Ben Macintyre for Redwood

Ben Macintyre is the multimillion-copy bestselling author of books including The Siege, Colditz, The Spy and the Traitor, SAS: Rogue Heroes, Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat and A Spy Among Friends. His most recent book, The Siege offers the definitive history of the Iranian Embassy siege in London in 1980.

He is a columnist and Associate Editor at The Times, and has worked as the newspaper’s correspondent in New York, Paris and Washington.

Ben joins us this September to discuss Redwood, the remarkable, unknown Cold War story of how one spy saved the world from nuclear war.

The year is 1981. Tehran is in violent turmoil in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. The Soviets are planning to overthrow the Ayatollah’s fledgling Islamist regime. If they do so, one response from America – unknown to the public – would be to use nuclear weapons.

Redwood is the story of how at the height of the Cold War, one mysterious double agent, whose intelligence reached the highest levels of British and American governments, cracked open the KGB, revealed the Kremlin’s secret plot and prevented Armageddon.

‘Redwood’ was the MI6 codename for this unsung, hitherto unknown hero of the Cold War, a highly-trained six-foot-four Russian intelligence officer who chose to expose the KGB’s deepest secrets. For Kuzichkin had a problem, a sexual secret, one that if revealed, would turn his life upside-down, and in a desperate situation, he reached out to MI6 – believing it to have the only solution. Soon facing exposure, he then demanded that the British try to smuggle him out of Iran in a high-stakes escape plan.

This is the gripping tale of one man’s courage, and its extraordinary unintended consequences that still shape our world today. It’s about a moving friendship between spies on opposite sides of the global conflict; about marriage, loyalty, betrayal and sexual dysfunction; and about how decisions made in secret can have huge, long-term ramifications.

Drawing on never-before-seen material from archives in multiple countries, and interviews with the participants including officers from MI6 and MI5, the KGB and CIA, Redwood combines the shadowy world of the Spy and the Traitor with the action of SAS: Rogue Heroes. It lifts the lid on an unknown and highly significant Cold War victory, on the machinations of history's Great Game, and on how espionage really works. Without Redwood, our world would be very different – and might not exist at all.