based on the autobiography by Jeff Carney
screenplay by Simon Reade & Guy de Beaujeu

produced by Guy de Beaujeu/Simon Reade/Fluidity Films

AGAINST ALL ENEMIES

West Berlin, 1983.

It was the middle of the night in April 1983, when Jeff Carney, a US Air Force intelligence linguist approached Checkpoint Charlie. His steps grew shaky and he began to sweat. A Mid-Western American, he was heading the wrong way. He was making a bee-line for the hard-line Communist, East German border. As he crossed the white line separating West from East, he thought he was safe. He couldn't have been more wrong.

Depressed by his job, coming to terms with his homosexuality, and with a genuine fear that US President Ronald Reagan was taking the world to the brink of Armageddon, Carney wanted out. He just wanted to live quietly in the East.

But after a severe interrogation, the incredulous STASI sent him back. If he wanted to make a real difference to the Cold War, he needed to start spying. If he didn’t, they’d denounce him to US authorities as a traitor. He was just 19.

So began one of the most fascinating Cold War spy thrillers never told. Until now. To a backdrop of the West Berlin music scene – David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream – of underground gay bars and nightclubs, of the Allied Powers desperately clinging on to Berlin, their spoil of war deep behind the Iron Curtain.

Carney was a fish out of water, operating in a cocktail of fear, excitement, sexual tension, radical protest and home-grown terrorism. Furtive meetings took place in the depths of the Eiskeller Forest. Carney would scale the Berlin Wall to meet his manipulative STASI handler. Like a Boy’s Own Story, he’d conceal a miniature camera in a Lipton Ice Tea can to snap classified documents.

And then the STASI rewarded him with asylum in the East. Where he fell in love with Wolfgang and set up a modest home. All seemed content and happily ever after.

But then, disaster: the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall was torn down. Carney found himself exposed - on the wrong side, at the wrong time. And one day, he just disappeared. Wolfgang never saw him again.

Carney had been rendered back to the USA to face the death penalty for spying against the nation. In a trial of Kafkaesque proportions, US Air Force lawyers were appointed to notionally defend him – they were the only thing that stood between Carney’s principled stand against American provocations during the Cold War, and the electric chair.

The film will be produced by Fluidity Films as a UK/German co-production.

Click for the BBC report about Jeff