{ "archive_path": "archive/1788896722.067693", "base_url": "www.the-independent.com/b3045983.html", "basename": "b3045983.html", "bookmarked_date": "2026-09-08 19:45", "canonical": { "archive_org_path": "https://web.archive.org/web/www.the-independent.com/b3045983.html", "dom_path": "output.html", "favicon_path": "favicon.ico", "git_path": "git/", "google_favicon_path": "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=www.the-independent.com", "headers_path": "headers.json", "htmltotext_path": "htmltotext.txt", "index_path": "index.html", "media_path": "media/", "mercury_path": "mercury/content.html", "pdf_path": "output.pdf", "readability_path": "readability/content.html", "screenshot_path": "screenshot.png", "singlefile_path": "singlefile.html", "warc_path": "warc/", "wget_path": "www.the-independent.com/b3045983.html" }, "domain": "www.the-independent.com", "extension": "html", "hash": "1RF20X5X2XYZ6BXR5NWR", "history": { "archive_org": [], "dom": [], "favicon": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "120", "--output", "favicon.ico", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=www.the-independent.com" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-11T16:33:05.285190+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "favicon.ico", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788896722.067693", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-11T16:33:04.810830+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "git": [], "headers": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--head", "--max-time", "120", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.the-independent.com/b3045983.html" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-11T16:33:05.865832+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "headers.json", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788896722.067693", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-11T16:33:05.297311+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "htmltotext": [], "media": [], "mercury": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/@postlight/parser/cli.js", "https://www.the-independent.com/b3045983.html", "--format=text" ], "cmd_version": "1.0.0", "end_ts": "2026-09-11T16:33:17.726092+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "ArchiveError: Mercury was not able to get article text from the URL", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788896722.067693", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-11T16:33:16.408301+00:00", "status": "failed" } ], "pdf": [], "readability": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/readability-extractor/readability-extractor", "/tmp/tmp0305eoll", "https://www.the-independent.com/b3045983.html" ], "cmd_version": "0.0.11", "end_ts": "2026-09-11T16:33:16.394616+00:00", "index_texts": [ "On a hot autumn evening in Tehran in 1981, two spies sat drinking vodka in a small white-tiled bathroom. One, Ian McCredie, was British; the other, Vladimir Kuzichkin, was a KGB major, more than six feet four inches tall and so broad that the wicker laundry basket beneath him creaked. The cold taps ran into the bath and basin, while a radio played to mask their voices from Iranian listening devices. If they were overheard, both men risked arrest, torture and perhaps execution.The Russian had already offered to betray the KGB, and possessed a secret of potentially enormous value. It appeared that Soviet-backed communists were preparing for the possibility of seizing power in Iran and inviting in the Red Army, giving Moscow access to the country\u2019s oilfields and the ports on the Persian Gulf. Kuzichkin revealed what he wanted in exchange; he believed Western medicine could cure something that was destroying his marriage \u2013 erectile dysfunction.Ben Macintyre\u2019s terrific new book, Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War\u2019s Most Extraordinary Spy, begins here, with a scene that dismantles the idea that history is shaped only by grand strategy, ideology and powerful states.\u201cI was first told about it ten years ago, and I didn\u2019t believe it,\u201d Macintyre tells me. \u201cI love this story. One man\u2019s very private, very secret problem, and it can be a hinge of history.\u201dKuzichkin\u2019s vulnerability had roots far deeper than his unhappy sex life. Born in Moscow in 1947, he was raised as the son of Andrei Kuzichkin, a violent, alcoholic and embittered KGB officer. At 22, he discovered that Andrei was not his biological father. His real father was Georgi Larkin, a construction engineer of Irish ancestry who had died in Siberia before Vladimir could meet him. The revelation fractured his sense of identity, but also offered the possibility that he could become somebody else.He joined the Communist Party and married Galina Kokosova, a diminutive, secretly religious young woman whom he adored. After university, he entered the KGB and was eventually posted to Iran, where revolution had swept away the Shah and replaced his regime with the Islamic Republic of Ayatollah Khomeini. The country became a crucible of violence, conspiracy and espionage, as Islamists, nationalists and Marxists fought to determine its future while Iran was also at war with Iraq.Kuzichkin served under diplomatic cover as a vice-consul, but his real work included liaison with the Tudeh, Iran\u2019s communist party. The Tudeh received Soviet money and direction, and had constructed a clandestine network extending into the armed forces. With the USSR already occupying neighbouring Afghanistan, Western governments feared that a communist coup in Tehran could bring Soviet forces to the Gulf and, in the worst scenario, set the superpowers on a path towards nuclear confrontation.Vladimir Kuzichkin with the McCredies (McCredie Family Archives)\u201cFrom every point of view, this was a genuine threat. A real fear,\u201d Macintyre says.By the time he approached the British, Kuzichkin had become disgusted by Soviet corruption and the KGB\u2019s manipulation of Iranian politics. But Macintyre does not turn him into a spotless ideological dissident. His motives were political, psychological and painfully physical.He was drinking heavily, feared losing Galina and had developed an almost mystical belief that Western doctors possessed a pill denied to Soviet medicine. If MI6 could restore his potency, he imagined, it might restore his marriage too.His first approach was appropriately confused. Kuzichkin walked into the British embassy and announced to the diplomat Nicholas Barrington: \u201cI am KGB. I wish to defect to UK.\u201d He had selected Barrington because the KGB mistakenly believed the flamboyant, impeccably dressed envoy must be MI6\u2019s man in Tehran. But Barrington was not a spy at all. The offer was passed instead to McCredie, a young intelligence officer working under diplomatic cover, who had to decide whether this implausibly valuable Russian was genuine, a KGB \u201cdangle\u201d, or bait in an Iranian trap.MI6 gave Kuzichkin the codename REDWOOD, inspired by his immense height. McCredie concealed him beneath a blanket in the back of a Land Rover to bring him into the British compound, where the bathroom became their improvised safe house. MI6 supplied pills \u2013 which were nothing more than vitamin tablets as this was a pre-viagra era \u2013 and an elderly Minox camera. Kuzichkin would then return exposed film in cigarette packets during fleeting \u201cbrush contacts\u201d. Every encounter risked detection by the KGB or Iran\u2019s competing security organisations.\u201cMcCredie is an extraordinary figure,\u201d Macintyre says. \u201cYou think you\u2019re getting to know him, and then you\u2019re not sure that you know him at all. Clearly this operation was the most important part of his life, and his relationship with Kuzichkin was the defining relationship of his life. The dangers he was under were absolutely terrifying \u2013 if he had been caught\u2026 The stakes were very high.\u201dVladimir Kuzichkin and Galina at the National Botanical Gardens, Tehran (Galina Kokosova Archives)That is partly because REDWOOD demonstrates a central truth of agent-running: spies are recruited through human needs, which seldom fit the tidy acronym of money, ideology, coercion and ego, often known as MICE. Kuzichkin wanted to challenge a system he had come to despise, but also to save his marriage to the woman he loved. His courage was inseparable from shame, loneliness and fear.He began supplying information about KGB personnel, secret communications, Soviet operations and the Tudeh underground. The material was extraordinarily valuable, but it also posed an increasingly dark question: who would ultimately use it, and to what end? As the operation moves towards its most dangerous phase, Macintyre transforms a tale of brilliant tradecraft into a moral inquiry. To reveal the outcome would be a plot spoiler, but the legacy of the operation remains fiercely disputed.\u201cThere is still some ambivalence about the story,\u201d Macintyre says. \u201cSome say that it was totally justified, the more gung-ho brigade. Others say that the butcher\u2019s bill was too high. But you have to remember that this wasn\u2019t MI6 acting rogue. It was ultimately a political decision.\u201dInterestingly, the service made no attempt to obstruct his research. \u201cMI6\u2019s attitude to secrecy is changing,\u201d he says. \u201cI think it\u2019s much more realistic these days. But nobody wants to be the next Tomlinson\u201d \u2013 a reference to former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson, whose disclosures led to prosecution and years of legal conflict.The remark points to one of Redwood\u2019s most unsettling themes. Intelligence operations do not end when the secret has been obtained or a case officially closed. Information develops an afterlife, passing into other hands and colliding with calculations its source may never have anticipated. A tactical triumph can become a strategic disaster; the enemy of an enemy may prove still more dangerous.(Viking)That ambiguity makes a story from the 1980s feel disconcertingly current. The apparatus of espionage has been transformed by satellites, cyberwarfare and mass interception, yet Macintyre believes human intelligence \u2013 Humint \u2013 has become more valuable today rather than less.\u201cThe reality is that espionage is more important than it has ever been,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s been this feeling that cyber will take over, and that espionage is now basically all about interception. But Humint is now more important than ever. Sigint is very easy to corrupt. We are going back to a more analogue way, a more old-fashioned way.\u201dSignals intelligence may capture what an organisation is saying, but a human source can reveal whether its leaders believe it, whether subordinates are merely supplying the answers demanded of them, or whether an entire intelligence apparatus is lying to itself. Macintyre sees Vladimir Putin\u2019s assault on Ukraine as the supreme modern example.\u201cThe biggest intelligence mistake was Putin invading Ukraine,\u201d he says. \u201cHe was told by the FSB that he could almost walk in.\u201dRussia has also revived the \u201cillegal\u201d, an intelligence officer living under a false civilian identity without diplomatic cover. \u201cThere are spies among us, and there are illegals all over the place,\u201d Macintyre says. \u201cThis is something straight out of the Cold War playbook. There are more illegals operating in the West than during the time of the Soviet Union.\u201dLike the best of Macintyre\u2019s books, Redwood is less concerned with the machinery of espionage than with the unruly people caught inside it. States may devise codenames, doctrines and clandestine networks, but secrets are carried by vulnerable and messy human beings. The most sophisticated intelligence system can still turn upon love, vanity, terror or humiliation \u2013 and the course of history upon a whispered bargain in a Tehran bathroom.Redwood is published 10 September. Ben Macintyre will be live on stage at the How To Academy on Tuesday 8 September, 7:30pm \u2013 8:45pm, at the Emmanuel Centre, Marsham St, London, SW1P 3DW." ], "output": "readability", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788896722.067693", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-11T16:33:14.553302+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "screenshot": [], "singlefile": [], "title": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "120", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.the-independent.com/b3045983.html" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-11T16:33:14.545717+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "The spy who betrayed his country for \u2018Viagra\u2019 | The Independent", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788896722.067693", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-11T16:33:14.515935+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "wget": [ { "cmd": [ "wget", "--no-verbose", "--adjust-extension", "--convert-links", "--force-directories", "--backup-converted", "--span-hosts", "--no-parent", "-e", "robots=off", "--timeout=120", "--restrict-file-names=windows", "--warc-file=/data/archive/1788896722.067693/warc/1789144385", "--page-requisites", "--user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) wget/GNU Wget 1.21.3", "--compression=auto", "https://www.the-independent.com/b3045983.html" ], "cmd_version": "GNU Wget 1.21.3", "end_ts": "2026-09-11T16:33:14.503715+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "www.the-independent.com/b3045983.html", "pwd": "/data/archive/1788896722.067693", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-11T16:33:05.875259+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ] }, "icons": null, "is_archived": true, "is_static": false, "latest": { "archive_org": null, "dom": null, "favicon": "favicon.ico", "git": null, "media": null, "pdf": null, "screenshot": null, "singlefile": null, "title": "The spy who betrayed his country for \u2018Viagra\u2019 | The Independent", "warc": null, "wget": "www.the-independent.com/b3045983.html" }, "link_dir": "/data/archive/1788896722.067693", "newest_archive_date": "2026-09-11T16:33:16.408301+00:00", "num_failures": 1, "num_outputs": 5, "oldest_archive_date": "2026-09-11T16:33:04.810830+00:00", "path": "/b3045983.html", "schema": "Link", "scheme": "https", "snapshot_id": "7bdf542d-555d-40a5-b4c7-83db631f74d8", "sources": [ "/data/sources/1788896722-import.txt" ], "tags": ",pool,drudge,war-wiki", "tags_str": "pool,drudge,war-wiki", "timestamp": "1788896722.067693", "title": "The spy who betrayed his country for \u2018Viagra\u2019 | The Independent", "updated": "2026-09-11T16:33:04.810432+00:00", "updated_date": "2026-09-11 16:33", "url": "https://www.the-independent.com/b3045983.html" }