An Evening with Ben Macintyre

Redwood: The Spy Who Saved the World

Join Ben Macintyre, the legendary historian and author behind SAS: Rogue Heroes, Operation Mincemeat, and The Spy and the Traitor, with his most gripping Cold War story yet. 

The year is 1981. Tehran is in turmoil in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. The Soviets are planning to overthrow the Ayatollah's Islamist regime, and the US is secretly considering their nuclear arsenal in reply. 

KGB Major Vladimir Kuzichkin, codename “Redwood”, was the best Soviet officer in Iran, but Redwood had a problem, a sexual secret that, if revealed, would humiliate him and his colleagues, cost him his job, and send him into exile. Desperate for a solution, he reached out to the only place he believed he’d find help: MI6. 

Live on stage, Ben Macintyre tells the gripping tale of Kuzichkin, as Iranian and Soviet intelligence close in on the double-agent, and how a young MI6 officer, Ian McCredie, designed and executed an improbably high-stakes extraction for Kuzichkin whose intelligence shaped our world today. 

Drawing on never-before-seen material from official archives and his own interviews with officers from MI6 and MI5, the KGB and the CIA, Ben lifts the lid on history's ‘Great Game’ and investigates how espionage really works.

“Ben Macintyre has a rare ability to turn history and espionage upside down and give us true, colourful stories that astound us as they draw us in. Redwood might be his best.” John Grisham

“Macintyre writes with the diligence and insight of a journalist, and the panache of a born storyteller.” John Banville, The Guardian

Book inclusion:  All tickets include a copy of Redwood by Ben Macintyre which will be distributed on the night of the event. Books must be collected on the night and cannot be delivered after the event. Only VIP ticket holders will have the opportunity to have their books signed.