The KGB Double Agent Who Stopped Armageddon with Ben McIntyre
Dan Snow's History Hit

The KGB Double Agent Who Stopped Armageddon with Ben McIntyre

B2Upper-intermediateSeptember 14, 202641 min

This is an extraordinary story of espionage, betrayal and an unlikely friendship between spies on opposite sides - and of a man who risked his life and shaped the course of history, for a deeply personal and unlikely reason. In 1981, Washington feared a Soviet takeover of Iran could trigger military intervention and potentially a nuclear war. A KGB officer - Vladimir Kouzichkin - was stationed in revolutionary Iran. He was codenamed Agent Redwood and worked with British intelligence to expose the Soviet Union's operations in Iran... in exchange for a cure to a very private medical problem. <...

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B2 · Upper-intermediate

Comfortable if you already follow TV news

A1 33%A2 34%B1 21%B2 9%C1 3%
  • 88% of the words are B1 or easier.
  • 182 words a minute: natural, fairly fast speech.
  • 241 harder words (B2 and up) in the whole episode.

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0:30

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history hit. Some stories are so wild, so far-fetched that they can scarcely be believed. And that's what I love about history. You get to be blown away by the strangest, most unlikely and bizarre things that have ever happened on this planet. And those are exactly the kinds of tales that Ben McIntyre writes about.

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