WASHINGTON, July 23 (RIA Novosti) – A new series set to air next year on US television will center around the work of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the battle for global supremacy between the United States and Russia at the twilight of the Cold War in the 1980s, the entertainment website Deadline.com reported Tuesday.
The series, titled “The Assets,” has been ordered by the ABC television network and will be based on a book exploring US authorities’ real-life hunt for Aldrich Ames, a former CIA officer who spied for the Soviet Union and Russia and is thought to have compromised at least 10 US agents who were later executed.
ABC has secured the television rights to the 2012 book, “Circle of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed,” which was written by retired CIA officers Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille, The Hollywood Reporter said on its website Tuesday.
Ames was convicted in 1994 after pleading guilty to spying for the Soviet Union and Russia beginning in 1985 and is thought to have compromised at least 100 US intelligence operations by providing information to Moscow in addition to fingering Soviet agents spying for the United States.
The planned ABC series comes in the wake of the success of “The Americans,” a critically acclaimed series on the FX network that premiered earlier this year which follows the lives of two married Soviet sleeper agents living in the United States in the early 1980s.
