One KGB Spy’s Bedroom Secret Changed the Middle East

Ben Macintyre on Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and the strangest book he has ever written.

In 1943, British intelligence floated a dead body off the coast of Spain with letters from an officer who had never existed. The Germans believed it. In 1941, a professional safe-cracker parachuted into Britain by the Nazis immediately switched sides. In 1979, a senior KGB officer in Tehran agreed to spy for Britain because he wanted erectile dysfunction medication the West didn't actually have.

Ben Macintyre has spent 30 years telling these stories for The Times and in bestselling books that became films, a TV series, and a West End musical. In this conversation he covers the Cambridge spy recruiter who nearly made him an intelligence officer, why he prefers bad men doing good things to heroes, the chain from Ian Fleming's imagination to a real wartime deception to a Broadway singalong, and the new book Redwood, completely unknown until now, about the KGB spy whose private problem changed the shape of the modern Middle East.

The Cambridge tap-on-the-shoulder opener is exactly who Macintyre is. The Operation Mincemeat section is the best account of how fiction becomes reality becomes fiction again. And the Redwood reveal at the end is the most genuinely surprising thing this show has aired.