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
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