Did the West win the Cold War because of one obscure KGB officer’s private misery? That’s the question Gerard Baker takes from Ben Macintyre’s new book, ‘Redwood,’ in Tuesday’s Journal, and we’ll put it clinically and move on: Vladimir Kuzichkin, a Soviet agent in Tehran in the early 1980s, suffered from erectile dysfunction, believed Western medicine could fix it, and offered a British agent his secrets in exchange for a new life. He got the life, and eventually the cure — which, Baker notes drily, owed nothing to Western medicine.
The secrets mattered. Kuzichkin’s haul exposed a 1982 plot by Iran’s communist Tudeh party to seize power with Soviet tanks and troops behind it. Britain and the U.S. passed it to the still-fragile Islamist leadership, which executed thousands of Iranian communists, expelled key Soviet diplomats and spies, and set the Iran–U.S.S.R. relationship back by years. Macintyre’s bold claim is that without it, Moscow might have taken Iran — and with it the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz — two years after it took Afghanistan, with an American contingency plan waiting that could have meant all-out war. Baker’s inner skeptic points out that the Soviets failed in Afghanistan and were already coming apart at home.
But the book’s real subject isn’t Iran. It’s contingency. Baker runs the list: the lone Soviet lieutenant colonel who in 1983 refused to believe his computer screen when it said an American missile was on its way; the archduke’s car taking the wrong turn in Sarajevo in 1914; the flight-school arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001 that nobody followed up. In each case, Baker allows, you can argue the big forces would have produced the same result by another route — and then he asks the harder question: can we be sure?
Why we prefer the tidy story
His answer is the useful part. We give primacy to “vast impersonal forces because they make us feel more secure” — an orderly chain of causes we can name feels like a world we can understand and act in; a history that turns on chance and the private troubles of strangers feels like one we can’t. So we tell the tidy version afterward and believe it. Historians have a name for that habit. So do investors: the narrative fallacy.
Our read
This is a Behavioral piece, and the market version is familiar if you watched this week. The S&P 500 closed at a record on Tuesday, and by breakfast Wednesday there were a dozen clean explanations for why it had been inevitable all along — each of which would have been quietly retired had the index fallen instead. We do it with oil shocks, with elections, with earnings. The story arrives after the price, gets promoted to a cause, and the next trade gets built on it. That’s how a concentrated bet gets made: a tidy narrative plus the comfort Baker describes.
The house’s defense is dull on purpose: write the rule before the story. Buy on dates and drawdowns set in advance, not on explanations assembled afterward; name in print what would prove you wrong, and say so when it does. This desk’s fall caution was wrong on timing, and we’ve said so this week — a hinge point of our own, filed under ‘can we be sure?’ Nothing is added this edition; the books are held at weight. If your portfolio has a position that rests on a story you could tell beautifully in hindsight, that’s the one to review first. The umbrella you want is the one you packed before the forecast made sense.