Is there an audiobook of Redwood?

Yes. Redwood has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Ben Macintyre.

How long is the Redwood audiobook?

The Redwood audiobook runs 17 hr 24 min.

Is Redwood on Kindle+?

No. Redwood was not included with Kindle+ when we last checked on October 25, 2026.

What formats is Redwood available in?

On Amazon, Redwood comes as a Kindle ebook, a paperback and a hardcover.

Our review

RedwoodThe Untold Story of the Cold War's Most Extraordinary Spy

Name: Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War's Most Extraordinary Spy
Author: Ben Macintyre

Ben Macintyre

4.5/ 5 · Outstanding

Redwood by Ben Macintyre is a Cold War spy history about KGB Major Vladimir Kuzichkin, who turns to MI6 in 1981 from his post in revolutionary Tehran. It's narrative nonfiction that reads like a thriller, and it follows the young British officer charged with getting him out alive.

Narrated by Ben Macintyre

Audiobook · 17 hr 24 min

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How the narration holds up

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The Review

Our take

Vladimir Kuzichkin has a good job and a bad secret. In 1981 he is a KGB major, the best Soviet officer in Iran, running agents in Tehran and working with a hidden network of Iranian communists while the new Islamic regime settles in. What he wants is simple: his own side must never learn something about his private life, because exposure would end his career and send him into exile. So he does the one thing a man in his position can't afford to do and approaches Britain's MI6. That's the engine of Redwood, Ben Macintyre's latest Cold War spy history, and it's a sturdy one. Here is a man whose worst enemy is his own employer's curiosity.

Stated plainly, Macintyre's argument is that this one defection mattered far beyond the two services involved, and that its consequences still shape the world. The espionage half of the book carries that claim with ease. Ian McCredie, a young undercover MI6 officer, becomes the man who must pull Kuzichkin's information out to the West and, when things turn bad, design an escape that the odds say will fail. Macintyre treats tradecraft as a job of slow logistics and patient nerves rather than a string of gunfights, and the detail is dense enough to make you trust him. If you read The Spy and the Traitor, you'll recognize the method: a real operation, rebuilt from archives and interviews with the people who lived it, and told with a novelist's sense of when to tighten.

Tehran helps. The city in these pages is a place where the revolution is still hardening, where Iranian intelligence, the KGB, the CIA, and others circle one another, and where nobody's motive is quite what it appears. The cast is wide, and it's a pleasure to watch Macintyre keep it straight, with enough Persian political history folded in that a reader with only a vague memory of the revolution can follow what's at stake. Along the way he finds room for a friendship between men from opposing services, and for marriage, loyalty, and betrayal at the personal scale. When the pursuit finally closes in and Kuzichkin has to run for the border, readers who have followed Macintyre for years call it one of the best chase sequences they've read, in fiction or out. I'd agree that the book's pulse is strongest there.

It has real weaknesses, and they're worth knowing about. Some readers find the chronology thin, with too few dates to anchor events, so that the story occasionally blurs when you'd like it sharp. A few feel the early going leans on Kuzichkin's backstory more than the espionage needs. And the larger framing is where the argument wobbles. The notion that this affair stood between the world and nuclear catastrophe, with the American government quietly weighing a nuclear response to a Soviet move against the Ayatollah, strikes more than one reader as overstated, and the sweeping closing verdicts on what it all meant feel simpler than the careful reporting that precedes them.

Why you should read

Readers of The Spy and the Traitor
Fans of Cold War espionage history
Anyone curious about Iran after the revolution
Nonfiction readers who want thriller pacing

What to expect

Narrative history that moves like a spy novel
Heavy, patient detail on how espionage works
A big cast across KGB, MI6, CIA, and Iranian intelligence
A tense escape sequence near the end
Few dates to anchor the timeline

Still, the claim doesn't need the nuclear stakes to work. The strongest evidence for it is a single frightened man, a patient British officer, and a revolution that was watching both. Macintyre is at his best when he stays in the room with them, and in Redwood he mostly does.

Reviewed by Ellis · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.5/ 5

Outstanding

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Where to read or listen

Is there an audiobook of Redwood?: Yes. Redwood has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Ben Macintyre.
Listen free with Audible
We earn from qualifying Amazon purchases.
How long is the Redwood audiobook?: The Redwood audiobook runs 17 hr 24 min.
Is Redwood on Kindle+?: No. Redwood was not included with Kindle+ when we last checked on October 25, 2026.
What formats is Redwood available in?: On Amazon, Redwood comes as a Kindle ebook, a paperback and a hardcover.

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Common questions

What is Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War's Most Extraordinary Spy about?: Vladimir Kuzichkin has a good job and a bad secret. In 1981 he is a KGB major, the best Soviet officer in Iran, running agents in Tehran and working with a hidden network of Iranian communists while the new Islamic regime settles in. What he wants is simple: his own side must never learn something…
Is Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War's Most Extraordinary Spy worth reading?: We scored Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War's Most Extraordinary Spy 4.5 out of 5. Redwood by Ben Macintyre is a Cold War spy history about KGB Major Vladimir Kuzichkin, who turns to MI6 in 1981 from his post in revolutionary Tehran. It's narrative nonfiction that reads like a thriller, and it follows the young British officer charged with getting him out…

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