An Evening with Ben Macintyre

The year is 1981. Tehran is in turmoil in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. The Soviets are planning to overthrow the Ayatollah's Islamist regime, and the US is secretly considering their nuclear arsenal in reply.

KGB Major Vladimir Kuzichkin, codename 'Redwood', was the best Soviet officer in Iran, but Redwood had a problem, a sexual secret that, if revealed, would humiliate him and his colleagues, cost him his job, and send him into exile. Desperate for a solution, he reached out to the only place he believed he’d find help: MI6.

Live on stage, Ben Macintyre tells the gripping tale of Kuzichkin, as Iranian and Soviet intelligence close in on the double-agent, and how a young MI6 officer, Ian McCredie, designed and executed an improbably high-stakes extraction for Kuzichkin whose intelligence shaped our world today.

Drawing on never-before-seen material from official archives and his own interviews with officers from MI6 and MI5, the KGB and the CIA, Ben lifts the lid on history's ‘Great Game’ and investigates how espionage really works.

Praise for Redwood

‘Ben Macintyre has a rare ability to turn history and espionage upside down and give us true, colourful stories that astound us as they draw us in. Redwood might be his best.’ – John Grisham

‘Macintyre writes with the diligence and insight of a journalist, and the panache of a born storyteller.’ – John Banville, The Guardian