Night Three : Episode 3

Airdate : 19th August, 2007

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 part 8

Night 2 : Episode 2

AIRDATE: AUGUST 12 8/7c


Jack McAuliffe is in Hungary. It is 1956, and the Hungarian uprising is in its infancy. His contact is Elizabet (Natascha McElhone), an English woman whose husband was killed by the Allamvedelmi Hatosag (AVH), the Hungarian secret police, and whose daughter was taken and put into a special camp. She now works with the resistance and takes Jack to meet Arpad Zelk (Misel Maticevic), a poet who heads it up. But Jack’s message from the CIA is not one Arpad wants to hear. Jack tells him that the CIA wants the uprising to be postponed until better plans can be laid to prevent war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Jack tells Arpad about the Soviet tanks poised to move into Hungary should the uprising go forward.

Jack’s presence in Hungary attracts the attention of the AVH, who arrest and brutally torture him. Elizabet is also captured and tortured, forcing Jack to tell the AVH what message he brought the resistance from the CIA. But Jack lies and tells them that the United States will fully back the revolutionaries.

Meanwhile, the CIA brass weigh their options on how to get Jack released. James Angleton believes that it would be impossible to attempt getting Jack out, since he’s not supposed to be there in the first place. Leo Kritzky vocally disagrees, however, and suggests a plan to have Sorcerer contact his KGB counterpart, Oskar Ugor-Molody and explain how it is against both nation’s interests to start taking agents into custody. After Sorcerer’s meeting with Ugor-Molody, Jack is removed from his cell just as the uprising begins in the streets.

As the AVH try to move Jack to another facility, the car is mobbed, and Arpad rescues Jack just before a firing squad kills him and the AVH officers. Arpad and Jack then rush to free Elizabet. As the violence in the streets escalates, Jack pushes Arpad to take control of the situation and stop the killing, but Arpad says there’s no way he could even if he wanted to.

Jack sends a message to the CIA begging for the U.S. to back up the Hungarians. But nobody is willing to do anything more than start rumors circulating that the U.S. is about to providing such support, even though no support will be forthcoming. But the rumors don’t work, since the CIA mole named Sasha passes the information about the ruse onto the Russians. The Soviet Union sends tanks into Hungary and begins putting down the resistance with deadly force. During the violent mayhem, Arpad is killed. Jack and Elizabet make their way to Austria, where she is finally reunited with her daughter.

Wisner takes the deaths of the Hungarian Freedom Fighters personally, and is eventually hospitalized in a mental health facility. Hungary, Angleton tells Jack, broke him.

Five years later, Jack is assigned by the CIA to help Cuban rebels prepare to retake their country from Castro. He first heads to Nicaragua, where the rebel soldiers led by Roberto Escalona (Raoul Bova), are training. Jack works as a liason for the Cuban Rebels, making sure they get whatever they need, while back in Washington, Angleton questions why the United States should be involved in such an action against a foreign leader, especially when there is a mole in their midst. Angleton is rebuffed, however, his claims of a mole named Sasha being characterized as nothing more than paranoia.

CIA bureaucrat Dick Bissell (Martin Doyle) is convinced that Kennedy will back the rebels should they get into trouble. He also assigns Sorcerer to work with the Cosa Nostra in an attempt to poison Castro’s favorite treat: a vanilla milkshake. But the plan fails.

As the invasion gets under way, Jack’s team is able to take the beach at the Bay of Pigs. But they cannot hold it for long. Castro orders a ground and air assault leaving the band of rebels helpless. Jack calls on Washington to send in air cover, but no help is forthcoming. Castro is able to quash the invasion quickly, forcing Jack to escape from Cuba to avoid being captured.

Feeling the United States let the Cuban rebels down, Jack decides to resign from the CIA. But Leo is able to remind him why they joined in the first place. For his bravery in Cuba, Jack is awarded a medal, which he accepts with a heavy heart. He is no longer the naïve optimist who joined up to save the world from communism. He is now a changed man who has perhaps lost faith in the very country he swore to protect.

Part 1 Part 2 Part3 Part4 Part5 Part6 Part7 Part8

Night One: Episode 1

NIGHT ONE
AIRDATE: 5-8-2007

It is January 1954 in West Berlin. Brilliant CIA operative Harvey Torriti (Alfred Molina), code-named Sorcerer, and his young assistant, Jack McAuliffe (Chris O’Donnell), code-named Apprentice, make contact with a man who seeks to defect with his family from East Germany. In exchange, he offers Sorcerer the name of a KGB mole working in MI6. The Sorcerer agrees to the plan and arranges for the defection to take place. Unfortunately, however, the KGB gets wind of the plan and interferes. As a result, it becomes clear to Sorcerer and to CIA counter-intelligence specialist James Jesus Angleton (Michael Keaton), code-named Mother, that it was the MI6 mole who gave away the information. But who that mole is remains unknown.

Jack is a Yale graduate, recruited right out of college to serve as a field agent for the CIA. One of his best friends, Leo Kritzky (Alessandro Nivola), is also recruited by the CIA, but takes up different path as he falls in love with and marries Adelle (Kristin Booth), whose father works for President Truman. While Jack learns spy-craft in West Berlin under the mentorship of Sorcerer, Leo uses his skills and connections to work his way into the upper echelons of the CIA.

Jack and Leo’s other friend, Yevgeny Tsipin (Rory Cochrane), the third of their college-days “troika” and a Russian national, is approached after graduation by Starik, a family friend who recruits him into the KGB and immediately begins training him to be a spy. It is during these early days that Yevgeny meets and falls in love with a young Jewish woman named Azalia (Erika Marozsan), who is at work on a book detailing the crimes against Jews under the Stalin regime. Their love affair, however, is cut short when Starik convinces Yevgeny it’s time to go to the United States and start playing his part in the game. He moves into an apartment in Washington, D.C. under the name Eugene Dodgson, receiving his orders through a radio quiz show that uses quotes from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a cue. Later, when he attempts to call Azalia, she is picked up and taken by the Starik and the KGB.

Sorcerer heads to England to meet with Elihu Epstein (Simon Callow), an MI6 agent who tells him of a rumored MI6 mole named Parsifal. Sorcerer then convinces Epstein to help him feeding bits of misinformation through MI6 in order to flush out a mole, a process known as a “barium meal.” His plan works, and he learns the identity of the mole. He immediately goes to Washington to reveal the name to the directors of the CIA, but first pays a visit to Angleton’s house to fill him in. As Angleton cares for his precious orchids, a process he likens to counterespionage, Sorcerer presents the evidence that the mole is Angleton’s own close friend and the CIA’s MI6 liaison, Adrian Philby (Tom Hollander), and that Angleton is partially responsible for the leak since he shared a great deal of information with Philby.

Meanwhile, Jack is ordered to begin receiving intelligence information from a ballet dancer named Lili (Alexandra Maria Lara), code-named Rainbow. While she delivers info to Jack, the CIA places a microphone secretly in the apartment she shares with a theoretical physics professor to whom she owes her life. Through their frequent contact, Jack finds himself drawn to Lilli romantically. She resists at first, knowing the danger in which such a relationship would place them, but in time she comes to love Jack intensely.

Once positioned in the United States, Yevgeny is ordered to drop a package off for Philby, whose KGB code-name is Parsifal. Upon arriving, Philby tells him that Sorcerer is onto his trail, information Yevgeny then passes along to the KGB for action. This information makes its way to West Berlin, where a former acquaintance of Jack’s tries to bribe him for information on the Sorcerer’s whereabouts and other information about their work in West Berlin. Jack refuses, but the KGB isn’t quick to take no for an answer.

Jack later discovers that the information Lili had been feeding him doesn’t match with the information they had been getting from the bug in her apartment. Lili confesses that she was coerced to provide misinformation by the KGB, who threatened to murder the professor if she didn’t help them trap Jack and Sorcerer. She convinces Jack to let her return to her apartment to get the professor, so that Jack can help them escape. But when she arrives at the apartment, she finds the professor has apparently committed suicide. And the East German police are now at her door. In an act of desperation, she takes a gun and kills herself.

Feeling the noose tightening, Philby is ordered to leave the United States and go to the Soviet Union. He does so reluctantly after he learns that Starik already has another mole in place. And this one is within the CIA itself.

Episode 1:

Part1
Part2
Part3
Part4
Part5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8

Episode 2:

Part1
Part2
Part3
Part4
Part5
Part6
Part7
Part8