Synopsis
Ten years after the senseless death of his daughter, journalist John Capriotti is still trying to come to terms with his grief.
It’s November 1990 and the West is moving inexorably towards Desert Storm and the desert war which will remove Saddam’s forces from Kuwait. Sent to Moscow to cover the West’s final attempts to reach a peaceful solution, Capriotti is more interested in learning about Gorbachev’s new Russia.
Capriotti and Dan Daniels, a forty year Reuter’s veteran, visit a club run by ex-KGB and “new order” businessman, Dimitri Orlanov. Unknown to the two journalists, Orlanov is being investigated by the OMON (Special Purpose Police Unit). Sergei Illanovitch is working under cover at the journalist’s hotel. He is watching Natasha Kerchenko, a young translator who works in the Business Centre.
Having met Dimitri Orlanov in Leningrad, Natasha Kerchenko has come to Moscow in the hope of finding information on her long dead father. Knowing Orlanov still has access to KGB files she hopes their growing relationship will help her discover who her father was and what happened to him.
An Iraqi intelligence officer, Colonel Al Sawabi, contacts Orlanov and offers to pay him $2m if he can procure sensitive KGB held information on the Coalition leaders. Although Orlanov knows nothing can stop the West from crossing into Kuwait he agrees because of his hatred for the changing Russian regime.
When Orlanov learns Capriotti has taken his girlfriend to dinner he has her brought to the office and beats her senseless. She is returned to her small apartment where Capriotti finds her and takes her to the relative safety of the Reuter’s office. She had previously shown Capriotti a picture of her father but now shows the two journalists another picture – only this time the man in the photograph looks like is John F. Kennedy.
Whilst searching for information on the Coalition leaders, Orlanov’s KGB contact notices that someone, using Orlanov’s old access codes, has tried to open a decades old East German Stasi file. When Orlanov learns the subject of the file is “Alexander Kerchenko” he assumes it has something to do with Natasha and asks his contact to courier everything over to his office. Illanovitch intercepts and arrests the courier, copies the floppy discs but then releases the man back onto the street so he can deliver the package to Orlanov.
Determined to find out who used his access codes and retrieve Natasha, Orlanov sends two NKVD officers to the Reuter’s company house but in the confusion Illanovitch is shot and killed. Daniels searches the dead OMON officer’s jacket pockets for car keys and finds two floppy discs with the name Alexander Kerchenko scrawled on the label. The two journalists and Natasha drive south to Leningrad, the Americans knowing they must escape the country before someone connects them to Illanovitch’s death.
John Fullbright, Deputy Director of the CIA, has learned that someone has accessed the Kerchenko file, a part of history he had hoped was dead and buried forever. He contacts Frank Harvey – a freelance agent – and the same person who cleaned up the “loose ends” after the Kerchenko affair first broke.
Alone in his office, Orlanov opens the Kerchenko files and spends the next five hours reading the best kept secret of the cold war. Khrushchev, embarrassed and humiliated by the Berlin Airlift and now President of Russia, agrees to Operation Poslezavtra – The Day After Tomorrow. The Russians create a Kennedy lookalike and during the 1961 Vienna meeting between Khrushchev and Kennedy they make the switch and a Russian agent becomes the leader of the West.
The files detail every part of the lead up to the Operation and also explain why, two years later, Andre Gromyko met with CIA Director McCone and John Fullbright in Vancouver and exposed their own man. The files end with the CIA planned assassination of Alexander Kerchenko in Dallas on November 22nd 1963.
Orlanov realises the information is explosive and in the right hands might stop the Americans from crossing the Kuwaiti border. He contacts Colonel Al Sawabi and offers to sell him the files for $100m. But greed and old habits take hold and he also contacts John Fullbright and tells him the CIA can have the file for $100m.
Capriotti and Daniels have also read their copy of the file and, if true, it means Kennedy could still be alive and living in Moscow. And so begins a race to find the real Kennedy and expose Operation Poslezavtra and the biggest cover up of the 20th Century.
Fullbright will do anything to prevent the truth coming out and sends Frank Harvey to Moscow to destroy the files and anyone and anything that has come in contact with them.
The Iraqis also want the files and are determined to get them back to Iraq and Saddam.
The end game begins when Daniels and Capriotti find the man behind the Camelot myth - only to realise their own government wants to bury them and the secret for ever.