More series adaptations coming from Ben Macintyre books after A Spy Among Friends

The series adaptations will be helmed by A Spy Among Friends lead actor Damian Lewis and producer Alexander Cary. A Spy Among Friends, the story of British spies Kim Philby and Nicholas Elliott starring Damian Lewis and Guy Pearce, recently premiered on MGM+.

The series, produced by Sony Pictures Television, is based on the book of the same name by Ben Macintyre. Alexander Cary, who executive produced the Showtime thriller series Homeland, starring Lewis, also created the television series A Spy Among Friends.



Cary (pictured) and Lewis, who also produced the MGM+ drama, were on Deadline TV Contenders to talk about the series. They are now turning their attention to more Macintryre books for the small screen.

The first is an adaptation of The Spy and the Traitor, the greatest espionage story of the Cold War. The book tells the story of Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB colonel who became bureau chief in London and provided information to the British secret service MI6 as a double agent.

It tells the story of how on a warm evening in July 1985, a middle-aged man stood on the sidewalk of a busy avenue in the heart of Moscow with a plastic carrier bag in hand. In his gray suit and tie, he looked like any other Soviet citizen. Only the bag stood out somewhat, with the red logo of Safeway, the British supermarket. The man was a spy. As a senior KGB officer, he had spent more than a decade supplying his British spies with a stream of priceless secrets from deep within the Soviet intelligence machine. No spy had done more damage to the KGB. The Safeway bag was a signal: to activate his escape plan to be smuggled out of Soviet Russia.



Lewis (pictured) previously starred in and produced a documentary series Spy Wars with Damian Lewis with British production company Alaska TV for the Smithsonian Channel and History UK, telling Gordievsky's story.

Lewis told Deadline that he will be directing the Gordievsky film adaptation with Cary.

"I think, contractually actually, Alexander Cary is bound to two whole jobs, so I can't jump ship now... I'll be co-producing the Gordievsky book with Alex," he said.

Cary, who has an overall deal with Sony Pictures Television, also revealed that he has Macintryre's Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle in development.

That book follows an unlikely group of British officers who plan daring escapes from their German prisoners from a stark Gothic hilltop castle in the heart of Nazi Germany during World War II.

The book explores the elite members of the Colditz Bullingdon Club to become America's oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent, and Colditz's soldier-prisoners were courageous and resilient, but also vulnerable and fearful, and astonishingly resourceful in their desperate escapes from the grounds of the prisoner of war camp Oflag IV-C for officers in World War II.