194. The KGB in Iran: Appeasing the Ayatollah with Ben Macintyre (Ep 2)

21:03David:bit about how he contacted the Brits generally. I mean, how easy was it for them to make emergency contacts or any contacts? So in the nine or 10 months that Redwood is running actively in Tehran, he and McCready have developed a system of contacts and communications. They are both, bear in mind, trained professional intelligence officers. They know what they're doing. And interestingly enough, long before they kind of knew each other, they had scoped out the same bits of Tehran to try and find dead drop sites and contact places. And because these things are hard to find in a crowded city, somewhere where you can have a brush contact with someone, pass on information without being overseen.

21:45And McCready was amazed. He said, you know, some of the things, places I'd identified had also been identified by Kozicin. He said, oh, yeah, I know that corner. I know what you're, I know where we're going to do that. And as I said before, in the last episode, Kozicin had the inestimable advantage of having the impulse feed to his car. So the impulse feed was the interception system that the Soviets had to pick up Iranian surveillance. So they could really tell their officers and their agents when they were being followed. So Kozitskin relied heavily on that. When he was going to a brush contact with McCready, he would be listening in on his own radio in his car to check whether he was being followed or not.

22:24What he didn't know was that the Iranians had rumbled this system too and were periodically turning off their car radios so that they could follow unseen. And that will play a part in Kozitskin's escape. So they had this system of meeting every fortnight or so. McCready would give Kozitskin reels of film. He'd already issued him with a little Minox camera, the great spy camera, for him to take photographs of documents. he'd give him five or six rolls of fresh film mccready would hand over the undeveloped film of what he'd i mean this is incredibly dangerous i mean i can't stress how much you know kazichkin is going into the office pretending to be the consul actually working in the kgb resident when everyone else goes off for lunch he stays there with his minox camera and is photographing everything he can lay his hands on he doesn't even know what he's handing over he's just going through the files.

23:20McCready has no time to develop this stuff. It's all going back in the diplomatic bag to London. So the Redwood Trove is almost overwhelming for P5. P5 is the Soviet Eastern European desk in MI6 headquarters. They're getting this vast amount of material. They can hardly cope with how much is coming through. It's all got to be translated. It's all got to be analyzed. It's all got to be worked out, whether it's operational or non-operational intelligence. Does it get used? Who does it get shared with? Is it passed on to Whitehall? The number of people privy to the Redwood case was tiny. I mean, it was really only ever about half a dozen people inside MI6.

23:58Top voices in the Foreign Office were aware of it. Obviously, it had to be signed off at various levels. But the level of secrecy was extraordinary. And yet they were having to deal with a huge amount of stuff that was coming in. And over the whole of this is the need for an emergency signal because they know that the clock is ticking right from the beginning. Because it's going to make it clear from the top that he's not going to do this forever. And it becomes clear he's not going to go back to Moscow. So they know they're going to have to get him out at some point. And then this crisis happens in his life.

24:30And he contacts and says, I've got to get out. You've got to activate this system. You've got to get me out. And two things happen very quickly. One is that they have to get authorization for an exfiltration. I mean, it's often thought that somehow MI6 operates independently of the government. It doesn't. Oh, no. It really doesn't. So they have to make a submission to the authorities. They have to get authority to do this. And the foreign secretary at this point is Francis Pym. The Falklands War is raging, by the way. It's at its height. So MI6 is not really focused on this issue. And the first thing that Francis Pym says is, OK, we can get him out.

25:09But you, Ian McCready, you can't go. Because I think he clearly calculated that the diplomatic fallout from having an MI6 officer intercepted at the border would be just too great. So if Kozichkin was going to do this, okay, but he'd have to go out pretending to be a British diplomat on his own. And so that is what they tried to do.

25:30Gordon:And I think we should say there's an incredible amount of detail in your book about this exfiltration, the tradecraft behind it, the ins and outs of how it all happens. We don't want to spoil it here. Read the book to get those details. Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about the incredible impact that Redwood has after he escapes from Iran.

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27:12David:Welcome back. So we left with Redwood on his way out. Ben, we're not going to go through all the amazing details you've unearthed about this story of the exfiltration, which is so dramatic. That's all in the book. We definitely want people to go buy that book and get into that kind of granular detail about it. But it is fair to say it doesn't go entirely according to plan, does it? Well, exfiltrations almost never do go according to plan. They're such dicey things. I mean, you know, any number of variables. So, yeah, I mean, we can leave Redwood. He's on the road to Tehran. He doesn't know whether Galina, his wife, and he's doing this for her, by the way.

27:55You know, he's trying to save his marriage and yet it's all gone wrong for him. We can leave him here. He's on his way to the Turkish border. He doesn't know it. He's being tailed by Iranian surveillance.

28:08David:He's on his own as well. He's on his own. He's got no backup. He hasn't got McCready with him, who is clearly a British diplomat, you know, who can do all the talking. He's got to bluff his way with a fake passport and fake stamps through one of the most heavily militarized borders in the world. And Galina's not with him. No. He's had to leave Galina behind. She has said she's not coming. Wow. He doesn't know if she's going to turn him into the KGB. You know, so he's got that ticking in his head, too. Has she told him? You know, she, in fact, had gone back to Moscow to see her mother, who was ill.

28:46because it didn't know if she just was walking into the lube bianca to turn him over i mean so

28:51David:he's got he's being chased by everybody and it is an amazing story in the book uh you know getting picked up by revolutionary guards at the border all these amazing things happen i mean you can't quite believe he's going to make it spoiler alert to some extent he does well because i would never be able to tell this story if he hadn't if he had made it so i think we i think we're not giving too much away from the book to say he does. And he's met on the other side by an MI-16. But what's so interesting about this story is that's not the end. And it's actually his importance after he gets out, which is so interesting and so, I think, important about this case.

29:32Yeah. In some ways, getting out is the beginning of this story. I mean, there are two types. I mean, Broadly speaking, there are two types of intelligence. There is operational intelligence and there's, as it were, political non-operational intelligence. Now, you can share non-operational intelligence as widely as you want to as an intelligence agency. You can decide who your customers are and which allies you're going to share it with. I mean, often it's very, very important, but it doesn't tend to be operational intelligence, the nuts and bolts, the stuff about whose agents are where and who's running who and who are the double agents.

30:06There's a trove of that stuff in Redwood. There are lots and lots of names. There are lots and lots of people that he has already identified. And that's operational intelligence that hasn't been shared with others. I mean, the Americans know or strongly suspect that MI6 has an agent inside Tehran because there are...

30:25Gordon:They haven't shared that. Obviously, the Brits have not shared his identity with the Americans. Have they shared the product up to this point? Bits and pieces. As you know, David, you know, there's this - I thought our two agencies shared everything. We know. We know that on both sides, they will share only what the other side needs to know. They'll be generous with the need to know, but they're not going to give away everything. So the Americans had worked out that they had somebody. as they did with Gordievsky. They'd worked out this stuff is too good not to have a high-level source. But deliberately or otherwise, MI6 had allowed the CIA to believe this source was in Moscow.

31:07They did not say where he was. They did not say who he was. They did not say which department he was in. They were very carefully covering their tracks, as is the convention. And both sides do this. You don't give away anything that's going to jeopardize him. Once Kozitsky is out, that reservation is off the books. And they are able finally, not just to start piecemeal handing out to different intelligence agencies, allied ones, the names of people that they know that Kozichkin has identified. They have this one huge secret that nobody knows outside MI6, which is the Communist Party plot. The fact that the Soviets were planning, by Kozichkin's account, to take over Iran.

31:54that the nightmare scenario that has been sort of sitting at the forefront of Cold War planning for decades is a reality. There's a sabotage plan in place by the KGB. There are gun stashes. There are stockpiles. There is a money trail. There are, you know, Kuzitskin is able to identify chapter and verse of a looming Soviet communist plot in Iran. And MI6 told the CIA. Chris Cohen, who was then head of security, he would go on to become head of MI6, was a kind of gung-ho, tough kind of cold warrior figure. And for him, and I've had this confirmed by numerous sources, you know, for him, this was operational intelligence of such importance that it had to be used.

32:45There's a big debate in intelligence, as you know, about, you know, what do you do with it? Is it just stuff that you gather so that you know a bit more than the opposition? Or do you use it? Do you use it as an offensive weapon against your rivals and your enemies? Do you make use of operational intelligence? Now, Kermit was in absolutely no doubt they had to tell the Americans and they had to stop this thing. This was a Cold War opportunity. So bear in mind at the same time as this is happening in Afghanistan, the CIA is pouring money and weapons to the Mujahideen to fight the Soviet Union. from Bill Casey, the head of the CIA, the CIA chief's point of view, this was just an extension of that battle.

33:23This was another opportunity to deal with the Soviet threat, to stop it in its tracks. So Cohen flew out to Washington, met with Bill Casey, brought with him trunk loads of photographic material to prove the state of the two-day plot. And Casey, it seems, said, right, we go for this. We have to tell the Iranians. We have to stop this. The only people able to do this are the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the Islamic government there. There's a secondary consideration here, which is not only if it works, are they going to be able to stymie this Soviet plot at birth? It might be a way to establish a conversation with the Iranians.

34:09this is the gold dust of of of it has this has been the holy grail of western diplomacy in the middle east for 50 years how do we talk to the iranians how do we get a purchase on these people how can we start a conversation this is very early on in that debate and here seemed to be a golden opportunity to curry favor with the ayatollah and his people we'll give them this kind of regime saving intelligence and they'll love us you know once again we'll be so grateful they'll be so grateful we're friends with the iranians we can reek i mean casey it seems mad now and naive but casey really believed that there would be a way to rekindle the oil relationship with iran that those oil fields that you know had been so heavily exploited under the shah that there would be a way of having a conversation and the islamic nature of the regime was secondary to the cold war prism through which they saw this problem.

35:06And one has to emphasize that because they were making a decision which in the parameters of the time was perfectly logical. It was, we've got to stop this. We've got to stop this communist coup from happening. Otherwise, we're going to lose the

35:21Gordon:Cold War. Is it your sense in looking at the story that a coup was actually imminent or would have happened? Or was this something that was on the shelf that could have been activated in the future? And so Casey and Kirwan are looking at this and saying, right, this is a potential asset down the road. Let's deny the Russians this asset. I think it was on the shelf, but I think it was half off the shelf too, actually. I mean, everybody in this story believed that it was imminent, that it was going to happen. Including Kuzichkin, presumably. Kozichkin believed it. McCready believed it. MI6 believed it.

35:59The CIA believed it. The Soviets believed it. And perhaps most importantly of all, the Tuday Party, you know, this communist organization within Iran also believed that this was what was going to happen. They had already established a military underground wing. They had access to weapons. They believed that destiny was on their side in that kind of in that way that communist thinking does. this was going to be the next revolution.

36:26David:So they're going to organise a summit meeting effectively in Islamabad, Pakistan, to pass on details. Yeah. I mean, it sounds extraordinary now, given the nature of our current relationship with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard and the Iranian regime, that something like this could have taken place. But again, one has to bear in mind that the Iranian regime had not solidified into the brutal, repressive, completely theocratic regime that it would become. It was all still kind of up for grabs. And so, yes, I mean, through the agency, they arranged a meeting. Islamabad seemed the logical place to do this.

37:06Interestingly, of course, recent negotiations between the West and Iran. The US were going to talk to the Iranians. Yeah, have also taken place in Islamabad. It's brokered by the Pakistani intelligence service, with which the CIA has very good relations because of what's happening with funding the Majahideen and so on. So the secret meeting, and here's the most extraordinary thing. They don't just hand over the intelligence. They produce Redwood. They fly Vladimir Kozichkin out to Islamabad to meet the representatives of the Iranian regime in person.

37:38Gordon:It's how you make it credible, right? It's how you make it credible. And he speaks perfect Farsi. So they fly him out. He's accompanied by two MI6 officers. They're shepherded into Pakistan intelligence headquarters. And they're waiting a delegation from Iran. Now, bear in mind that Pakistan's played a very good game at this point, as it often does in the Middle East. You know, it's talking to both sides. It has very good relations with the West. It's also talking to the Iranians. You know, it was one of the first countries in the region to support the Islamic Revolution. You know, they're brilliantly playing both sides.

38:10So it's all done under their auspices. and over the course of three days vladimir kozichkin describes what he knows about about this as he sees it looming trojan horse is the way he described it that there was that was all ready to go and he gives them absolute chapter and verse he explains where the communists are operating where the safe houses are the names the money trails the gun stashes everything And the Iranians say, thank you very much. Well, actually, they don't. They're a pretty stony face. They just sort of - They shove it into boxes. They shove it into boxes. They take it back. But the day they fly back, they contact, they get hold of Rafsanjani, the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, and say, we got a problem here.

38:59And the aftermath is brutal and spectacular. And bloody. and incredibly bloody. I mean, within a couple of months, thousands of members of the Iranian Communist Party are rounded up by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and hundreds, if not thousands of them are executed. I mean, it's very hard to know what the final butcher's bill is for this, but the ferocity with which the IRGC assaults the left, the communist left in Iran, is total and absolute. And it is the foundation stone in many ways of the theocratic regime. From that moment on, the Ayatollah and his thugs tolerate no opposition whatever.

39:48They're going for it. And they systematically begin to wipe out all opposite, I mean, leftist, nationalist, everything. It is an unbelievable bloodbath. We'll probably never know the full toll, but it's absolutely spectacular. And so in one way, you can read this as a highly successful Cold War operation. At a stroke, which I'm pretty sure is how Casey and Cohen read it, at a stroke, they have wiped out the Iranian Communist Party. The threat of this, you know, behemoth rolling across the border, that's not going to happen. That's finished. And so, you know, I think there was rejoicing in parts of Whitehall and the Pentagon and Langley when this came through.

40:33Great, we've done it. We've done it. What did not happen was an improvement of relations with Iran, because so far from currying favor with the Ayatollah, they saw this as yet more machination by the West. This is yet again the West meddling in our affairs. So if you read the official histories of the revolution, this is one of the foundation myths. This is the moment when the Ayatollah clamps down on the left. It's when he proves it's neither East nor West. It is a foundational myth and it appears everywhere. What they do not mention anywhere is that they got the intelligence from the West because that would undermine the independence, the brutal independence of the Iranian regime.

41:18So I don't want to admit - There's no upside to crediting.

41:21Gordon:There's no MI6. And so far from opening a cheerful conversation with Washington, it compounds the idea that all Washington wants to do is get their hands on our oil, which is kind of true. And that is also true today. But you can read this story in two ways. And in a way, that's why I find it so interesting. It is a Cold War triumph. You'll find people in MI6 today and in the CIA who will say, yeah, we did it. We did it. We stopped this secret threat. But the human toll is huge and it helps to create a monster. I was thinking about some other examples of intelligence sharing with hostile or sort of semi-hostile states.

42:03Gordon:I mean, there was counterterrorism cooperation with Assad's Syria. There's counterterrorism cooperation with Putin's Russia occasionally with the SVR and the FSB. There are rumors of even agency contacts with the Chinese over North Korea. And I think these kind of relationships can have a tendency to be quite transactional. There's a mutual benefit for sharing particular information, and they quite often don't translate into some kind of strategic partnership. And throughout the Cold War, we know there were back channels on both sides when it served the interests of both sides. But you're right, it doesn't translate into an overall relationship.

42:44David:I mean, this reminds me a little bit of when MI6 cooperated with Gaddafi's Libya.

42:48Gordon:Yeah.

42:49David:And they started handing over details of dissidents and, you know, got involved in rendition operations. And again, it was like, we're currying favor with the Libyans. You know, maybe we can kind of build up a good relationship with them. But there were moral complexities to such actions. And I think, I mean, even at the time with Redwood, some of the officers in MI6 seem to have worried about the kind of morality because of what, you know, You rightly call the butcher's bill of this.

43:15Gordon:Because everyone knew what was going to happen when that intelligence was passed to the Iranians. I don't know that they knew quite how ruthless and brutal and total would be the claim. You could tell. I mean, you wouldn't require an enormous amount of foresight to work out that they weren't going to be. These people were not going to be told, you're naughty little communists and we just don't do it again. They were going to, you know. And you're right. Even on P5, on the desk in MI6, there were voices, often women's voices, I have to say, raised saying there is a humanitarian aspect to this, if that's the right word.

43:48There is a moral aspect to this. We are sending these people to their deaths. But this was the Cold War. People die in wars. And the senior leadership of both the CIA and MI6 said, we're fighting proxy wars all over the world. What makes this one different? This is an opportunity to kill off the danger. And if that means some dead communists, well, you know, it was only later, I think, that the queasiness really sets in. I mean, there is a vigorous debate on the desk about whether or not Redwood should do it in the first place. But MI6 was not a democracy, as one of the officers said to me, you know, the bosses wanted it, it was going to happen.

44:26So it happened. It was afterwards that there was an uneasy feeling, as there was in Afghanistan, that we have backed people to fight the Soviets. And in so doing, we have created something or helped to create something terrible here. We know that from the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, spawn Al-Qaeda, spawn ISIS, spawn Osama bin Laden, 9-11. and the Afghan war. This is the outcome of unintended consequences. You know, you can't see the future. And in the parameters of the time, it was defensible. And it is still defended. I mean, McCready believes and others believe that this was ultimately the right thing to do.

45:11If a few lives were lost, that was nothing like as many lives that were going to be lost if the situation in Iran triggered nuclear conflict. You know, this was, if you're comparing, you know, butcher's bills. It's a possibility though, isn't it?

45:27Gordon:You're balancing a possibility against a reality. It's hard. It reminds me of the Merdegan line where he's, again, Iran decades later, justifying an Israeli assassination campaign and saying, we're killing to save lives. How did Redwood react to this? Because participating in that meeting in Islamabad, I assume he's a savvy guy. He understands a bit of how this is going to be used, but how does he reckon with what he did? Well, of all people, actually, Redwood had had sort of closest eyewitness evidence of what the Iranian Revolutionary Guard were capable of. You know, he'd lived through the revolution.

46:06He'd watched this sort of fledgling group, you know, beheading people in the streets. He really knew what they could do. He was a good soldier. You know, he did what he was told. He obediently set off there. in his later life it's one of the things that he that drove him to where he ended up he he he never forgave himself he believed that he had inadvertently he never blamed mi6 for this interestingly but he believed that he he wished he'd not done it he wished it hadn't he because of course it didn't create what they all wanted which was a kind of conversation with the iranians either it did it did he thought he might be contributing to world peace in the end what he

46:46David:But in the end, I mean, his own agents, people he'd run as agents are going to get killed. Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, the two-day party is rounded up. All of his contacts, he's given the names. I mean, he's given the safe houses. They're all wound up and lots of them end up in Evin prison and end up in front of firing squads. And as we said, I mean, I think the contemporary relevance of this story is so interesting because it is about the rise to power of a slightly more paranoid Iranian state and of the Revolutionary Guards as the kind of arm of the state to crush opposition. And what we've seen in the last few months even is them move even closer to the center of power.

47:26David:This was, you know, the Redwood case was an early stage in that. And if you like, we've seen, you know, following the killing of the Supreme Leader recently by the US and Israel, another step of them actually becoming the power center in Iran. Absolutely. It's interesting. You should mention Khamenei, who was killed in the first Israeli airstrike. I mean, he was among, at this point in 1982, he's among the hardliners. He's one of those who is saying, we've got to unleash the Iranian Revolutionary Guard on the two-day party. We've got to get rid of them. And paranoia is absolutely the right word, Gordon, because here was proof, written proof, that there was a fifth column.

48:03But, you know, it came from the left rather than from the imperialists. But, you know, it enabled the regime to say, we're under threat. There are internal traitors. There are external forces that are pushing them to treachery. We need to eradicate the lot because the future of the Islamic revolution is at stake here. So it really does become, in a way, the story that the regime tells to itself. And what struck me as so interesting was that as I was writing the book, I had to rewrite the final chapters because, you know, the main figures in the story that I wrote from 1982 are some of the main figures today.

48:39You know, they're some of the main targets. They were in their youth then. They were in their 20s and 30s. Now they're in their 80s or 90s. You know, they're a gerontocracy now. But they're the same people. And they've used this story internally to bolster their power.

48:53Gordon:The paranoia, you know, because I'd have to think all of these characters on the Iranian regime side in the early 80s already suspected the worst from today Iranian Marxists. But then to have Western intelligence services, who you as an Iranian who lived through 1953, you've lived through the CIA support for the Shah and Sivak. You see the Brits and the Americans as this kind of all seeing, all powerful entity. They come to you with information from a Soviet KGB officer that they've recruited. They've plopped him down in this chair in Islamabad. They've just given you hard evidence that all of your paranoia is true.

49:34Gordon:It cements the idea, doesn't it?

49:35David:They are all powerful and able to manipulate everything, doesn't it? Which is what they kind of continue to believe. Well, you can imagine. I mean, the first reaction to this trove was pure skepticism. What are the Americans and the Brits up to now? Are they feeding us false information? Are they deliberately setting us against the Soviets for their own ends? What is this? So internally within the Iranian regime, there was a huge debate about what to do, as there had been before in MI6, about what to do with this operational intelligence. Is it fake? Are we being sold a pup here? But it was the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who were the real hardliners.

50:11They said, there's no doubt about this. Oddly enough, the Iranian intelligence sources are quite open on this. I mean, for such a paranoid regime, you can access the debate that is going on inside the regime because they love this story. They don't love the Western part of it. They don't like the idea that MI6 and CIA are behind it. You don't find that in any of the books. but you do get the story of this was the great moment when the ayatollah the imam clamped down saving us from the enemy within that's so so ben as we come to a close i suppose we should

50:43David:just we won't give away too much about redwood himself and what happens to him i do notice he becomes an acupuncturist at one point in petersfield i mean but should we say what happens to his personal problem which drove so much of this i don't know how much yes i mean one of the main sources on this book was redwood's daughter um which would suggest a daughter born after daughter born after which would suggest his afterlife yes i mean he was he he was cured yeah the stresslessness of his latter life was part of it did he give up the booze he did not give up the booze. He did not give up the booze.

51:26And the booze took him in the end, I'm afraid. I mean, sad to say. The afterlife of defectors is never uniformly happy. You know, you arrive with these great secrets for a while, you're a celebrity and as time goes on and it doesn't often take very long, you're no longer the focus of attention. Kazichkin did manage to fashion for himself a happy life at times. You know, he developed a relationship. He did You know, he had a child. He became, as you say, the most successful acupuncturist in Western Superman. I mean, if you put that line in a novel, people would say, this is ridiculous.

52:05Gordon:I'm going to put it in one. I'll see if my editor takes it out. They would take it out immediately, David. They would. It's just so unlikely. Cut that. But, you know, he was plagued by his demons, the memories of what had happened, what he had done, and the booze. And so I think he never fully recovered. But it's not a tragic story. It's not. He, in some ways, he achieved what he wanted.

52:32David:And it is actually. I found the afterlife very interesting. And the details of that, we should say, again, are in Ben's excellent new book, Redwood, which I loved and which is out now. and we should say that we're also going to be talking to ben for club members a little bit about the writing of these and other books aren't we and which we can kind of delve in a bit more about how you know these remarkable stories get told so do join up we're going to talk about our also our personal experience and some of these issues as well so do join up that's how to sell people to join a club isn't it but ben we should say thank you very much for joining us and telling This is an amazing story.

53:13David:Thanks, Ben. It's been a huge pleasure. Thank you, guys. Thanks, Ben.

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