Damian Lewis: Spy Wars

At a time when the Cold War spying game was in full swing, Oleg Gordievsky was one of the KGB’s rising stars...and biggest traitors. For years, he provided top-secret Russian intelligence to the British, but he is best remembered for risking his life in 1983 to pull the world back from the brink of nuclear annihilation. Presented by host Damian Lewis and backed by firsthand accounts by Gordievsky himself, we detail the spy’s incredible career as a double agent and his gripping defection out of Russia.

It was the largest surveillance operation in British history, involving 800 agents monitoring 24 suspects around the clock in order to thwart a fiendish terrorist plot. Host Damian Lewis examines the 2006 joint investigation between MI5, London’s Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Unit, and the CIA to track down a homegrown Al Qaeda cell in east London and stop its plan to blow up multiple U.S.-bound passenger planes using liquid bombs.

It was the biggest East-West swap since the Cold War: four CIA and MI6 agents traded for ten deep cover Russian agents caught posing as Americans across the country. The 2010 spy exchange itself was global news, but the events leading up to and following the trade would shock the world to its core. Join host Damian Lewis as he details the Russian plot and how the undoing of this operation marked the beginning of a new era of espionage with an ex-KGB spymaster at its heart: Vladimir Putin.

He was the most dangerous mole in intelligence history, an FBI security specialist who supplied the KGB with the identities of hundreds of U.S. double agents in Russia and thousands of pages of America’s most closely guarded secrets. This is the story of Robert Hanssen, who systematically compromised every single operative the FBI had working in Russia. Host Damian Lewis reveals how Hanssen’s actions pitted the CIA against the FBI and triggered a mole hunt that brought the American intelligence services to their knees.

In November 1979, 53 American employees of the U.S. Embassy in Iran were taken hostage by Islamic revolutionaries. Six diplomats managed to escape, but getting out of the country seemed impossible. Enter CIA officer Tony Mendez, who used inspiration from Hollywood to school six frightened diplomats in the art of assuming false identities and pulled off a bold rescue mission during one of the darkest moments in American foreign policy history.

Once a rising star in the KGB during the 1960s, Vladimir Vetrov found himself pushed down the pecking order and stuck in a demeaning desk job. Disgruntled and seeking revenge, he made a decision that helped hasten the collapse of the entire Soviet system. Revisit one of the biggest spy stories of the Cold War and follow double agent Vetrov as he undermines the KGB’s industrial espionage mission against the West by feeding faulty technology back to the Russians.