According to Deadline, British actor and filmmaker Amma Asante has signed on to direct an adaptation of David E. Hoffman’s The Billion Dollar Spy. The movie will be about Adolf Tolkachev, the former chief engineer of the Soviet Union’s Research Institute Of Radio Engineering. During the Cold War, Tolkachev lost faith in his government and made contact with CIA operatives, eventually providing the Americans with “over tens of thousands of pages of highly classified documents” for virtually no compensation and coming up with new ways to provide the CIA with intel when its own procedures weren’t secure enough for him. He went on to be “the crown jewel” of the U.S. government’s spy network, until a rogue CIA officer who defected to the Soviet Union gave hm up to the KBG. Tolkachev was then arrested and executed.
The movie version will be produced by Walden Media and Akiva Goldsman.