HISTORY: Impotent Russian spy gave away state secrets in exchange for treatment.

In 1981, as Iran’s new government hunted down political opponents, a KGB officer slipped into a bathroom in the British Embassy compound in Tehran. Vladimir Kuzichkin, 6-foot-4 and broad-shouldered, sat on a wicker laundry basket that creaked beneath him. Across from him, MI6 officer Ian McCredie sat on the toilet.

McCredie poured the Russian another vodka. He left the faucets running and turned on a radio to drown out their conversation. If the Revolutionary Guards overheard them, “they would both be arrested, interrogated, imprisoned, and possibly executed, once the torture was completed,” writes British journalist Ben Macintyre in his new book, “Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy” (Crown), out now.

Kuzichkin had come with Soviet secrets. He also had a very personal and bizarre question for McCredie, though he was in no hurry to ask it.

From there, things got weird.