IN DEVELOPMENT

What’s inside the heart of a person who manipulates and deceives for a living? What part of a spy’s humanity remains intact as they wreak havoc and destruction on their targets, their rivals, and ultimately their own lives?

GOLD takes these questions and puts them into a divided city searching for its soul – Berlin in the 1950s. Split into four sectors, the war-torn city provides the battleground for the Cold War, a bitter conflict between two superpowers and their ideologies. There is no end in sight. The stakes are higher than ever in human history. Both sides have the power to destroy all life on earth. Both fear that the other will use it.

Based on the true story of the CIA's audacious attempt to build a spy tunnel into the Soviet sector of East Berlin to prevent a possible nuclear strike, the show focuses on three spies and their nail-biting race against each other and their complex personal lives.

A city in ruins. A secret spy tunnel. A CIA veteran, a British double agent and a young Stasi officer engaged in a high stake game of cat and mouse. GOLD is an epic thriller that crackles with tension, suspense and high political drama at a thrilling moment in time: traitors and spies, surveillance and counter surveillance, aggressive superpowers jostling for advantage in secretive ways. Not much has changed, we will find. Looking at the dark and dangerous world of the Cold War means holding a mirror to our own.

GOLD is deeply personal. Our spies grapple with their ideological and personal commitments. What happens when these commitments collide? Can you be a good spy and a loyal husband, parent, friend and patriot?

Put the soul of a spy under a microscope and what do you see?

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BACKSTORY: THE REAL SPIES

BILL HARVEY is the CIA’s smartest spy, which is why they sent him to run the Berlin station. A brilliant operator, Bill is also a loose cannon. A functioning alcoholic who is drunk by noon and keeps cocking his guns inside his pockets for sport. He has staked his career on the tunnel and desperately needs it to succeed. He's also running away from a destructive marriage back home. So he's not just using the tunnel to chase professional glory, he's also chasing the light at the end of it. It just may save his life. But there's a major flaw in his plan. The Soviets are already aware of the planned CIA spy tunnel, and they have a mole inside the project.

GEORGE BLAKE is a British intelligence officer whose expertise on Russia has earned him an essential spot in the tunnel mission. Nobody assumes that Blake is a double agent. He swore loyalty to the communist cause in a Soviet prison camp during the Korean War. Now that loyalty is about to be severely tested. Because the KGB order him not to interfere with the tunnel. They don't want to reveal that they have a mole in the highest ranks of British intelligence. However, Blake knows that if the tunnel succeeds and Soviet phone lines are tapped, he risks being unmasked. That would destroy his marriage and end his career. But what he fears even more is to be exposed for what he is. A traitor. So he risks everything and embarks on a reckless solo mission to sabotage the tunnel.

Enter our third spy, and the most brilliant of all. MARKUS WOLF is a rising star in the Stasi, the East German intelligence Service. What makes Wolf the greatest spy of his generation isn’t just his intelligence and skill set – it’s his unique story and the fact that he actually believes in what he does. Raised by Jewish parents who fled the Nazis and found refuge in Moscow, Wolf is passionate about the socialist utopia the new East German State is built upon. He has returned to rebuild the country he was once forced to flee. This is his true homeland, and he will do anything to protect it.