The handsome 6ft 4in KGB spy boss who defected - because he thought Western medicine could cure the impotence wrecking his marriage

On a hot autumn evening in Tehran, the capital city of Iran, two professional spies sat drinking vodka in a small, white-tiled bathroom on the top floor of a house in the semi-abandoned compound of the British Embassy. One was Russian and the other British.

The 6ft 4in Russian, a major in the KGB, sat precariously on a wicker laundry basket while the Englishman, perching on the toilet, leant over and refilled his guest’s glass. The MI6 officer suspected his home was bugged from attic to basement by the Iranian secret police, so, to cover the sound of their voices, the cold taps were running into the basin and bath and a radio played loudly, ironically broadcasting a reading from the Koran.

If the Islamic Revolutionary Guards overheard this conversation, they would both be arrested, interrogated and possibly executed, hung from a crane as a warning to others.

The year was 1981, two years into Iran’s tumultuous revolution in which the religious leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, had ousted the hereditary ruler, the Shah, and now presided over an increasingly hardline Islamic regime.

The most bewildering aspect of the Iranian Revolution was its cataclysmic speed. In the space of a few months, a wealthy regime with strong international support and a modern army of 400,000 men collapsed in the face of popular demonstrations. The world’s oldest empire folded and plummeted, like a kite in a hurricane.

Tehran was left a boiling crucible of espionage, bloodletting and score-settling, as suspected counter-revolutionaries, foreign spies, Leftists, Fifth Columnists and unbelievers were rooted out and eliminated by fanatical Islamist enforcers.

Khomeini was anti-American, anti-British and also vehemently anti-communist. He straddled the Cold War, calling on his followers to reject both capitalism and communism.

Amid the chaos and the carnage, there were rich pickings to be had by the rival spies of East and West, the KGB, CIA and MI6, which is what made the Russian’s story so valuable, and so very dangerous.

The handsome 6ft 4in KGB spy boss, Vladimir Kuzichkin, with his wife Galina in the early 70s

His voice masked by the running water, the KGB officer revealed that there was a plot by the Soviet Union in which an underground force of Iranian communists would seize power from the clerics and invite in the Red Army.

A Soviet occupation of Iran was the West’s worst nightmare. With its power extending all the way to the Persian Gulf, Moscow would control the warm-water ports and the oil fields. The USSR could win the Cold War. If America resorted to nuclear weapons, the world might be transformed and possibly destroyed.

The Russian knew all this because it was his task to liaise with the Iranian communists. He was the linchpin of the conspiracy. And now he was offering to swap sides and share this terrifying secret with the West.

But he needed something in return. ‘I have problem,’ he whispered, leaning forward and placing a hand on the Englishman’s knee. ‘Will you help me?’ The MI6 officer nodded, wondering what could possibly be coming next. Was he about to be propositioned in his own bathroom by an enormous Russian homosexual spy?

What the Russian now poured out in an embarrassed whisper was a plea for help unmatched even in the tangled history of espionage and double-dealing.

His problem was an emasculating medical and psychological affliction – he couldn’t perform in bed anymore and it was driving him mad.

‘In the West, there must be pills, yes? Western medicine is superior to Russian.’ The Englishman nodded, patting the hand that gripped his leg. ‘We can help you,’ he said, though he had no idea if that was true.

In the time it took to run a bath, the KGB spy became a double agent, his betrayal purchased with an extraordinary promise to restore his virility.

Vladimir Kuzichkin and MI6 officer Ian McCredie provided for book series Redwood by Ben Macintyre

The Russian’s name was Vladimir Kuzichkin. Tall and as broad as a bullock, he was instantly visible in a crowd, the biggest object in the forest. From the list of potential codenames for its newest agent, MI6 chose Redwood, the world’s tallest tree. It also had another possible meaning – red (communist) and wood (slang for an erection).

A top KGB recruit, he was a shy, awkward 33 year old. Except when drunk. Alcohol brought out the extrovert in him. He tended to drink fast and deeply, before seizing a guitar (he’d been in a rock band in his younger days) and bursting into song.

Women were drawn to this gentle, melodious giant with bright blue eyes and a shock of fair hair but he was unavailable, married for ten years to Galina, a petite, pale, sweet-faced woman two years his junior.

Kuzichkin lost his virginity to her and adored her and the ‘uncomplicated, unforgettable sex’ of their early married years. To the KGB they were the perfect KGB couple – in love with the Motherland and with each other – and ideal for a sensitive posting like Iran.

Yet, deep inside Kuzichkin, anger smouldered. Party officials were swindlers, hypocrites or thugs. The KGB was riddled with bribe-taking, nepotism, boozing, apathy and fraud. Marxist dogma, he reflected secretly, was ‘drivel’.

Kuzichkin’s disillusionment focused on the man at the pinnacle of Soviet power. He loathed General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev as ‘up to his eyes in corruption’, while displaying a chest full of bogus medals and lecturing the world on communist virtue.

According to gossip inside KGB HQ, the Soviet leader was a ‘ladies’ man’, with a particular weakness for actresses, but – a strange coincidence here – his ‘physical abilities had begun to let him down with increasing frequency’, it was said.

To cure his erectile dysfunction, the Kremlin doctors were said to have resorted to ‘Swiss pills’ and testosterone treatment which induced several small strokes, affecting his speech without solving his problem.

Whenever Kuzichkin heard Brezhnev slurring through another interminable homily, he reflected on the cause: Russia’s most powerful man was impotent.

As he and his wife set out for Tehran, he was warned by a KGB general that he would be on the front line, competing with the CIA and MI6 in a region of vital strategic importance while being spied upon by the ruthless Iranian intelligence service. He was entering an arena where failure would not be tolerated. ‘If a KGB operation should misfire, intelligence officers can expect no mercy.’

The KGB station, or rezidentura, in Tehran, the largest in the Middle East, occupied three floors of the embassy building. Thirty of its diplomats were really intelligence officers. Additional KGB personnel worked undercover as illegals: journalists, businessmen, pilots and doctors.

Gossip scorched around the embassy like grassfire. The KGB knew perfectly well who said what about whom, who was sleeping with whom, everything. What they failed to detect, however, was Kuzichkin’s unhappiness from the beginning of his time in Tehran.

Vladimir Kuzichkin with dog Archie

The Iranians had marked him down as a suspected KGB officer from the moment he arrived. As he explored the city on foot, ostensibly visiting Tehran’s many bookshops but in fact scouting for dead drop and brush-by sites where secrets could be passed to him by under-cover agents, he sensed he was being followed.

Hidden cameras recorded everyone entering and leaving the embassy compound. Soviet diplomatic cars were tailed by Iranian surveillance teams. He found the sensation of being watched day and night, inside and outside the embassy, distressing to the point of exhaustion.

He returned shaking from his first field operation, a routine rendezvous with an agent on a street corner to receive a package. ‘This was the first meeting of my life with a real agent in a hostile environment. All my nerves were on edge. I felt all the passers-by were giving me suspicious looks.’

Drained by the emotional tension, he got through a bottle of vodka on his return to his home a few hundred yards from the embassy compound and drank himself into a stupor. Kuzichkin was struggling with the pressure of espionage. He had expected the work to be taxing but was unprepared for ‘the nervous strain of preparing for a rendezvous and the stress engendered at a meeting’. On his car radio, he sometimes detected as many as four mobile teams behind or in front, two men to a vehicle.

He sensed the watchers on the street even when he could not see them, ‘breathing down my neck, treading on my heels’. At home, the telephone rang at odd hours, with no one on the line.

Sometimes he returned to find obvious ‘traces of hostile visits’: cigarette stubs in the bathroom basin, books left open, pockets of clothing turned out.

In the face of what he called this ‘overt psychological warfare’, Kuzichkin was developing symptoms of combat neurosis.

On top of which he had two undercover agents, codenamed Konrad and Evi, to run and spent days scouring the city for fresh dead letter box sites: a loose brick in a wall, behind a drainpipe, beneath a low bush in a park. An open window at a certain time of day, a newspaper left on a park bench or in myriad other ways, they would signal they had a message for him to collect.

He would pick it up, leaving an empty crushed tube of toothpaste to indicate he had got it, then spend hours recovering the content from the secret ink it had been written in before sending it on via a KGB agent who was co-pilot on the Aeroflot flights between Moscow and Tehran.

Vladimir Kuzichkin. Tall and as broad as a bullock, he was instantly visible in a crowd

Konrad and Evi were highly productive, sending long and detailed reports every six weeks on what they had picked up on their rounds of diplomatic parties and social events, but their success came with a pulsing vein of anxiety for Kuzichkin. If they were exposed, he could be destroyed along with them.

Unbeknown to his wife, a highly stressed Kuzichkin lay awake at night, plagued by dread and knowing this was not how KGB officers were supposed to feel.

Yet his career continued to flourish. He was promoted, taking charge of five KGB officers and a dozen illegals. He was also made the link man between the KGB and the Iranian communist party, the Tudeh, to prepare it to oust Khomeini and take power in Iran – Moscow’s long-term aim.

Kuzichkin protested, trying to wriggle out of a job that sounded extremely hazardous. ‘But it was pointless to argue. I had to carry out the order.’ He was engulfed by depression. ‘I tried to lose myself in work,’ he recalled, but was beset by doubts: ‘Who profits?

‘For what purpose were we risking ourselves, and not only that but exposing foreigners to mortal danger by persuading them to collaborate?’

Galina agonised over her husband’s deepening melancholy. Moments of intimacy between them were growing rarer. The evenings often ended happily, but the nights, never. As one contemporary observed, ‘Galina was his best friend, and he loved her to bits.’ The friendship was easy; the loving, less and less so.

In the eyes of his KGB colleagues, Kuzichkin had everything a man could want: an attractive wife, a supportive boss, an exciting and well-paid foreign posting with excellent prospects.

What he did not have with any reliability, and seemed increasingly unable to attain or sustain, was an erection.

Erectile dysfunction was, and remains, one of the last taboos, even though at some point in their lives, many men will experience the inability to achieve or maintain an erection sufficient for satisfactory intercourse.

At least one in ten cases is connected to depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress or a deteriorating relationship.

Vladimir Kuzichkin in his band The Brothers, which he was a part of in his younger days 

Early remedies included aphrodisiacs such as ambergris from the digestive systems of sperm whales. In the 18th and 19th centuries, impotence was thought to be caused by masturbation. Treatments included tepid baths, enemas, perineal electric stimulation, flagellation and Spanish Fly (dried blister beetles) applied to the genitals in a cold-water bath.

These treatments had just one thing in common: they did not work. For centuries, male inability to copulate was incurable, unmentionable and therefore comic to those who did not suffer from it.

For a man like Vladimir Kuzichkin it was the ultimate humiliation, an inexplicable curse, mysterious and mortifying.

He told no one of his problem. If he consulted one of the Russian doctors, gossip would be swirling around the embassy in hours. He would become a laughing stock. His career would be over.

Kuzichkin lived in a world of secrecy, but his erectile dysfunction was a secret more dangerous, and more closely held, than any other. The only person who knew was Galina, and she did not want to talk about it either.

The problems started a year after the couple arrived in Iran and grew steadily worse as the stress of his work increased. With growing frequency, he was unable to make love, and the greater his performance anxiety, the worse the performance.

The higher Kuzichkin rose in KGB ranks, the worse his dysfunction grew. Increasing stress, the violence on the streets of Tehran, alcohol, depression, disillusionment and fear that his shameful secret might be exposed – all were swirling into a sexual nightmare from which he could see no escape.

His bedroom failings grew ever more acute. He kept trying, with urgency and shame, and he kept failing. His urgent desire to achieve sexual satisfaction for both of them only deepened the humiliation when he could not.

Vladimir Kuzichkin in military service

Sometimes he blamed Galina. Sometimes, desperate and enraged, she blamed him. ‘You are less than a man,’ she sneered, after another sexual flop. ‘I am going to tell other wives how useless in bed you are.’

She immediately regretted the outburst. Galina was as lost as he was. After each fiasco, Kuzichkin hit the bottle, hard, but the more he drank, the worse his problem became.

Then one day one of the embassy typists, a friend of Galina, passed him in a corridor and remarked nastily: ‘What evil tongues some people have.’

He asked her sharply what she meant but she turned away, leaving him fretting.

Was she referring to his bedroom performance, or rather the lack of it? Was Galina complaining to her friends about her husband’s sexual failings? The experience of impotence was embarrassing enough, but the suspicion that others knew and were sniggering behind his back, compounded his shame.

His world was falling apart. Out of the blue, his prize agents, Konrad and Evi, went missing after flying to Switzerland where their regularly topped-up KGB funding was lodged in a bank account for them to dip into as they saw fit. After two months, there was still no trace of them.

The bosses at the Centre, KGB HQ in the dreaded Lubyanka in Moscow, blamed Kuzichkin, ‘the tone of their telegrams growing increasingly accusatory’.

Paranoid, depressed, often drunk, Kuzichkin was appalled by the inhumanity of revolutionary Iran. ‘Hundreds were being executed daily.’ The Tudeh, the Moscow-controlled, Iranian communist party – with whom he was liaising – was playing ‘an active part’ in the slaughter. Every meeting with a Tudeh contact left him drained and quaking.

Vladimir Kuzichkin and Galina at the National Botanical Gardens, Tehran 1977

He was conspiring with people who were encouraging the bloodshed, skimming off money for themselves and manoeuvring to take power: ‘I wanted no part of it. I now began to examine my own involvement in this filth.’

His impotence obsessed him. Galina now shrank from his touch, confused and distraught. ‘Something must be done,’ he told himself. He would find a woman to have sex with. That would prove he was still a man. It might jump-start sex with Galina. It might make her love him again.

This would be Kuzichkin’s second foray into adultery.

His first, in Moscow not long into their marriage, had been brief but sexually satisfactory. Galina’s mother had spotted him on the street holding a bunch of flowers on his way to an assignation and issued a sharp reprimand that put a stop to the dalliance. His second would be more of a test, a trial of manliness, a verification of virility.

A prostitute was out of the question. The Ayatollah’s religious government had recently demolished Tehran’s red light district with bulldozers, ejecting 1,500 prostitutes, pimps and brothel-keepers.

Sex workers were flogged, imprisoned and occasionally executed. Buying sex was far too dangerous. The woman for Kuzichkin’s purposes would have to be within the Soviet community.

‘A girlfriend might solve the problem and reawaken the libido,’ he reflected. Women had always found him attractive. ‘In the embassy extra-marital and inter-marital relationships were commonplace, and sexual licence was quite widespread,’ he noted.

At an after-work drinks party he spotted an Aeroflot stewardess, single, attractive, quite drunk and evidently available. He made his approach. Tatyana responded positively, and soon they were in bed in her hotel room.

Then, nothing. Despite his best efforts, and hers, he was unable to make love. Tatyana told him to go home. His masculinity-affirming one-night stand had wilted before it began.

More humiliated than ever, he slunk back to the apartment, where Galina was already asleep, and slipped guiltily into the marital bed, his place of shame.

His job took an even greater turn for the worse when a telegram from the Centre announced that Konrad and Evi had been arrested in Switzerland immediately on arrival from Tehran. During interrogation, they revealed their real names and that they belonged to the KGB. They had been charged with spying.

Kuzichkin was now directly in the firing line. Under cross-examination in court, the couple could reveal enough to identify him as their KGB handler. If he was exposed, he would be sent back to Moscow.

If they disclosed to the world in court how they had been trained and run, the wrath of his superiors would be truly dire: he would be kicked out of the KGB with maximum force. As he reeled from the news and its possibly devastating consequences, he was offered an unexpected lifeline. His immediate boss had been to a party the night before at the Swedish Embassy, under whose protection the handful of British diplomats were allowed to operate, on condition they did not take part in any subversive activity.

‘We have a new neighbour,’ Kuzichkin’s boss told him. ‘The British have appointed a new diplomat. I have met him before, in Pakistan. He is an intelligence officer, the MI6 head of station, my opposite number. We will need to keep an eye on him.’

A British spy next door. The thought brought the glimmerings of a plan, a bold stroke that might take away the pain, solve all his problems and allow for a fresh start. For the first time in months, Kuzichkin felt a flicker of hope.

Adapted from Redwood by Ben Macintyre (Viking, £25). © Ben Macintyre 2026. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid to September 27; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to: mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.