From the New York Times bestselling author of The Spy and the Traitor comes the remarkable, untold story of how one spy thwarted a Soviet plot to take over Iran at the height of the Cold War—and changed the course of history.
1982. The height of political and religious turmoil in Tehran. The Iranian hostage crisis had concluded—the 52 Americans held captive for 444 days inside the U.S. embassy were finally free—and just three years earlier, Moscow had successfully invaded Afghanistan, propping up the communist government in Kabul. The battleground of the Cold War had swung to the Middle East, and the U.S. found itself at the precarious tipping point of a conflict with the Soviets that could erupt into violence any day. In the midst of this tension, the USSR was planning their next plot: stage a military coup against the Ayatollah Khomeini and take over Iran, tipping the balance of the war in Moscow’s favor.
Enter three spies: Howard Hart, a swashbuckling American adventurer and CIA station chief in Tehran; Ian McCredie, a recent Cambridge graduate and undercover British spy; and Vladimir Kuzichkin, a mysterious KGB officer disillusioned with communism, desperate for help, and towering at 6 feet 5 inches—codename Redwood.
On a quiet night in early 1981, in the shadows of a clandestine safehouse, Kuzichkin promised to betray his country if McCredie could find him a cure that Soviet medicine could not. Thus began a pivotal friendship between spies. In time, Kuzichkin exposed the Soviet coup in Iran, along with the names of communist plotters, details of their safehouses, and the source of their money and arms shipments. In the end, Redwood’s treachery led to a bloodbath: 10,000 suspected communists arrested, 1,000 of them executed, their leaders’ forced confessions televised. Together, Hart, McCredie, and Kuzichkin had prevented nuclear Armageddon—but left a calamity in their wake.
Drawing on never-before-seen material and a firsthand account from Ian McCredie himself, Redwood is a blazing tale of loyalty, manipulation, and the extraordinary global consequences of one double agent’s defection.
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