Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War's Most Extraordinary Spy - Hardcover

MacIntyre, Ben

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593728122 ISBN 13: 9780593728123

Verlag: Crown Pub, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Spy and the Traitor comes the remarkable, untold story of how one spy thwarted a Soviet plot to take over Iran at the height of the Cold War—and changed the course of history.

1982. The height of political and religious turmoil in Tehran. The Iranian hostage crisis had concluded—the 52 Americans held captive for 444 days inside the U.S. embassy were finally free—and just three years earlier, Moscow had successfully invaded Afghanistan, propping up the communist government in Kabul. The battleground of the Cold War had swung to the Middle East, and the U.S. found itself at the precarious tipping point of a conflict with the Soviets that could erupt into violence any day. In the midst of this tension, the USSR was planning their next plot: stage a military coup against the Ayatollah Khomeini and take over Iran, tipping the balance of the war in Moscow’s favor.

Enter three spies: Howard Hart, a swashbuckling American adventurer and CIA station chief in Tehran; Ian McCredie, a recent Cambridge graduate and undercover British spy; and Vladimir Kuzichkin, a mysterious KGB officer disillusioned with communism, desperate for help, and towering at 6 feet 5 inches—codename Redwood.

On a quiet night in early 1981, in the shadows of a clandestine safehouse, Kuzichkin promised to betray his country if McCredie could find him a cure that Soviet medicine could not. Thus began a pivotal friendship between spies. In time, Kuzichkin exposed the Soviet coup in Iran, along with the names of communist plotters, details of their safehouses, and the source of their money and arms shipments. In the end, Redwood’s treachery led to a bloodbath: 10,000 suspected communists arrested, 1,000 of them executed, their leaders’ forced confessions televised. Together, Hart, McCredie, and Kuzichkin had prevented nuclear Armageddon—but left a calamity in their wake.

Drawing on never-before-seen material and a firsthand account from Ian McCredie himself, Redwood is a blazing tale of loyalty, manipulation, and the extraordinary global consequences of one double agent’s defection.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times (UK) and the bestselling author of Agent Sonya, The Spy and the Traitor, A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, Rogue Heroes, Prisoners of the Castle, and The Siege, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work.

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1

Elite Forces

At the age of twenty-­two, Vladimir Andreevich Kuzichkin discovered he was not who he thought he was.

Kuzichkin’s childhood was privileged, by Moscow standards. His father Andrei was a KGB officer, undistinguished and disgruntled, but enjoying the benefits that came from membership in the Soviet Union’s all-­powerful intelligence and security service. His mother, Elisabeta, was an office typist. Born in 1947, Vladimir was principally raised by his maternal grandmother, who spoiled him. Despite the privations of postwar Russia, the family had enough to eat, clothing coupons, and holidays in a state dacha. When Vladimir was seven, they moved into a three-­room apartment in a cooperative block in the Leningrad District, surrounded by a high fence to keep out the poor from the slums. An only child, little Volodya considered this a life of “luxury.”

But the family had a streak of violent unhappiness running through it, fueled by vodka. Andrei Kuzichkin was a vicious alcoholic. He beat Elisabeta on the weekend and whenever he drank during the week, which was usually. She suffered repeated miscarriages. This added to Andrei’s fury. He hit his son, too, until the boy grew big enough to defend himself. By the age of fourteen, Vladimir was already over six feet tall.

Intelligent and sensitive, Vladimir had hated his father for as long as he could remember. One summer in the dacha, he befriended a domesticated pig named Vasili, feeding the animal leftovers and teaching it to come when he whistled. At the end of the holiday Andrei sternly summoned Vladimir to the barn and insisted the boy watch as he killed his pet with a hatchet. Ten-­year-­old Volodya wept for a week, but not in front of his father. Like many abused children, fear and hatred brought complex secret feelings of guilt and self-­loathing. “What kind of a person am I that I detest the man I came from?” he wondered. Sometimes he imagined killing his father, with an axe.

The boy rebelled, insofar as that was possible in Soviet Russia of the 1960s. He ran with a gang of street toughs and got into fights. His height made him a target. To defy his father, he refused to join Komsomol, the communist youth league. He listened to bootleg pop music from Britain and America and aped the forbidden fashions of the capitalist West. He also discovered the songs of Vladimir Vysotsky, an unruly star of the new Moscow folk underground. With a cousin and two friends, he formed a rock band called The Brothers. At the age of eighteen, wearing flares and two-­inch home-­adapted Cuban heels, Vladimir Kuzichkin imagined himself as a gigantic Russian version of Cliff Richard or Paul McCartney. “We are going to be the Russian Beatles,” he declared. Andrei Kuzichkin said his son’s music was rubbish and that The Brothers would never amount to anything. He was right.

Vladimir Kuzichkin finished school with good grades, a reputation for fistfights, a taste for Western pop, a damaged soul, and no ambition. Called up for three years’ military service, he was sent to Hagenow in East Germany as a radio operator in a nuclear missile launching unit, the front line of the Cold War. “In the event of war,” he recalled, “the division’s task was to annihilate Hamburg with six tactical nuclear missiles” and then be obliterated in turn, in accordance with the logic of mutually assured destruction (MAD). The naïve young conscript was not overly concerned by his assigned role in nuclear Armageddon. He was very bored.

One morning, Kuzichkin was summoned to the commander’s office to take an urgent telephone call from his mother. “Your father is dead,” Elisabeta Kuzichkina said, her voice hoarse. “You must come home.” Granted two days’ compassionate leave, on the train to Moscow he wondered at his own lack of grief. He was unable to cry. His overwhelming feeling was not grief, but relief. “Now I don’t have to hate myself so much,” he reflected.

Opening the apartment front door, he found Andrei Kuzichkin seated at the table, very much alive, and drunk. The older man picked up his bottle without a word and retreated to the bedroom. Between sobs, Elisabeta confessed her lie.

Vladimir’s father was not Andrei Kuzichkin, but Georgi Alexandreevich Larkin, a tall, good-­looking construction engineer of Irish ancestry, hence his unusual surname. Elisabeta and Georgi met after the war, and she had become pregnant. They intended to marry. But then he was sent to Siberia to build a steel factory. Georgi urged her to come too. She refused. What would she do there? Moscow was the only world she knew. Larkin never returned from the east. For a few years Elisabeta struggled on as an unmarried working mother, while her mother cared for the child. Her sister was married to a KGB officer, who introduced her to his brother, also in the KGB. Andrei Kuzichkin was boozy and rough, but he had a good job. Andrei offered a future. He even reluctantly agreed to adopt her child.

And now Georgi Larkin, the only man she had ever loved, was dead from a heart attack on a bear-­hunting expedition in the Siberian wilderness. It was four hours before they discovered his body in the snow.

Vladimir Kuzichkin was baffled and furious. “How could she deceive me all these years?” he wondered. He ignored Andrei from that day on. And yet the discovery explained everything: the dislocation he had always felt; his hatred for the man who had pretended to be his father and beaten that untruth into him. More prosaically, it explained his height and coloring. To his friends, bandmates, and army comrades, he was still Kuzichkin, the lanky would-­be pop star, but inside, secretly, he was Larkin. The discovery of a real father, now invested with imaginary qualities Georgi had never possessed in life, awoke the possibility of making himself into someone else. So that is what he did.

To begin that transformation, he decided, he would need some higher education. Back at the Hagenow base, he plunged into the officers’ library and began reading ravenously. He joined the Communist Party (an unshakable requirement for anyone with ambition in Soviet Russia), but without much conviction. He had recited the mantras of Marxism from his earliest childhood, and believed them, along with everyone else. The discovery of his real father made him question everything he had grown up with, including communism. He did not share these heretical thoughts with anyone else. He barely admitted them to himself.

After three years in uniform, Kuzichkin applied to study at the Institute of Asian and African Countries in Moscow, a specialist university teaching Oriental and African languages. Mastery of a foreign tongue “raised the probability of future work abroad.” Reading down the list of language options, from Arabic to Zulu, he settled on Persian (or Farsi), the language of Iran. It sounded intriguing, and the course was undersubscribed. A model Soviet citizen with good academic grades and a clean military record, Kuzichkin was told to report to the Institute on September 1, 1970.

In addition to Iran’s language, culture, and history, the six-­year course included a substantial ideological component: Communist Party history, dialectical materialism, Marxism-­Leninism, philosophy, and political economy. Each student was required to learn an additional Western language: he chose English. If he was deemed suitable, the fourth year (1973–­1974) would be spent in Iran.

Located on Karl Marx Prospekt opposite the Kremlin, the Institute was controlled by the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown Pub
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593728122
• ISBN 13: 9780593728123
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: CROWN; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/; ; Avda. Diagonal 640 planta 4 A; Barcelona; Barcelona; 8017; Spanien