The Cold War blind spots behind Iran’s rift with the West

Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy, Ben Macintyre, Viking, £25.

When Ben Macintyre was writing this book, he could not have foreseen that at the time of publication the United States would have been locked for almost seven months in a conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran that has destabilised the Middle East, disrupted global trade and shows no sign of ending. And yet the seeds of that conflict, and indeed of the troubled relations for the past 45 years between Iran and its enemies, proxies and sponsors, can be found laid out explicitly in Redwood. This gives the book an extraordinary topicality that enhances a story of espionage and tradecraft replete with danger and drama.

Macintyre, whose book on KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky (The Spy and the Traitor) is a model of its kind, has employed his knowledge (and contacts) skilfully in telling the less familiar story of Vladimir Kuzichkin, a KGB officer posted to Tehran in 1977, who was driven by disillusion, stress and personal trauma to defect to the United Kingdom. Kuzichkin’s contacts with the sole MI6 officer operating in Tehran, at a time when the Western intelligence presence in Iran was minimal, were fraught with danger, but he was successfully exfiltrated in 1982 (posing, improbably, as a British diplomat). Given the codename REDWOOD (based partly on his height), Kuzichkin provided a wealth of detailed information on KGB personnel, operations and structures, as well as on his own assignments in Iran (which included liaison with the Tudeh party, supported by Moscow).

Macintyre goes on to relate how, when this intelligence was shared with the CIA, the American and British governments, hoping in vain to open a friendly back channel to Tehran, took the controversial decision to pass on details of a potential communist coup, resulting in a crackdown on Tudeh sympathisers by the Revolutionary Guards. It is a compelling, if brutal, account of Cold War realpolitik, based on informed sources and containing much fascinating detail.

Kuzichkin’s posting to Tehran coincided with a particularly dramatic period in Iranian history and in the new Islamic Republic’s relations with the rest of the world, at a time of high Cold War tension that included fears of nuclear attack. He had a ringside seat as opposition to the Shah’s regime led to clashes between SAVAK officers and anti-government protestors outside the American and British embassies in 1978, and the virtual collapse of the KGB agent network in Iran. The parallels between Kuzichkin’s growing personal and professional anxieties and disillusion with KGB life, and the disintegration of the Shah’s regime, are striking. He watched the overthrow of that regime in January 1979 and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini at the head of an Islamist republic and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. He also experienced the Iranian hostage crisis that would undermine the presidency of Jimmy Carter, underpin the Ayatollah’s power, and ‘permanently poison diplomatic relations between Iran and the US’.

Kuzichkin found his professional duties increasingly difficult, as Khomeini, faced with increasing violence from rival militias, ordered a savage crackdown by his newly formed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. When young MI6 officer Ian McCredie arrived in Tehran in April 1981, he found ‘a city in violent flux, increasingly stripped of Western ways but not yet fully Islamized, a revolution in full flood but incomplete’. Six months later, he found himself dealing with a confused and anxious Kuzichkin determined to defect. As Macintyre acknowledges, McCredie’s memory and generous cooperation are essential to the story.

Yet in my view, the interest and significance of Redwood lies just as much in the bigger picture it reveals: in particular, in its striking depiction of how confirmation bias – the tendency to prefer information that accords with what we already believe – had a profound effect on the way in which Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union regarded Iran in the period leading up to the Iranian revolution in 1979, and then dealt with the Islamic regime thereafter. Governments and their intelligence agencies on all sides interpreted selectively the information they received and formulated their policies on the basis of past assumptions that they were reluctant to abandon or alter. That confirmation bias had an equally profound effect on the way in which Iranians – of all factions – regarded (and still regard) foreign countries, whether supportive or hostile. The intelligence supplied by Kuzichkin provides clear evidence of this; and confirmation bias remains clearly visible in the current Iranian conflict today.

The late Sir Nicholas Browne, a British diplomat who served in Iran, spelled out in his 1979 report on ‘British Policy in Iran 1974-1978’ the weaknesses in analyses of Iranian politics before the Islamic revolution – not just by his own government, but by other countries as well. They were all reluctant to abandon the image of the Shah as a ‘strong monarch presiding over a stable country’ until his downfall was inevitable. Browne also drew attention to the failure of British and other observers to understand the importance of Shia Islam in Iranian political life, and the extent to which opposition to the Shah’s corrupt and repressive regime was fuelled by religious fervour; and also the failure to pay sufficient attention to Iranian intellectual life and the increasing alienation of educated youth. Those shortcomings in analysis did not disappear with the Shah.

The Browne report, focusing on the failure to predict the revolution, provided ample evidence of confirmation bias; the intelligence supplied by REDWOOD offered further proof, whether in the detail he supplied of KGB structures, activities and personnel, or in the instructions he received from Moscow, both before the revolution and in the dramatic early years of the Khomeini regime. Proof of confirmation bias can be found in the persistence of the Iranians in believing MI6 to be the greatest intelligence threat to their interests; of the British in believing that historic links with Persia conferred special insights; of the Americans in their conviction that the Soviet Union intended to invade Iran and chose to interpret Kuzichkin’s information as confirmation; and of the Soviet authorities who ‘chose to interpret the Iranian Revolution as the precursor to a communist revolution’. Above all, it lies in the general failure to appreciate the underlying resilience of an Islamic regime that, despite its ruthless repression, commanded strong support from a population profoundly suspicious of foreign powers.

When the Americans and British passed on Kuzichkin’s intelligence about Soviet support for Tudeh activities, ‘The Islamic Republic saw the REDWOOD peace offering as just another example of Western meddling and pretended it had never happened’. Ben Macintyre says that the REDWOOD story can be seen as triumph or disaster, but surely it is neither; nor did it have a profound effect on events in, or relations with, Iran. But it is a story definitely worth reading, not just as an excellent espionage story but as an instructive cautionary tale.