In the early months of 1981, Tehran was a cauldron of sectarian violence and revolutionary chaos. The Ayatollah’s fledgling Islamist regime clung to power through terror, unaware that across the northern border, the First Chief Directorate of the KGB was already drafting operational plans for a full-scale covert overthrow. What the Kremlin did not factor into their geopolitical calculus was the American response. Hidden deep within the Pentagon's SIOP—the Single Integrated Operational Plan—lay a contingency unknown to the global public: the immediate, catastrophic deployment of the American nuclear triad against Soviet staging areas.
The mechanism that prevented total global annihilation was not diplomacy, but a single human asset. To Century House, the London headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service, he was known simply by the cryptonym 'Redwood'.
He was an anomaly within the standard parameters of Soviet intelligence officers: a towering, six-foot-four operative stationed in the Iranian capital. Yet, despite his impeccable Party credentials, Redwood possessed a vulnerability—a highly sensitive sexual secret that, under the strict morality codes of the Soviet state, carried a mandatory sentence of hard labour or a bullet in the Lubyanka basement. Recognizing his position was untenable, the Russian made a cold, transactional calculation. He approached MI6 with an ultimatum: the crown jewels of KGB active measures in Southwest Asia in exchange for a clean slate and a permanent medical solution to the dysfunction threatening to destroy him.
But when the counter-intelligence shadow began to close in, the operation shifted from passive intelligence collection to an emergency exfiltration. Trapped in Tehran, Redwood demanded that the British execute a high-stakes, cross-border escape plan before the KGB's internal security directorate could liquidate him.
What follows is the precise anatomical reconstruction of that operation. It is a narrative stripped of romanticism, detailing the mechanics of institutional betrayal, the psychological fractures of marriage under stress, and the absolute reality of how individual human flaws can alter the course of global history. Compiled from newly declassified files across multiple international archives, and verified through extensive debriefings with retired operatives from MI6, MI5, the CIA, and the former Soviet apparatus, this is the definitive account of the Cold War’s most significant, and hitherto unrecorded, intelligence victory. Without the man called Redwood, the world we inhabit today would simply cease to exist.
Buy hardcover →Buy paperback →Buy Kindle edition →Buy audiobook →