Danger Close | Ben Macintyre

0:00This episode was brought to you by Bravo Company Manufacturing. He's one of the few books I've ever written that is completely original. I mean there is no hint of this story anywhere virtually. And that's because the various parties involved in the CIA, MI6, the Iranian Intelligence Services, they didn't want it told because it's a fascinating tale. Kazitschkin was a senior KGB officer, a Russian KGB officer in revolutionary Iran. And in 1981 he walked into the British Embassy and he walked in and said I want to spy for the West. But it swiftly emerged that his reason for doing this was not the traditional reason that we associate with Spine. Vladimir Kazitschkin had a problem. Vladimir Kazitschkin suffered from erectile dysfunction and believed that the West had medicines that would cure it.

1:08Ben, how are you? I'm fine, thank you, yourself. Oh, doing great, doing great. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. This is such an honor for me to be able to talk to you. So I really appreciate it. It's a great pleasure to have you. I couldn't be happy. I see you've got a perfect book lined room there as well. I do. I like that. I love that. I love that backdrop. That's great stuff. Excellent. Good. Well, listen, love it. Love it to see you. You too. You too. I have a lot of your books on my shelves here. Look at that. Wow. You've got practically the whole lot there. I do have a whole lot, but they are scattered about because it is a little bit of chaos around here. I was about to listen. Thank you. I'm delighted to hear it. That's great. Well, and I did just get this last night. So I have not had a chance to read the new one. No, it's not. It's I'm so excited to read this. I'll have some questions for you about it. But I more want to because I haven't read it. I want to want to tease it out a little more so people show go get this. Add this to their library along with all your other work, which is just.

2:10It's so remarkable and I just can't say enough great things about you or writing. How you bring history alive. It's just incredible. So first off, thank you very, very good to hear and we can just. I will just tell the story. I mean, I'm not shy about telling that whole thing. I never think it matters very much. I mean, there is an escape in the middle where he gets out of Iran. So we might we might keep that back. Okay. So I think we might but but the other reveals which are quite pretty remarkable. Some of them I'm happy to just do everything. So so don't feel you need to hold back on everything. Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, we will get there and I'm going to keep my eye on the clock here because. So many things to do in the lead up to this book, which comes out September 15th. Is it the same thing in the US and the UK? It's slightly earlier in the UK because complicated reasons, but because we're serializing it in the times here. It's out here on the 10th. So not very different. But much the same. Yeah. And then I'll be in the US for a big old to later in the year, which would be quite fun.

3:12Oh, perfect. Perfect. And so that tour doesn't coincide with September 15th. It'll be later. I won't get I won't get the because I'm doing mostly stuff in Europe for the first bit. So I think I get to the US on about the 25th of September. And then I'm there for a couple of weeks and then back. Well, I'll be looking at that and see where you're where you're headed. And if anything, I'll be fine. I love the big, big sea. I love to say hi. That's amazing. Yeah. Everybody who is listening to this in the US, check that out, find those book tour dates and go pick up Redwood and say hello to Ben on the road. So let's kick things off here with you right for the most part narrative nonfiction. Can you describe what that is for those listening who might not be familiar? Okay. So so narrative nonfiction as I do it is that these are historical stories. They are all true. Every word of them is sourced. I never put words in anybody's mouth. I never make anything up. That would be a novel. But they are told as stories. And so what for me, the kind of key thing is the narrative drive.

4:13So that they're not footnoted scholarly. Compendiums of facts. These are their stories. They're tales. They are, you know, I hope when they work, they kind of they move along at some pace. So I'm pretty ruthless about that. You know, something in the story doesn't interest me. It doesn't go in the book. So I'm not it's these are not comprehensive kind of accounts of factual detail. They are made to entertain and but they are all true. You know, that's why I do proper footnotes for everything. It's why, you know, you can find out where, where everything has come from. Oh, yeah, there's very big difference between let's say I, I term it popular history, meaning someone just puts it in their reads. A bunch of other books about the subject. There's not the source material isn't first hand accounts or archival. It's just someone like putting together a story based on work other people have done and they just get it out there. And that's not what yours is and you can just go to the back of any of your books and look at those notes. And now I know how I how much work goes into that. Now that I have a nonfiction book out on Beirut and my second one comes out next year on Panam 103.

5:16But now I know how much work goes in to annotating everything correctly, legally, getting all the right. Photos in there, making sure they're attributed correctly and paid for and all the rest of it. So how much work goes into something like this? Yeah, no, I mean, so I'm all about the archives really. I mean, I'm all about the primary research because that's what I really enjoy. And I love the writing obviously. But you know, for me, the great combination is a certain amount of sort of archival material written material. If I can find them people who were alive at the time that I was writing, that's all to me. That's gold dust really, you know, recordings, letters, postcards, poems, you know, and anything that is left behind. But without enough primary material, if you don't have enough of that original stuff, it's very hard, I think, to write one of these books. Yeah, well, I mean, they're all incredible and it does pull you in like a novel and you learn so much. I just love all your work. Now I am fascinated also by British schooling. Can you talk a little bit about your connection to Oxford, to Cambridge, to Abingdon?

6:21Is that how you pronounce your... Abingdon, yeah. No, so I was born in Oxford. My father was an academic historian at Oxford. So I grew up in a kind of house sold with historians. I then went to a school, but actually my parents taught me at home for quite a lot of the time. I was home schooled for a while. And then we lived in Scotland and then we came back down again. And then I went to a school called Abingdon, which is outside Oxford, which is a... It's a private school, but it's not what we would call a public school. It's not one of those sort of grand, eaten type schools. It was great. I loved it there. It was quite a sort of humble place, but it was filled with academic children. So that was part of why we went there. And then I went to Cambridge University to study history inevitably, because my father was very nice about it. He said, you know, we could apply to go to Oxford if we wanted to, but that he wouldn't stay on if we did. So that seemed to me to be a very sensible decision. So I have a brother and a sister. They all did history. They all did history at Cambridge. You know, we all went... We went to the other place, which was... So that was kind of my schooling, really.

7:22Yeah. I love that. My mom was librarian. So I grew up showing her my books and a love of reading it. As you can probably tell from... I can tell from your other side over here that has mostly fiction. And this is a nonfiction room here. But in my wife and I were in Oxford last year. We went to see the Jean La Corée exhibit up there. It was fascinating. I was... I plan to be playing the whole trip around when that was going to be out there. And then we went to see the spider coming from the cold stage play in London. So we had a Fleming La Corée type of trip. I saw the exhibition in Oxford. It was really good, actually. I mean, it was... I mean, I knew David Cornwall quite well. And we were sort of friends over the years. But I haven't realized quite how much time and effort he put in to researching his novels. He really did. He liked to go to the places. He liked to meet the people it was written. I can't press by that, actually. They weren't just written and they sucked out of the end of a pencil. These were stories that he properly researched. And you mentioned you studied history at university. Did you have a specific focus?

8:23Did you have to choose a focus there? Or... And then from that, what led you down the path in many cases to writing about espionage? Well, I... The Cambridge course is very diffuse. Or it was when I was there. So you could pick and choose all sorts of different things. So the Oxford course was much more linear. You know, you started at the beginning and then you ended at the end. I much preferred the Cambridge thing where you could just... You know, you could do Byzantine history one term and you could do, you know, the history of Kenya and Malmau the next. So it was kind of... It was really mixed. And I loved that. So I sort of dropped it around a bit. I guess the espionage thing. When I first left university, I worked for a publisher's. And then, soon after that, I actually studied in the States for a couple of years. I went to Columbia University. And then after that, I became a journalist. But sort of on my last day at Cambridge, I was recruited by M.I.C.X. by the British intelligence service. I say it was recruited. It wasn't nearly as dignified as that. I was kind of tapped up and sent off to go and see an obscure bloke in the middle of Whitehall.

9:27But I think that didn't come to anything I'm glad to say. But that sort of really peaked my interest, I think, in Espionage. I've always been interested in espionage. Because writing about spies allows you to write about the sorts of subject that novelists usually write about. So you can... Espionage is so dense and so strange and so imaginative that it's all about love and loyalty and betrayal and adventure and romance. And if you have the right sort of material, you can write a book that feels like a novel. But it's actually not. It's actually every word of it is true. And so that's... That I think is why Espionage appeals to me so much. I think it's also got a sort of primal attraction for a lot of people. The idea that you can live in a world where you appear to be one thing on the outside, but actually on the inside or something completely different. That is a kind of universal appeal, I think. Oh yes, a lot of these books have a running theme to them.

10:31When did you decide you wanted to write? Did you say you wanted to be a journalist first and then writing narrative nonfiction sprung from that? Or did you always want to do both or how did that come up? I think I always wanted to do both, Jack. But I started out as a journalist and I'm still a journalist. You know, I still write a column for the Times of London. I've been on the Times for 35 years now. So, you know, journalism was my first love. Some of my books use a sort of journalism. You know, I am interviewing people. I am thinking up material from all sorts of different places. So the journalism and the books do complement each other. But so my first book was written when I was about 24. So I just started out in journalism. But I was very lucky because I was a foreign correspondent for most of my career. So I was in America for 12 of the years that I was on the Times. And that was a great place to write because I was sort of in an office on my ear. I could do the journalism and I could do the books on the edge of the desk as it were. I could do them both at the same time because it was, you know,

11:32you could kind of manage my own time really. So being a foreign correspondent really helped, I think. Yeah. And I do want to ask you about one of your earlier works here because both of our countries have experience in Afghanistan. Can you tell me a little bit about a man you wrote about Josiah Harlan? That was an extraordinary story. Well, I just, I mean, he was a character. So I was in Afghanistan as a foreign correspondent for some time. So I was there. Well, actually, my first posting was in in Peshawar and then on into Afghanistan. So in 1998 to 1998 to 1990. I was in and out of Afghanistan a fair bit mostly with the majority in and covering the Soviet withdrawal and so on. And I, I kind of heard about this character, this character, Josiah Harlan, who was an American who had come to Afghanistan in 1823. You believe it on law? I mean, he was the first American ever to set foot in the country.

12:34And he was that rarest of creatures. He was a quaker mercenary. Quakers are, as you know, mostly pacifists, but Josiah Harlan definitely wasn't and he was a gun for hire. So he ended up sort of fighting as a kind of military advisor to the amir of Kabul, the sort of king of Afghanistan. And he became his senior military advisor. And he ended up, believe it or not, being crowned king of a part of the northern Hindu Kush. He was the first person since Alexander the great to take elephants across the Hindu Kush. And there's this extraordinary account written by him of being crowned king of Gore up there. I mean, he was, as you've probably gathered, fairly bonkers. But he was an extraordinary figure. And he was the model for a Rajad Kipling story called The Man Who Would Be King, which was then made into a wonderful film with Sean Connery and Michael Cain.

13:36But that, believe it or not, that story of a kind of western of wanting to become a king of Afghanistan is actually based in truth. And Josiah Harlan was an extraordinary figure. He was actually eventually kicked out of Afghanistan by the British when they arrived in the 1840s, this sort of strange American knocky about. Then he fought in the Civil War. He raised his own troop during the Civil War and was caught marshal at the end of the Civil War. And ended up as a very successful dentist in San Francisco. His life is absolutely bizarre. And I found his diary. That was where he went. I wrote the book. I found his diary in a talk of archives in a museum in Pennsylvania, in the Chester County local museum. And amazingly, in a box, they found this original manuscript which is on a Harlem. And that's, you know, that was the sort of center on which the piece was written. That is crazy. I mean, my experience in archives is very slim still at this point, but I have been in archives.

14:39And my co-author in the targeted series, James M. Scott, it was a full surprise finalist and historian. I'm learning a lot from him about that process and how to document things and what you can find in these archives. And it's incredible. I mean, I'm sure they're looking for it about how to go into archives and about the things that have been found in archives and all of that. But it's amazing. I'm amazed at what you can find. And I'm amazed at what people wrote down and kept. I mean, the wonderful thing about that, Josiah Harlan manuscript, was that even the library itself really didn't know it was there. It just had a whole box of stuff and a wonderful, very generous with their time archivist. And while going to have a look through some of these boxes and sure enough, there it was a completely original manuscript. And so wild. Now, at least five of your books have been turned into docu-series. What's that experience like seeing your work changed and brought to not the adaptation ones, but the ones that are turned into docu-series? What's that been like for you? Well, that's something that I kind of do myself. So I tend to present those.

15:40And in some ways, I sort of reenact the stories. You know, I did one about the deception plan around D.D. and that involved a lot of travel in France. And then I did various other ones. So they're kind of, they're slightly odd sort of hybridry. They're partly documentaries, but they're partly kind of semi-dramatized things where I kind of slightly reenact what the different characters did. But they were great fun. I've done, as you say, I think I've done five now. And I tend to do, you know, I'll do the book. And then I will, if I have the time, I will then do this sort of documentary that goes with it. Yeah, that's fantastic. I did my first one. I had my first taste of doing one, not based on one of my books, but just docu-series in general on Carlos the Jackal. They just had about a month and a half ago or so. And it was a big experience. Yeah, I was very interested in it. Really great subject. Do I cover, even though I covered his trial in Paris when I was there during the mid-90s when he was sort of brought in? I don't think it's crazy. It's not an extraordinary case. Yeah, it's very interesting. What a showman essentially in a murderer, of course, as well.

16:41But so how about the adaptation front? Let's say Rogue Heroes Operation Minsmita, Paspai among friends. What has that process been like for you to see those brats alive? Well, it's fascinating. And it's, you know, so much depends on who is doing the adaptation as to how much they want me to be involved. Some of those adaptations I've been very closely involved in. You know, the one we just finished on the siege. You know, I was on set a lot. I was advising the access. That was all great fun. Others like Rogue Heroes. There we go. That's just been made into a series that comes out next year. Others, you know, the producers and the writers don't really need me along. They don't particularly want you along. And I always think that you kind of have to respect what the creators of these things are trying to do. I never think it's a particularly dignified look for the writer of the book to turn around after was insane. Oh, I didn't like that. You know, they didn't do it properly. You know, you get fairly, you get generously recompensed for these things. And I think the least you can do is allow the next person who wants to turn the story into something else.

17:46A fairly free hand to do so. And I'm always amazed by, you know, the people who sort of complain that somehow a dramatization like this is not identical to the book. But of course, it's not. It's a completely different way of thinking your way through it. And that seems to me to be a very, a very short, winded, short, minded way of approaching history. Because actually everybody has a different taste. It means it's a great example. You know, that's this bizarre story of a wartime plot to get a dead body and then use it to pass false information to the Germans. And it was highly successful that that began as a novel, believe it or not, by a very obscure detective writer. It was then picked up by Ian Fleming, another would be novel writer. Then it was put into action by two would be novelists. You never published anything. Then after the war, it became another novel called Operation Heartbreak. Then there was a nonfiction book about it that was mostly made up. Then there was a film called The Man Who Never Was. Then I wrote a book that was factual.

18:48That was sent into a film. And now it's become a musical. So it's an each stage. That story is taken on by somebody else and imbued with their own imagination. I kind of think that's wonderful. I think that's exactly how it should be. Anyone who stood up and complained about the fact that they've made a song out of your book. I mean, that's just wonderful. What happens next? The ballet? That would be great. I love that perspective on adaptations right there. My wife and I went to see Operation Mints meeting London. We were there last year as well. We had to do it. Also about research. We touched on it a little bit. But the UK does not have the equivalent of the US Freedom of Information Act. How does that impact your work? Well, greatly. We do have a free of information act, but it doesn't cover the intelligence services. That's right, Matt. So, but that said, MI5, which is our security service, that's the equivalent of the FBI,

19:50they do release their archives, or they can release their archives after 50 years, depending on national security. Now national security covers an awful lot of stuff. Everything in the MI5 archives is about national security. So they pretty much have carte blanche not to release what they don't want to come out. So it's a very, it's a very strange system here really. Very much up to the internal intelligence service, what it wants to release. Now MI6, which is the equivalent of the CIA, never releases its files. Not only that, it never comments on them. So that's a very different kind of process because there is no paper trail as distinct from the CIA, which actually releases quite a lot of its material. There is no paper trail for MI6. You are dependent, I am dependent for those stories on interviews, on talking to living witnesses, on memoirs that officers may or may not have been authorized to write. So it's a much more gray area that one.

20:51It's much more dependent on what I can crowbar out of people than that anything that is available to the public. So I do want to go back to Oleg Gordaevsky. Is that your pronounce? That's a good one. But first we did mention some adaptations and SAS Rogue Heroes. Rogue Heroes here. The Paddy Main was played by a guy named Jack O'Connell, who I believe is in the running to become Bond, which is very interesting. I think he'd be brilliant at it. I mean, he's an extraordinary actor. I mean, he's absolutely brilliant in the part of Paddy Main. He really seizes that part. Paddy Main was the kind of deputy head of the SAS who then ended up running the whole show. Who was a very, very volatile, dangerous, complicated character. And Jack catches his character absolutely brilliantly. It's one of those. So I think you'd make a wonderful Bond, but you never know. You never know. A bit of a bit of a lot of the point of the thing.

21:52Yeah, exactly. And the actor has to avoid to do it as well. I think all the news reports I read, and they don't take into account that this person has to actually want that role. I wonder how many actually would turn it down. I think that would be how many it is the thing is. I know. I know. It's the world. I mean, yeah, I suppose people might. But it should be, I mean, the man who produced Peaky Blinders and Rogue Heroes is also going to be doing the next James Bond. And he knows Jack very well. So I don't know if that gives him an insight. Oh, there we go. And there's another connection to Bond here. I have this is a first edition, I believe right here. So you did this a couple of couple of years back. And I believe it was in conjunction with the Fleming Bond exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. Is that right? Right. Yeah. So that was, that was to do with a big exhibition, the, the IWM, which I love doing actually. I mean, I kind of thumbed it. It's, it's, it's really, I mean, that edition you've got there is, there is a beautifully illustrated sort of picture.

22:52But it's, I wanted to kind of explore how much of Ian Fleming's life informed what Bond became and how much, how much he was aspirational, how much he was completely imagined. So I wanted to find out where Ian Fleming the author ended and where James Bond 007 begins. It was great fun. Yeah, well, I don't know if he doesn't have this. Any Bond or Fleming fans out there. Figure out his only in Fleming and James Bond. And it's fantastic. Like the pictures, there's a lot of photos in here that I hadn't seen elsewhere before. And it's, yeah, well, I mean, the Imperial War Museum gathered together an amazing collection of stuff not just from Fleming's life, but also from the Bond films. It's, it's an amazing collection. And I did want to ask you about that, speaking of Bond, the connection between fact and fiction, you know, British spy thrillers in particular. And did you grow up reading spy thrillers? Did you grow up reading the careers in the, yeah, no, I mean, you know, we had every Fleming, every Graham Greene, every John LeCarrie. Yeah, my father loved all that stuff too, you know.

23:54And it's, you know, in a funny way, those that, they're not espionage writers, exactly. They're literally novelists, but it's interesting that they in almost all cases had also been spies at some point, you know, I mean, in Fleming, John LeCarrie, Graham Greene, Salsa at Maul, John Bucken. These people were all involved in intelligence at some point or other. So they tell it in a particular way. And I think that's fine. That's fascinating. Yeah, I know we were actually steeped in the genre growing up. Yeah, I love that. I love that. And do you think that intelligence officers and, or spies and spy novelists share some of those same traits? Yes, I do. I mean, I think, you know, what, what spies do with their offices or agents is not so different from what novelists do. I mean, you are creating a kind of a false world, really. And you're trying to lure people into it. So you're making an artificial life, both for yourself or for others or, but it's all about imagination.

24:54And it's all about creating something that is believable, whether you are posing as somebody you're not, or whether you're undercover, or whether you're an illegal agent implanted in a foreign company. You are, you are kind of creating a fictional world. And in both cases, I think the better you are to imagining a different world, it makes you a better spy, makes you a better novelist. So I think the two, the two traits are not so different. Yeah. And I just want to ask you about your writing process because I want to see if I can pick up any, any tips here. Do you have a process or, or it is a key object actually, Jack, it's not, I mean, I think the quality of the process is kind of to dignify it really. I kind of, I'm on a kind of two years cycle. So I tend to spend about a year researching quite intensively and then about a year writing again, pretty intensively, but the two processes very much overlap. I'm very lucky. We have a sort of family house on the far west coast of Scotland. And when I am fully ready to write, and I've got all my notes and I've got everything ready in one place,

25:56I take myself up there and I hide myself away. And I just write my pants off for weeks on end. It's great. It's a good way of really digging yourself into a into another world. So yeah, that's, that's, but that's as far as the process goes really. I kind of, I don't get up at a particular time and sit with a special pen and a particular desk. I mean, one of the virtues and benefits of having been a journalist was that you, you can write anywhere. Yeah, I mean, I like writing on airplanes. I love writing on trains. I like writing at the edge of the kitchen table. I'm, you know, I'm, I'm happy doing it anywhere. I don't quite believe people who say they can't write and less there in a special rotating heart on a bio river, you know, with a kind of, with a particular kind of vellum manuscript. Well, sign. Yes, I need a, I just need uninterrupted time. And it can be anywhere I need a view. I just uninterrupted time is the, is the key for, for me. I agree. But I mean, I don't, I mean, I like to do it with people around. I don't mind if I'm on my own. It's funny. I kind of, I don't, I don't, I'm not particularly sort of fussy about that.

26:57Interesting. Again, we, I thought I needed to be on my own for the longest time. And then we were filming the TV show Dark Wolf over in Budapest. And I went out to the, the four seasons has this great little cafe that spills out under a cobblestone street that cars can't go on. And I thought I never thought I could write with people around like in a coffee shop or something like that. But I sat out there and what happened was all the people going by and bicycles and walking by, even though I didn't know them, and they were holding me accountable for that. Because they go by and just kind of look and they're not going to be, you know, there's kind of looking. But I felt it was a very strange thing. So now I, I feel like I can write even in a coffee shop or a cafe or a restaurant. It did help that they were bringing beers and, and that did, that did quite a big. I do want to ask you about Kim Filby, a spy among friends right here. There's an afterward by Jean-Laurent Corée. Right here, you mentioned that, that you knew him. First, maybe what was Jean-Laurent like to know him personally before I asked a little bit more about him.

28:00Well, he was wonderful. I mean, he was a tremendous, he was actually so kind to me. He was a real supporter of my writing. He was, he was often the first, not the first person, but one of the earliest people to read the books. We became close friends over the years. He gave me lots of brilliant advice on things. Even though we do, we did very different things. You know, I'm writing strictly non-fiction. He is strictly fiction. He was so steeped in that world. And in that particular book, he sort of gave it to me really. I mean, I was walking with him one day on Hamstead Heath and I said, you know, I'm looking for a new book. I don't know what to write. He said, ah, you should write about Kim Filby and Nicolas Elliott. And he had no Nicolas Elliott when he was in the services himself. So that was incredibly generous of him, really. He did, you know, it took a lot of research. And it was quite interesting because, you know, his, his afterward, I mean, it was based really on, on his personal experience of Elliott, whereas of course, I'd never met Elliott. He'd been dead. And it was Kim Filby's closest friend and the man he sort of betrayed ever a long time.

29:03So it was really wonderful to have David's absolutely personal account of him at the end of, of, of a book that was based on research. So I know that was incredibly, typically generous of him. And can you give us a little bit about Kim Filby for those who might not know, because it's such an amazing book. I hope everybody picks it up, a spy among friends. And then if you do that, you'll certainly pick up the spy and the trader. And that will lead you. I think there's a theme maybe that goes between somebody's books. You can tell me if I'm, I'm right about that of betrayals and, of course, in the espionage world. But tell me a little bit about Kim Filby for those who might not know. And if Filby was, well, he sort of came to prominence really during and immediately after the war. And he rose very high in MI6, our foreign intelligence service. He was a bane and charming and clever and highly astute and was rising up through the ranks of MI6. But he was secretly a communist agent. He'd been recruited by the KGB very early on in the 30s, soon after leaving university.

30:04So he was, you know, he was the most effective double agent. I'd probably in history, actually. I mean, he got, you know, he was slated to become a head of MI6 when he was finally sort of semi exposed and moved out. But it's an extraordinary story because in a way, it's not really a story so much about espionage. It's about British class and about the class system and the way that Filby managed to kind of hide. He was really made himself invisible because he had the right old school tie and he had the right sort of accent. And he watched a lot of cricket. So, you know, he was, so he in a way, he's a fascinating figure. I mean, he's, he is detested mostly in Britain as a traitor and someone who sent hundreds, if not thousands of people to their deaths. He was a ruthless figure. I mean, behind the smile and the facade, he was a brutal man. But in Russia, he is celebrated as a hero. He's still considered to be, you know, one of their greatest foreign agents.

31:04And, you know, his picture is on the outside of the FSB, you know, Putin personally reveres him. So he's just a good example of how one man's freedom fighter is, another man's, you know, criminal is. And Filby is very interesting. And the same is probably true of the other character he were referring to, his Gordie Eski, which is the spy on the traitor. So Gordie Eski is the reverse side of that coin, if you like. Gordie Eski was a KGB officer, very senior, very successful, recruited by MI6 at the height of the Cold War, who was able for a decade to reveal to Britain and America and the West. What the Kremlin was thinking, I mean, he was one of the highest placed agents ever, but anyone's ever had. And his story is extraordinary because, you know, I don't want to give it away, but you know, he has to try and escape from Moscow. And that is a very remarkable moment. But he, again, it's sort of interesting. I mean, in this country, Gordie Eski died last year.

32:09He was arrested with life here in hiding, really, living in a safe house in the suburbs. But here he is considered to be a national hero. He's regarded as being, you know, somebody who fought the good fight was on ideologically on the right side of history, who helped bring about the end of the Cold War and perestroika. In Russia, he's absolutely detested. I mean, he's on Putin's hit list. I mean, in fact, he had to be under very, very tight security because there were considerable fears. That the Russians might try and kill him because, you know, he is considered to be a traitor and a coward and somebody who turned against them. So they both have this kind of ambivalence about them, which makes them both very interesting. That's why I love these two books. I was going to ask you about that juxtaposition between Philby and Gordie Eski here, because it is so fascinating. I put Philby in one of my last books called Cry Have It. It's a espionage thriller set in the Heart of Saigon in 1968. So essentially it became a historical fiction, essentially, and took a lot more time researching that I thought.

33:11But Philby makes an appearance there in 1968 in Moscow. So I really, very brief, but I want to try to capture kind of the feel of the era. I think I would have been the most amazing company. I think he would have saved charming and funny and brutal. You know, really interesting combination. Yeah, and it's kind of applies to both, actually. So I have this is the the autobiography of of a Lego to Eski right here. He writes his own. And of course he works with Christian Brandt, you're right. This one too, of course, here. But there's something you said a few years ago now, I'm not sure if you remember or not, but you said we are all unreliable narrators of our own past, which I thought was very perceptive. In some cases, obvious, but also the way you put it up, and the more I research in this area, I think the trueer that is really because we think our memories are truth. We think that what we remember happening is what happened, but actually that's not what memory is. Memory is the story that we tell ourselves to make sense of the past.

34:19And often it can be a long way from the truth. You know, the more I research in this area, the more I discover you can have three people in the same room at the same time witnessing exactly the same things. And yet they will have three often diametrically different memories of what happened. So I've learned to take people telling me about their pasts with a grain of salt actually. I mean, God, he's a good example. I must have spent hours interviewing him. I mean months in the end. I mean, I was there. I was in the safe house for days on end. And he too was a slightly unreliable narrator of his past. He would tell you a story. And because I had interviewed the MI6 people who'd run in my interview to everybody connected with the case. On a few occasions, I would have to say to him, you know, that's not right. What you remember happening is not correct. And he would give me a very hard, Slavic look and then say, well, all right. And you know my story better than I do.

35:19He didn't like it. Well, we none of us like it when our memories are contradicted. But I think that's what siblings are for really. I think that's there to sort of to say when you're halfway through your story to say that's complete nonsense. It didn't happen that way. I found that with Carlos the Jacologian researching him and talking to people who had had had spoken to him. But that was intentional. His unreliable narration in many cases was was intentional. He's the lies. I suspect whereas unreliable narration is a slightly different thing. I was just being nice about it. What was it? What was he like? What was Gordewski like to sit down and spend so much time with him? He was fascinating man really. He had a prodigious memory. He really could remember incredible details. I think he was very traumatized at some levels by what had happened to him. He's escaped from Russia. He was terrifying. I think I think he never fully recovered from it. I mean, in some ways, he was rather a difficult person to get to know because he was so conscious of his own moral record.

36:28He was an attitude, if you like. He believed fervently that he had done the right thing. He was ideologically on the side of the angels. He never expressed a word of regret even though he lost his family. He lost his homeland. He lost job and all sorts of things. I never heard him expressly get. But like all people who are absolutely certain that they are right, it didn't make him quite difficult to get on with sometimes. There was an air of sort of martyrdom about him that was at times quite difficult to deal with. He could be very erasable. He could be very short tempered. He could be very funny too. He had a very dry ironic wit. He was frequently turned, got very sharp and he would turn it on either me or other people in the room. He could be pretty scared sometimes. But I wouldn't say we ever became friends. We grew close actually. I got to know him very well over the years. He really didn't need people very much. He didn't have very many people around him. He lived a very solitary life.

37:35I think he was one of the loneliest people I've ever met. He was undoubtedly one of the bravest. That is interesting. Keep the escape to the west under wraps so people can get the spy and the traitor right here. For those who are wondering who we're talking about, can you just tell me a little bit about who he was with that connection from birth to the KGB. His impact on the end of the Cold War, especially that last decade of the Cold War, specifically to Thatcher, Reagan, Gorbachev. The Gordy F.G. was born into KGB royalty. His father had been a KGB agent. His brother was a KGB agent. There was never any doubt that that was what he was going to be. KGB officer rather. He was very swiftly through the ranks. He ended up as the designated head of station for the KGB in London. He was right at the top of the pinnacle. He was able to alert the west, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, in particular to the fact that the Kremlin genuinely believed that the west was planning a first strike.

38:43They were gearing up to unleash nuclear weapons on Russia. Gordy F.G. was able to explain to MI6 and to the CIA. Look, what you're saying here, this sort of aggressive rhetoric is being heard as threat in Moscow. It's not helping. So that was in a way you can chart the beginning of the end of the Cold War to that body of information. The Gordy F.G. was able to prove that what seemed to be paranoid, ramping on the part of the Kremlin was actually genuine fear. And it all began to ratchet down. Once what's really discovered that, what's actually discovered that, they began to kind of to temper their kind of ferocious rhetorical assaults on the Soviet Union. So it began a sort of daytime. So he plays a very important part. More specifically, he was able to alert the west that are sort of set of military maneuvers being carried out by NATO in Europe,

39:47were being seen in the Kremlin as the prelude to a first strike. The training exercise called Able Archer was actually being seen as they're going to attack us. And the Russians were really in ballistic weapons to respond. So again, by alerting the west of that and by scaling down Able Archer very, very quickly, that averted a potential nuclear war. I mean, one doesn't want to exaggerate it, but you know, that was as close as anything. I mean, anything since the Cuban missile crisis to being a sort of full on confrontation. It's amazing how how little is known about Able Archer and the West. There's a couple books out on it. I went into one of my one of my novels just as background for a character. But it is so fascinating. Do you think there are other Gordon Eskies out there that we don't know about that maybe in a safe house in London today or maybe in northern Virginia? I would be very surprised if there aren't. I mean, you know, human intelligence is as important today as it's ever been arguably much more important given the rising digital intelligence and so on.

40:55So yeah, no, I'm absolutely certain that the premium these days is on getting somebody inside the enemy camp now how you define the enemy camp is up to you. But you know, believe me, the West is desperately trying to recruit people in China in Iran in Russia, you know, and having a Gordie Eskie figure who is able to tell you inside the enemy camp, not just what your rivals are doing. But what they're thinking of doing that is that is absolutely gold dust and believe me, yeah, they're digging around with them harder than ever. Oh, yeah. And we're as we're recording this, we're creeping up on the anniversary of 9-11 and just what you said right there reminds me of how even if you have people inside the same organization, more intelligent servers that are letting you know what the opposition is thinking. Sometimes you need actual people within the plot itself because a lot of people that were in Al-Qaeda didn't know the 9-11 was happening obviously and that was kept close hold, but getting somebody in the plot inside of a plot or an operation that's even more difficult than getting somebody in the in the organization who might not know.

42:05So just thinking about that as you as you mentioned it. But that's leading us down this path as we get closer to 1981, we get closer to the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and what comes after it when it as per James the Soviet Union and British intelligence as well. And I cannot wait to dive into this. I'm super excited. But as we're talking about espionage and agents and all the rest of its spies, there's another book agent Sonya. Talk to me a little bit about about her what made her different and specifically the time when M.I.5 comes to her house to interview her. So agent Sonya was the code name for a communist agent. This is this is the history of espionage from the other end of the telescope. So Sonya, whose real name is Ursula Kaczynski, was a German born Jew who fled from Vymeid when the Nazis took part. She was bitterly anti-Nazi, she was anti-fascist and she enrolled with the Russian intelligence service with the Russian military intelligence service was trained as a spy.

43:13And spyed all over the world. She was extremely good at it. She spied in Shanghai and in Manchuria and in Switzerland and in Poland and all over the world. But she ended up in Britain where she married a British American called Burton and she lived in a little village in the Cotsworlds. And you know she was Mrs Burton, she was baking cakes and looking after her kids and going to the local fate. But in fact in the back garden she had built in the outside toilet there. She had built a very powerful radio transmitter and with that she was sending intelligence reports back to Moscow, including the blueprints for the atomic weapon. So which she had gathered from her spies who penetrated the nuclear weapons program, the Lee's atomic weapons program. So she's absolutely crucial spy. I mean she's arguably on the other side. You know she's doing it for the communist but my goodness she's impressive. And eventually MI5, the security service got wind that somebody was using a radio transmitter in this in this little village.

44:20And they began interviewing people and they even interviewed Mrs Burton and they were a port which I've seen in MI5 archives reads you know she can't possibly be a spy because she's so busy with her domestic duties. She was the mother of three, she was a housewife and it was thought that so that was part of what Sonja did was she was brilliant at using her gender as a disguise. And she got away with it. I mean by the time they actually worked out it was her. She got she vanished back to East Germany. So she's an extraordinary figure. And then some a lesson in a way that you know she looked so innocent she looked so unlikely that you know there she was she was a spy disguised in a dress and a penny. So you know she kind of she's kind of less than there. It's it's absolutely incredible. And reason I'm asking about all these books is one because I'm interested in all these stories and I want everyone to go out there. And I want to show you these all of your books to their to their library stop holding pick up a book dive into these pages and the siege right here.

45:27So this was one of the topics that I wanted to explore actually my nonfiction series and I thought you were doing it and I'm like that that's off my list at least for the years or. I was learning in the research to the siege that you you you didn't know before I mean it's 1980 at you know I it's more I guess I guess I can't call it recent history now but it's something that if you grew up reading about special operations and terrorism that you're familiar with especially you being from the UK. What did you learn in writing this book and here's rusty firm inside this for me right there the man. There you go. What you learn about this operation you know it's it's an extraordinary story I mean it's one that if you were you know over the age of 10 in Britain when it took place it's absolutely seared on your memory because it was a it was the most dramatic television we've ever seen it was a six day hostage situation right in the heart of London inside the Iranian Embassy six Arab gunmen had sort of taken over the embassy taken hostage.

46:28It was all being broadcast live including the final moments when the S a S bursting and liberated the hostages so it was always presented as a kind of incredible story of daring do. I mean what I learned while researching it is that it is a much more complicated story and a much more fraught story than the kind of mythology that we were all handed down you know in the in the sort of. The approved version the S a S were kind of brave heroes and the gunmen were terrorists and the hostages were all brave and they all behaved very well it's not it's much more interesting than that I mean the gunmen had their reasons for doing what they were doing I'm not defending them but they you know most people didn't don't still today don't really realize what that siege was about they think it's something to do with Islamic fundamentalism it's not these these six gunmen were opposed to the I atollars race. They were going in as a demonstration against the Islamists you know 99 out of 100 people you know this country wouldn't know that they would think it was something to do with Islamic terrorism and you know it's a book that asks the question what would you do in these terrifying circumstances you know and really it's a story told from inside the embassy because I I interviewed the survivors and I spoke to pretty much everyone who's still alive from that from that period who was involved in the war.

47:53So what I tried to do is tell the story from the inside out really so it's not a story of sort of gun hoe daring do kick the doors down S a type sort of military stuff I'm going to that happens at the end in the final 11 minutes are pretty exciting because that's that it sort of boils down to that but it's really a story about all the individuals getting caught up in in absolutely terrifying circumstances it is very dramatic but it's also very dramatic. It's a dramatic from the point of view of character I think because it's really about it asked the question what would you do you know if you were if you happen to be in there and some people behave with incredible courage and others behaved differently and others behaved in very humane human fallible way so it's I love writing it actually it's it's sort of a back human nature more than military operation. Fantastic belongs in everyone's library which leads us to here to redwood first I think you I had never heard this story before which is why I love all of your books even if it's there's not the focus of the book I find a sentence here a paragraph there about people or or operations that I didn't didn't know about but what led you down the path to write redwood and and who was out of I'm going to put your name again major Vladimir Cousichkin Cousichkin.

49:14Yeah I mean I'm not a bridegabner heard of it Jack because nobody has heard of it I mean it is it is one of the few books I've ever written that is completely original I mean there is no there is no hint of this story anywhere virtually and that's because the various parties involved you know the CIA MI6 the Iranian intelligence services they didn't want it told because it's a it's a it's a it's a fascinating tale and Cousichkin was a I'll just briefly give you the outline. I mean Cousichkin was a senior KGB officer Russian KGB officer in in revolutionary Iran so he spoke perfect person and he had been in Iran since 1976 so he he'd been there throughout the revolution and he was there afterwards and he was rising up through the ranks he you absolutely everything about what the Soviets were doing in the Middle East and in 1981 he walked into the British Embassy or what remained of it in in downtown Iran and explained to the skeleton staff there there are really six diplomats left the Americans by this point had been kicked out you know the CIA station had been disbanded we'd had the US hostage drama there was no American diplomatic representation in Iran and only just this handful of Brits and he walked in and said I want a spy for the West

50:35I want to be your spy and he was taken on by the only MI6 officer in Iran a young man then called Ian McCready who took him on and began running him as a double agent and he began to reveal the most incredible secrets about what the Soviets were up to but it swiftly emerged that he's reason for doing this was not the traditional reason that we associate with spy and there's an old acronym MICEMICE which is supposed to stand for the sort of motivating elements of the spy money ideology coercion and ego now Vladimir Kuzitskyn wasn't after money he was partly motivated by ideology he was very alienated from the Soviet regime but coercion had nothing to do with it and ego even less Vladimir Kuzitskyn had a problem Vladimir Kuzitskyn suffered from erectile dysfunction and believed that the West had medicines that would cure it it sounds extraordinary it sounds like the most unlikely tale but

51:40to understand that you have to realize just what an affliction that was for a macho six foot four KGB officer in a very tough environment to be impotent and he was it was basically the stress that was doing him in was a life-endingly dreadful situation for him to be in he was quite newly married he adored his wife and he believed the only way to save the love of his life to save this marriage was to get a cure the problem was that of course there was no cure of Iagra had not been invented and would not be invented for another 14 years but he didn't know that and the Brits said well look we'll took him on and said we'll do our best but they knew there was no cure for this at that point I mean today this sounds very antique because of course now there's a little blue pill that would have solved all of Vladimir Kuzitskyn's problems immediately so there's a very human story in this but so Kuzitskyn

52:42spied for about a year inside revolutionary Iran and one of the things he revealed astonishingly was that the Soviet Union was planning a coup in Iran at this point the Iatola had not yet got full control of the country there were different parties and powers and groups vying for power I mean the islamists were technically in control but there were street battles and groups and among those chief among those really was the Iranian Communist Party which was then very powerful had thousands of members it had an underground military organization it had guns it had money and it was semi tolerated by the Iatolars regime because it was so powerful they didn't dare take them on but the plan the Soviet plan was to set the communists up in a coup to take over the government kick out the mullers and have the red army cross over from Afghanistan where you know this just happened in Afghanistan where the communist regime was being held in place by the red army roll across the border

53:42take over the Iranian oil fields take over the strait of all moves and win the Cold War I mean this was a radical Soviet plan and it was it was ready to go and the reason Kuzitsky knew about it was because he was the linchpin he was the person passing the money and guns and the plans via the KGB to the communist plotters so he knew absolutely chapter and verse on this and obviously this was the west's nightmare I mean the CIA had been publishing memos for years warning that if this happens we are stuffed you know what are we going to do what is our contingency plan and the contingency plan one of them was to respond with nuclear weapons they would take special forces in one of the plans was to take special forces in with things called manpack nukes mini nuclear weapons and collapse the alboraz manpacking and the anti-ranged to bring down the mountains to block the passes so the Soviets would be unable to bring their tanks in or try and stop them getting out that didn't work there was another plan it was this was all drawn up by the Pentagon to actually just use nuclear weapons and try and take the Russians out because they could not afford to lose the oil fields completely

54:58so it's you know so this is this is a potential nuclear situation it's as dangerous I would say as what we were just talking about the able archer situation as the Cuban missile crisis but it's completely unknown nobody knows that this was going on so MI6 had a decision to make which was what do we do with this intelligence this is really high grade operational intelligence and I'm going to give away a bit of the story here but once because it's him was out once redwood was out and by the way the codename he was codename redwood because he was six foot four but there was also an obvious you know double meaning in that it was read because he was communist and would because that was the problem so as always with spy stories there is a kind of Dublant and during the name once they got because it's going out they decided that they they couldn't just sit on this intelligence they had to share it so they told the CIA and Bill Casey then the head of the CIA really tough cold warrior said right we've got to tell the Iranians

56:05so they arranged a secret meeting in Islamabad where redwood was flown out with his handlers to meet the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps the intelligence operatives of the Iatollah's regime to hand over the entire redwood hall the names the addresses the communist plot the money trails the gun debt cashies everything within two months something like 8000 Iranian communists were rounded up by the Revolutionary Guard of whom perhaps 6000 were executed it was a blood path comparable to what has recently happened in Iran and it you know it was it's still regarded this moment you know I mean the Iranians don't admit that the intelligence came from the West but the crushing of the communist party in Iran is still hailed as one of the foundational moments of the Islamic regime it is regarded as the moment when the Iatollah removed all internal opposition

57:12and it strengthened him in power I mean it you know it helped to solidify that regime from that moment on you know the Iatollah and the IRGC brooked no opposition at all so it's a very double-aged story for the West this it isn't on the one hand it's a Cold War trial they stopped they stopped this potential plot in its tracks you know the communist party was utterly destroyed never never took to come back again you know the threat to the straight up hall moves didn't happen on the other hand inadvertently and without knowing that that is what they were going to do as in Afghanistan they had created a new monster they had helped to create the regime of the Iatollah just as you know by supporting the majority in a games to say the union they had poured money in guns to Islamists and that led to al-Qaeda that led to ISIS that led to you know another Afghan war and 9-11 you know these are the inadvertent consequences of you know intelligence operations

58:21and one has to understand that you know the Western intelligence services were looking at this entirely through the prism of the Cold War this was a Cold War problem they had to stop the Soviets and in those days of course as throughout the world my enemy is enemy is my friend you know so anyone that was opposing the Soviets you know we the West were going to back but what they didn't realize was what the longer-term consequences of that were going to be so this is this is one of those strange stories it's a story about one man's deeply personal individual problem you know and its impact it's massive impact on the world that we live in today if Kazitskyn if I agra had been invented and Kazitskyn hadn't had a problem who knows the cult the story of the cult the story of the Cold War could have been completely different incredible incredible bring it down the mountain range sounds like a little bit what we talked about earlier the espionage thriller versus the real world

59:25and reminds me a little bit of the inflemming in the trout memo and people can look up here on time but people can go and research that it's just but it sounds like the sort of thing that I mean if you make if you if you put that on a novel people will that's ridiculous you know that's that's too far fetched you know but the truth is reality is often so much stranger than fiction so much more extravagant this was a genuine plot this was a genuine plan the Pentagon had a had a fallback incredible incredible and but in the minute we have left I want to let you go so many more questions for you but we're going to leave it with with redwood your latest book everybody needs to add this to the library and needs to go see you on tour when you come to talk about it that'd be so much fun I hope it works out and I can come say say hello to you in person but where did he first come on your radar where did you first hear of of this story I got to know Ian McCready who lives in the States now so the case officer who ran

1:00:30Vladimir Kuzitskyn has become a friend and he told me this story and I have to admit this makes it in laugh when he initially told me this story I didn't believe it I just didn't believe it just didn't seem credible to me but I've since interviewed every MI6 officer who was involved in it everybody who knows about the case and you know it's really it doesn't come only for me and I can't had hints about it before some of the case officers who ran oligodiesky are the same case officers who ran redwood so again I kind of knew them already but it's a story that my six is ambivalent about for obvious reasons it's unlike oligodiesky which is you know that's a straight ideological win for the west there you know he's a you know he's a straight ideological agent this is both more complicated and I think I would say it more interesting in some ways in its origins it comes from a very different human place he's not you know he is an ideal organ in some ways but really this is about human human frailty and and yet it has this incredible impact it really does so so but MI6 is is understood as the CIA is

1:01:43this is why we've not heard it before is because it's a tricky story for them well I have to let you go thank you so much for spending all this time with me everybody pick up redwood now pick up all of Ben's books add those to your to your library and and I can't wait to to dive in and read every single word of redwood so thank you for all you do sincerely appreciate it and I can't wait to read this and then find out what you're working on next so thank you so much for everything it's been a great pleasure thank you Jack all right take care bye