By New York Post (World News) | Created at 2026-09-19 18:15:37 | Updated at 2026-09-19 23:35:55
5 hours ago
In 1981, as Iran’s new government hunted down political opponents, a KGB officer slipped into a bathroom in the British Embassy compound in Tehran. Vladimir Kuzichkin, 6-foot-4 and broad-shouldered, sat on a wicker laundry basket that creaked beneath him. Across from him, MI6 officer Ian McCredie sat on the toilet.
McCredie poured the Russian another vodka. He left the faucets running and turned on a radio to drown out their conversation. If the Revolutionary Guards overheard them, “they would both be arrested, interrogated, imprisoned, and possibly executed, once the torture was completed,” writes British journalist Ben Macintyre in his new book, “Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy” (Crown), out now.
Kuzichkin had come with Soviet secrets. He also had a very personal and bizarre question for McCredie, though he was in no hurry to ask it.
A KGB major who handled contacts with Iran’s Soviet-aligned Tudeh Party, Kuzichkin described weapons caches, communist agents inside the Iranian military and a possible coup that might bring Soviet troops across the border. “The coup might happen tomorrow, next month, or never,” Macintyre writes. Kuzichkin knew about the preparations because “he was the linchpin of the conspiracy.”
To prove himself, Kuzichkin brought a Soviet Embassy directory and identified the spies hidden among its officials. “An hour and a half had passed with Kuzichkin barely pausing for breath,” Macintyre writes. “Gallons of water had swirled down the drains.”
Kuzichkin took another drink, leaned forward and placed a hand on McCredie’s knee. “I have big problem,” he said. “Will you help me?”
“I have no power in bedroom,” Kuzichkin explained. He believed Western medicine could cure his impotence.
“Nothing in McCredie’s life or MI6 training had prepared him for the challenge of handling a spy with erectile dysfunction,” Macintyre writes. McCredie promised to help, and Kuzichkin “almost crushed him in ‘a tremendous bear hug.’”
At their next meeting, McCredie gave him a letter from MI6’s chief medical officer, wrapped around the ink cartridge inside a ballpoint pen, and a bottle of red pills. Kuzichkin read the letter and swallowed two pills. They were vitamins with iron, which MI6 hoped might work as a placebo.
McCredie also handed over a camera for photographing KGB documents. Instead of a James Bond gadget, the technical branch had supplied “an elderly miniature Minox,” Macintyre writes.
Kuzichkin snorted. “We have these in the museum!”
In one week, he photographed 180 documents inside the Soviet Embassy. The British named him REDWOOD because of his height. Macintyre notes that nobody initially noticed the name’s other possible meanings: “‘RED’ (communist) and ‘WOOD’ (slang for an erection).”
By spring 1982, the strain was showing. McCredie concluded that Kuzichkin had told his wife about MI6 and panicked when she refused to defect with him. He demanded an immediate escape.
Kuzichkin had one more request. He wanted to be circumcised as soon as he reached Britain, certain it would solve his erectile dysfunction. MI6 had heard some odd asks from Soviet defectors over the years, but this was a new one. “Kuzichkin was the first spy in history to demand, as the price of defection, the removal of his foreskin,” Macintyre writes.
MI6 delivered on that promise, arranging for an army doctor to circumcise him at a military hospital in Aldershot in July 1982.
The UK intelligence agency also forged a British passport for one “Michael Guy Road,” a supposed diplomatic courier. McCredie packed British clothes to support the disguise, although one suit “would have split in half had Kuzichkin tried to wear it,” Macintyre writes.
Kuzichkin drove through the night toward Turkey, unaware that Iranian agents were following him. Exhausted, he pulled off the road and fell asleep among trees. His pursuers drove past. When he awoke, the border was still 180 miles away. He floored the accelerator.
At the crossing, he abandoned his BMW, put on a jacket and tie, and presented himself as a British diplomat. Four armed Revolutionary Guards stopped him. He claimed not to understand Persian, then nervously began explaining himself in fluent Persian.
Macintyre calls the exchange an “absurd and terrifying standoff.” Somehow Kuzichkin talked his way through it. The Guards even gave him a lift to the checkpoint. As Iranian agents searched for his car, “Michael Road” crossed into Turkey.
Kuzichkin’s escape gave MI6 a huge haul of Soviet secrets. British intelligence proposed sharing the names of Tudeh leaders, military contacts and KGB operatives with Iran. CIA Director William Casey backed the plan.
That meant cooperating with the government whose militants had recently held 52 Americans hostage. The CIA publicly condemned Iran while secretly handing its government intelligence. If that arrangement became public, Macintyre writes, “the scandal would be explosive.”
Whether President Ronald Reagan knew remains unclear.
In September 1982, Kuzichkin flew to Pakistan and briefed Iranian intelligence officers. Mass arrests, torture and televised confessions followed. Senior members of Tudeh’s military network were executed, and Iran expelled 18 Soviet officials. The operation damaged Moscow’s intelligence network in Iran, but also helped Khomeini consolidate power by crushing an organized opposition party.
In early 1983, Kuzichkin took a much-needed vacation at the Gazelle d’Or, a resort in Morocco. During his stay, he met Chantal van Santen, a 37-year-old French secretary, and they soon became intimate. His erectile dysfunction had somehow been cured. “Perhaps it was the stressless environment at the Gazelle d’Or, or the nightingales, or the surgery, or his first full inhalation of freedom,” writes Macintyre.
