniature Minox, and Kuzichkin proceeded to photograph every secret document inside the KGB station that he could lay his hands on, and there were thousands of them.

He would hand them over as undeveloped film at various brush contact sites around Tehran. McCready would then send it back to London in the diplomatic bag, where it was developed, translated, analyzed, and this was a vast amount of material. To give it some kind of context, I mean, Kuzichkin was really deputy head of the Rezidentura in Tehran, the largest KGB station in the Middle East.

So, he had access to pretty much everything, and he was able to blow apart spy rings, undercover networks, and above all, this extraordinary looming plot to set up the communists as the government in Iran. Now, this was operational intelligence of the highest quality, so good that it couldn’t be shared because the fear was if this was passed over wholesale to allies, most notably America, that this would expose the source.

And of course, this would happen with the Gordievsky case. The American interest in trying to find out who the source was would eventually blow that case. And so, they were very careful, the Brits. They handed over some of it, heavily disguised. They never conceded where it came from. But of course, that changed once Kuzichkin was out.

I me- and this is to give away some of the story, but once Kuzichkin was safe in the West, it was decided that they had to do something with this intelligence, that... And this is the old debate, as you know, Michael the whole debate about what do you do with intelligence? What’s it for? Do you gather it just to have a kind of incremental knowledge, to know a little bit more than your enemy, or do you actually weaponize it?

Do you take top grade information and use it to try to destroy your enemy, to try to achieve, as it were, a battlefield result with it? So, the people running MI6 in 1982 were staunch cold warriors. Their entire focus was defeating the Soviet Union. And that aim was shared with the head of the CIA with Bill Casey, who was himself an absolutely committed cold warrior.

As someone said of him, he didn’t see the world in black and white, he saw the world in red and white. And it was decided that they would have to tell the Americans. So, a special delegation arrived in Washington with all of Redwood’s intelligence, and it was laid before Casey, and a plan was outlined by a man called Chris Cohen, who would go on to become head of British intelligence of MI6.

And it was everything. It was the entire communist plot. I mean, the whole, the money trails, the, the safe houses, the names, the personnel. And Cohen said, we have to tell the Iranians. We have to stop this possible assault into Iran. And to put that into some kind of context, I mean, if the Soviet Union had gone ahead with this plan, if they had managed to set up a communist government, as they already had in Afghanistan, bear in mind, 1979, the Red Army had gone in to support the Soviet-backed communist government there.

If the same thing happened in Iran, the Soviets would control the Strait of Hormuz. They would control the oil trade. That would’ve been a complete game changer. And America had long feared that there might be just such an incursion, and in fact, the CIA, there are many warnings now declassified, sent to the government saying, we fear that a Soviet invasion is imminent.

And so, there was already a contingency plan in place. I mean, the Pentagon had framed up contingency plans if that occurred, and those were nuclear. They would have to resort to nuclear weapons. There were not enough troops and not enough weapons in theater to stop a Soviet invasion. And of course, if the Reagan administration had used nuclear weapons, the Soviets would’ve responded in kind.

So, there is a nuclear threat that hangs over this entire story. And so it was decided with Bill Casey to hand over everything to the Iranians. And bear in mind that there was no diplomatic relations between Washington and Tehran at this point. I mean, the situation was in deep freeze. If it had leaked that the CIA was holding secret meetings with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Pakistan, that would have been an enormous scandal.

I mean, that would have been, it would have removed Bill Casey. It might even have undermined Reagan himself. So, it was done in deadly secrecy. It was all handed over to the Iranians. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard said, thank you very much. Well, actually, they didn’t. They’re rather stony-faced way. They simply took the intelligence away, and within two months, we think roughly 10,000 Iranian communists were rounded up, of whom more than half were executed.

Mike Feinberg: Yeah, so let’s get into that. I was a little surprised, quite frankly, towards the end of your work where you talk about the regret that some of the MI6 officers had at the outcome of this operation, at just the sort of mass slaughter of Iranian communists. And you also tell some very moving stories of one of the ringleaders who is just horribly tortured at Evin Prison and, you know, forced denunciations on TV, the sort of Cold War script of, we have broken you down completely, and you will recite our lines for us.

But I was a little surprised that the orchestrators of this plot in the West showed remorse. What did they expect was going to happen exactly here?

Ben Macintyre: Well, this is a good question. So, at the time, there was an intense debate within MI6 about whether this was the right thing to do. There were voices in the Soviet department that said, if we hand over the names of all these communists, they’re all gonna be slaughtered.

They were overruled Because this was seen as a Cold War necessity, if you like. The argument went, if we don’t use this intelligence, we risk nuclear war, and the butcher’s bill from that is going to be incalculable. So, we’re dealing with two different unhappy outcomes, if you like. I think people like Bill Casey and Chris Cohen thought, well, if a few communist heads roll, that’s fine. That is the way it ought to be.

I think they had not anticipated the sheer scale of the slaughter. They did not anticipate show trials, lynch mobs, mass executions. There was another political reason for the regret, which was that two things really. One, it didn’t create a kind of happy, friendly back channel to Iran, which was one of the intentions.

The whole idea was that somehow if this intelligence is handed over to the Ayatollah, he will like us. We may be able to go back to the old days of the Shah, where the oil is still accessible to U.S. companies and so on. So, there was a hope that would happen. To give them some sort of credit, MI6 and the CIA didn’t at this stage realize the true nature of the Ayatollah’s regime.

It had not revealed itself in its full brutal colors. And the other regret was just practical really, because they ended up reinforcing the power of the Ayatollah. From this moment onwards, the Islamic regime tolerated no opposition at all. Anyone who raised a voice of criticism was a target, and that set a precedent that has continued ever since.

The slaughter that we saw taking place on the streets of Tehran not even a year ago now is straight out of this playbook. From this moment, the Ayatollah and his goons headed towards full theocratic despotism. So, the tyranny starts here. And what nobody knows and hasn’t known until this book came out is that the U.S. and Britain played a part in creating that.

The whole theory that my enemy’s enemy is my friend has been disproved many times over history. It is thoroughly disproved here, and in a way it echoes what happened in Afghanistan. There again, pouring money and guns, the CIA covert operation to arm the Mujahideen against the Soviet invaders was a Cold War victory.

They managed to force out the Soviets in 1989. It worked. On the other hand, it emboldened and helped to create an Islamist insurgency, the effect of which has been felt ever since. Al-Qaeda, ISIS, war again in Afghanistan. These are the legacies, the inadvertent legacies of what the West did. And inadvertent is the key point.

They did not intend to create the Islamic state, but that is what they helped to do.

Mike Feinberg: I want to pull on a thread you just mentioned, and you said your book is the first one to tell this story. And that’s certainly true from the perspective of Vladimir and Ian’s relationship and the role of the intelligence agencies.

But the mass slaughter of the Iranian Communist Party is a historical fact.

Ben Macintyre: It is.

Mike Feinberg: Why do you think, why do you think it is not as well known to the West as it should be? I mean, this is... Even if you don’t know the reasons why it happened, if you don’t know the role of Western intelligence agencies and the KGB’s defeat in this particular battle, you know, it was an event that really changed the Cold War dynamic in the Middle East.

Why hasn’t it gotten more attention from historians?

Ben Macintyre: I think from the point of view of sort of general understanding of what happened in Iran, the destruction of the Iranian Communist Party, the official Communist Party is bundled together with the Ayatollah’s repression of all opposition.

It’s simply seen as one story that he turns against anybody, and it’s true. You know, he slaughtered monarchists, nationalists, liberals, Marxist groups, Islamic Marxist groups. There were all sorts of different groups at that point competing for power. I mean, the Ayatollah was heading towards full despotism, but he didn’t have full control of the country.

So, I think from the Western point of view, the specific fate of the Iranian Communist Party was kind of lost, if you like, in a miasma of mass murder that took place. And the role played by Western intelligence in it was suppressed by all sides, actually. I mean, the Iranian regime is still very proud of the moment when the Ayatollah and his Iranian Revolutionary Guards turn against the communists.

It’s one of the foundation myths of the country. It’s the moment when the Ayatollah demonstrated that he was neither East nor West, that he was not prepared to tolerate capitalism, and he was not prepared to tolerate communism either. So, it’s a real statement of independence by the Iranian government.

And indeed, quite recent books have come out celebrating this moment. What none of them mention is the role played by Vladimir Kuzichkin and Western intelligence, because that is not something that Iran wishes to admit, that Western intelligence was at the root of this, as it were, glorious moment for the Iranian government.

MI6 and the CIA have not wished the story to come out for obvious reasons. It did not produce what they hoped it would in the longer run. It’s a story filled with bloodshed and so on. Although you can still, and there are people in MI6 who today who will say this, will say it was a victory.

It was a great unsung Cold War victory. But they didn’t want to tell the story publicly The Russians definitely don’t want this story out. I mean, it is a massive humiliation for the KGB. You know, this was ... they were thoroughly worsted over this. It, you know, half the diplomatic representation in Iran was thrown out.

It created a chasm between Moscow and Tehran that took a generation to mend. So, all sides were happy to keep this quiet because it’s a story that none of them particularly wanted told, which is why I think only a tiny handful of people in British and American intelligence actually ever knew about it.

I think you could count them really on, you know, 20 fingers. There were very few people who knew about it.

Mike Feinberg: Okay, so I wanna poke at a little bit how you came to this story, but I’m going to do so in a very circuitous manner. In preparing for this podcast, I perused my shelves, which have almost all of your other works, and I’m gonna put aside your first two and I’m gonna put aside The Prisoners of the Castle and The Siege.

The overwhelming majority of your books are about various intelligence skirmishes during World War II and during the Cold War. And I don’t mean this as a slight because I think they’re the best telling of it, but at least some of your early books, I’m thinking of Agent Zigzag, of Operation Mincemeat, and of Double Cross, were grand retellings with more nuance than previous ones of stories that were already somewhat in the public eye.

There was you know, the sort of mastermind, no pun intended when I say his real name, but the mastermind of the double cross system, JC Masterman, wrote his own account of the events. There was a film about Agent Zigzag, I think starring Christopher Plummer or Christopher Reeve.

Ben Macintyre: That’s right. Yeah.

Mike Feinberg: I ... Yeah.

Ben Macintyre: Yep.

Mike Feinberg: And, you know, those are stories that while they were not well known, they were in the public eye. And as you progressed in your career, you started writing about Cold War escapades and agents who are considerably less known to the public, even the portion of the public that is reading the Christopher Andrew monographs or the John le Carre novels.

And I’m just curious, and you don’t have to get into great detail on this, but did the success of the early works Sort of create, if not an incentive, a willingness of people who had been involved in this sort of world to talk to you in a more free-ranging way than they would’ve if this was your first work?

Ben Macintyre: Undoubtedly. I mean, I’ve been extraordinarily lucky that the people who serve now and/or have recently left or served in the past in these intelligence agencies are fascinated by their own history. So, they, in many cases, they have read some of the earlier books, and that has really helped because what I’ve tried to do with the earlier books is to take, you’re absolutely right, stories that are known or partially known, but to tell them in a different way, to tell them in a much more honest, I hope, and objective way because you’re absolutely right.

The post-war stories were told immediately after the war, but they were often told with a propaganda intent. They are told as kind of moral fables of black and white. Espionage doesn’t work that way. It’s much more complicated than that. It’s much more interesting than that, too. So, I think, I hope what happened was that sort of as, as it were, the intelligence community came to trust me a little bit, came to feel that I was gonna give them a decent, straight hearing, that I wasn’t gonna be a propagandist, but nor was I gonna be a knocker.

And so, I think they have had a kind of strange cumulative effect. And if, and I think it is probably true, you know, I am more breaking stories now from inside the intelligence service. I think that’s, I hope, because some members of the intelligence services trust me a little bit more. I mean, this new book is a very good example.

It was, as I say, almost completely unknown outside a very small handful of people. I mean, Bill Casey deliberately kept it off the books. Yet it does exist in British intelligence history really because it’s one of the cases that is taught to trainee spies. They are presented with the Redwood case because it has at its heart, as we’ve just discussed, an important ethical dilemma.

You know, what do you do with information like this? So, it’s a very useful thing. So, it sort of sits there. So, I first heard about it years ago, I mean, 10 years ago, when a former officer said, oh, you know, there’s this extraordinary story. In truth, I didn’t really believe it at the time. It just didn’t seem to me to be possible.

It just seemed totally implausible. But over time, I then met other officers and Ian McCready himself who just told me the full story, and it is absolutely it, you know, the mere fact that it’s not been told is also, in a way, what makes it so extraordinary, I think, is it’s one of the real hidden gems.

But yeah, I mean, I’ve been incredibly lucky in that respect.

Mike Feinberg: So, it’s funny, when I was still working in counterintelligence and recruiting assets myself, my organization, as well as all of our partner organizations, both within the United States and within the larger Five Eyes community, were absolutely paranoid about journalists and researchers finding out what we were doing, and I think, frankly, with good reason much of the time.

But one of the things that they told us that has always stuck with me is, you know, remember that a good journalist is gonna use the same methods of rapport building and elicitation that you are. The professions are not that different, and actually in the early years of the Cold War, you know, there were a lot of journalists who spied for both sides.

And I’m curious, when you’re talking to former intelligence officers and their assets, and you’re trying to draw out a story that they might be conflicted about relating, do you ever feel a certain kinship with the professions? I’ve never had the opportunity to ask somebody who writes about intelligence if they see the dynamic the same way we do, so I’m just curious what your impressions are.

Ben Macintyre: My first job was as a journalist. I am still a journalist. It, you know, I write books these days, and that takes up a lot more of my time than the journalism, but I was trained as a journalist. It’s what I do is sort of trying to find out what people are like and what their stories are. Intelligence people, spies, recruits, agents, officers, they all want to tell their story.

All human beings do. So, it is a fundamental interest. I do use similar methods to an intelligence officer. I’m rigorous about protecting identities if my sources want that. I’m more than happy to disguise people. And I think over the years people have discovered that I stick to my word. I don’t, you know, I don’t imperil national security.

I don’t tell stories that might put people either in jeopardy or in professional situations that are uncomfortable for them. So, and that is what journalists do, and it’s what intelligence officers do. I mean, MI6 in this story has been helpful in the sense that they were not actively unhelpful.

Does that make any sense? They didn’t-

Mike Feinberg: It does, yes. They didn’t try and throw up roadblocks.

Ben Macintyre: They could easily have done so. They could have said to their former officers, you may not talk to this man, Macintyre. You know, you’ll be... And they didn’t. I think because they have a realistic attitude towards their own history.

They know that stories, even nuanced stories like this, will come out. I mean, that I was gonna write it anyway. I did not show MI... There’s a sort of mad thing that goes around that I am somehow authorized by MI6 to write these books. I’m not at all. They do not read the manuscript. They never asked to read the manuscript.

I wouldn’t give them the manuscript if they did ask to see it. So, you know, we are at friendly arm’s length. Let’s put it that way. They’re ambivalent about this story in a way that they weren’t really about the Gordievsky story that, that I wrote earlier that you alluded to, The Spy and the Traitor.

That is an easier story for the intelligence services because he’s a pure ideological spy. You know, he’s on the right side of history right the way through. So, he’s a hero in MI6 and they, you know, they, I think they have a particular affection for that book because it sort of fits into an easy moral template for them.

This one is harder to fit. But I think it’s rather admirable that they are prepared not to impede it. That’s been very interesting.

Mike Feinberg: While I have you here, I wanna take full advantage of you and sort of widen the aperture of this interview a little bit, and I’m gonna end with you know, sort of an intelligence officer’s version of the Proust questionnaire.

Let’s — I’m just curious, what — I’ve got three questions, and the first two are, what do you think are the best novelistic and cinematic representations of this world? Not necessarily in the sense of what is the most entertaining story, but if people really wanted to understand the atmospherics of working in the intelligence world, who do you think are the best scribes and authors that are telling those stories or have told those stories?

Ben Macintyre: Well, isn’t it fascinating, Michael, that so many of our greatest novelists were themselves spies? And I’m talking about Britain here obviously, but you know-

Mike Feinberg: Yep, Graham Greene and yep…

Ben Macintyre: ... you know, I think it’s always sort of fascinating. Graham Greene, John Buchan, Ian Fleming-

Mike Feinberg: le Carre, of course, yeah.

Ben Macintyre: Somerset Maugham and le Carre. And so my answer is that. I mean, there is nobody who does it better, to coin a phrase than John le Carre. I mean, he was himself an intelligence officer in both MI5 and MI6. His capacity to pick apart the psychology of this particular world is unparalleled. I mean, nobody has that kind of incredibly intense focus.

I mean, he’s even created a new language to tell these stories that is adopted by the services themselves.

Mike Feinberg: Yeah. Lamplighters and scalphunters. Yeah.

Ben Macintyre: Words like mole and circus and lamplight, these are all things that le Carre invented, but they’re so close to the reality that the real people actually use them.

So, it’s, you know, that is an extraordinary tribute. So, I would say on the page, le Carre is still the king really, and I owe him a particular debt, in fact. We were friends. He was always a huge support and very encouraging, and very flattering really. I mean, he often, he would occasionally say lovely things.

He’s like, you know, y- my nonfiction books, I use some of the same techniques, some of the same things that he does in, in his novels, but of course, mine are real and his are invented, but his are also real in some ways and mine are novelistic in the sense that I use some of those techniques, but I never make anything up.

So, I owe him a huge debt, so he’s the main one. On the screen, well, there are so many fun screen representations, but I, and I use the word fun advisedly because these are always entertainments. Then it, you can’t really use the screen to go deep into what intelligence is really like because as you know. It often involves long periods of not doing anything or studying bits of paper.

I mean, if you really did a, a film about that, it would be tremendously boring.

Mike Feinberg: It would be an individual sitting in a hotel room-

Absolutely ...

listening to a speaker that is silent for 23 hours and 45 minutes every day.

Ben Macintyre: Right. Right, and nothing happening.

Mike Feinberg: Yeah.

Ben Macintyre: Or looking out of the curtain-

Mike Feinberg: Yeah

Ben Macintyre: ... once every couple... You know, it’s ... So the reality of intelligence is different, and that’s why writing about it is such fun. But I mean, I’m a particular fan, because it just makes me hoot, of Slow Horses. I don’t know if,

Mike Feinberg: Yes ...

Ben Macintyre: Your listeners know that wonderful British series. Because of course it’s complete fantasy.

There is no such unit. I mean, this is ... Slow Horses is supposedly the group of sort of hopeless MI5 officers who are sort of put out to grass in a separate section, as if any organization would actually do that. But it’s wonderfully funny, and it does capture some of the sort of strange, slightly twisted human material that often goes into these stories.

So that’s ... On screen, those are the ones I love.

Mike Feinberg: And it, you know, it’s funny. I realize I’m gonna be, you know, banished from the kingdom by many people for saying this, but I think the star of Slow Horses, Gary Oldman, actually did the best cinematic portrayal of George Smiley of the three-

Ben Macintyre: I agree.

Mike Feinberg: ... that there were. I know the estate of Alec Guinness is going to come for my blood for saying that.

Ben Macintyre: Well, possibly not. I mean, the, you know, I agree with you. I think Oldman as Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was wonderful because they also captured some of that kind of very old-fashioned British Bakelite and brown Windsor suit, all slightly dowdy kind of post-war world, and it’s brilliant.

But I have great hopes for the new one for Matthew Macfadyen as Smiley. They’ve just released the first stills from that, and that he is brilliant. I think he’s absolutely superb actor, Matthew. And he was actually in the adaptation of one of, one of my books as well, and he played it, he played the part brilliantly in Operation Mincemeat.

So, I have great hopes for that.

Mike Feinberg: And I’d be remiss just because I’m friendly with him if I didn’t note that John le Carre’s son, Nick Harkaway, has actually continued the Smiley universe, I was fortunate enough to read his forthcoming novel about George Smiley in galleys a couple weeks ago, and he does an admirable job of carrying on the story and the characters.

Ben Macintyre: He really does. I mean, I know Nick as well, and he’s, I mean, quite apart from the fact that I know him, he, you know, he has done a really brilliant work of, like what’s the word? Echo. There are echoes. There are, you know, he does it very well, but he’s brought his own voice to it, too. I mean, it’s a very impressive job he’s done.

Mike Feinberg: With my last question for you, I’m just curious, and I’m not asking you to give anything away about what your next project is gonna be or anything along those lines. I’m just curious, as somebody who inhabited this world from a journalist’s and historian’s perspective, what do you think is the best intelligence caper or the most interesting character that has not yet been covered in a sort of narrative history?

What would you as a reader hope to see someone do?

Ben Macintyre: I am convinced that within Putin’s circle, there is a human intelligence source who is passing information to the West. It’s pretty clear that in the run-up to the Ukraine invasion, yes, the CIA was able to say what was gonna happen in more or less in real time, and much of that was derived from signals intelligence.

But some of it was clearly a human being, a very brave human being inside that regime somewhere, and Putin knows it, too. So that’s the story I’d love to write. I don’t know who that person is. We may never know who that person is, but I am absolutely convinced that person exists, and maybe one day we’ll find out who they were.

That’s the untold story of our own times, I think, that will be absolutely fascinating to hear. But there are many others from the past, actually, that haven’t really been given full treatment or touched on but not really, you know, properly pulled apart. So, for my purposes what works is when there is a combination of declassified material, archival material that was once secret that is released, and living witnesses.

You know, having people who were there at the time is absolute gold dust to me. You know? So, I am able to describe, you know, the relationship between McCready and Kuzichkin in Redwood because I, you know, I have an eyewitness who was there who’s able to tell me it. So, my books are becoming more modern in the sense that you know, I need these living witnesses to make them really sing.

So yeah, I mean, who knows? I would love to do something that is about contemporary spycraft.

Mike Feinberg: We’ll leave it there, and perhaps we have some listeners retired from the community who will someday give you a ring and put you onto a contemporary story. Ben Macintyre, thank you again for joining us on the Lawfare Podcast, and best of luck with the rest of the book tour.

Ben Macintyre: Thank you so much. It’s been a great pleasure.

Mike Feinberg: The Lawfare Podcast is produced by the Lawfare Institute. If you wanna support the show and listen ad-free, you can become a Lawfare material supporter at lawfaremedia.org/support. Supporters also get access to special events and other bonus content we don’t share anywhere else. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review us wherever you listen.

It really does help. And be sure to check out our other shows, including Rational Security, Allies, The Aftermath, and Escalation, our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine. You can also find all of our written work at lawfaremedia.org. The podcast is edited by Jen Patja with audio engineering by Goat Rodeo.

Our theme song is from Alibi Music. And as always, thanks for listening.