Review | Redwood by Ben Macintyre

A Spy Story Stranger Than Fiction

I love a good spy story, and Ben Macintyre has done it again. Redwood is a cracking read, made even better because it is a true story. Honestly, if someone had made this up, you might have thought they were stretching things a bit!

Set in Iran during the Cold War, the story follows Vladimir Kuzichkin, a senior KGB officer who decides to betray his country and work with British intelligence. And his reason for doing so? Well, let’s just say it wasn’t about politics or money, but a rather personal problem he hoped Western medicine could fix. You really couldn’t make it up.

Macintyre tells these stories in a wonderful way. He takes you into a world of spies, secret meetings, double-crossing, and political manoeuvring, but it’s the people who make it so fascinating. They aren’t all terribly clever, brave, or even particularly likeable. Some of their decisions are astonishing, especially given what was at stake.

I particularly enjoyed the relationship between Kuzichkin and his British MI6 handler, Ian McCredie. It’s an unlikely friendship, given that neither should really have trusted the other. Yet their relationship became central to an operation that had consequences neither could have imagined.

The story has some extraordinary twists, and I found myself wondering more than once how on earth they managed to get away with it all.

But this isn’t a story where everyone gets to live happily ever after. Some of the decisions made by those involved had dreadful consequences for thousands of people, and the final chapters are quite sad.

What I enjoy most about Macintyre’s books is that I come away feeling I’ve learned something about history without ever feeling as though I’ve been given a history lesson. He makes the people and events so interesting that you just keep turning the pages.

I thoroughly enjoyed Redwood. It’s fascinating, sometimes quite unbelievable, and one of those books I was reluctant to put down.

A great spy read.