Impotent Russian spy gave away state secrets in exchange for treatment

In 1981, as Iran’s new government hunted down political opponents, a KGB officer slipped into a bathroom in the British Embassy compound in Tehran.Vladimir Kuzichkin, 6-foot-4 and broad-shouldered, sat on a wicker laundry basket that creaked beneath him.

Across from him, MI6 officer Ian McCredie sat on the toilet.McCredie poured the Russian another vodka.He left the faucets running and turned on a radio to drown out their conversation.

If the Revolutionary Guards overheard them, “they would both be arrested, interrogated, imprisoned, and possibly executed, once the torture was completed,” writes British journalist Ben Macintyre in his new book, “Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy” (Crown), out now.Kuzichkin had come with Soviet secrets.He also had a very personal and bizarre question for McCredie, though he was in no hurry to ask it.A KGB major who handled contacts with Iran’s Soviet-aligned Tudeh Party, Kuzichkin described weapons caches, communist agents inside the Iranian military and a possible coup that might bring Soviet troops across the border.

“The coup might happen tomorrow, next month, or never,” Macintyre writes.Kuzichkin knew about the preparations because “he was the linchpin of the conspiracy.”To prove himself, Kuzichkin brought a Soviet Embassy directory and identified the spies hidden among its officials.

“An hour and a half had passed with Kuzichkin barely pausing for breath,” Macintyre writes.“Gallons of water had swirled down the drains.”Kuzichkin took another drink, leaned forward and placed a hand on McCredie’s knee.

“I have big problem,” he said.“Will you help me?”“I have no power in bedroom,” Kuzichkin explained.

He believed Western medicine could cure his impotence.“Nothing in McCredie’s life or MI6 training had prepared him for the challenge of handling a spy with erectile dysfunction,” Macintyre writes.McCredie promised to help, and Kuzichkin “almost...