Plot Synopsis

Hosted by Damian Lewis, SPY WARS WITH DAMIAN LEWIS is an eight-episode docuseries that features true stories of spy wars fought in the shadows, from the turbulent years of the Cold War to the Iran Hostage Crisis and the discovery of a complex web of sleeper agents living in the U.S. -- a major inspiration for the plot of THE AMERICANS. In each one-hour episode, Lewis reveals a single tale of the secretive world of government intelligence, surveillance and international conspiracy plots with interviews from the experts and eyewitnesses that lived through them.

SPY WARS WITH DAMIAN LEWIS had its U.S. premiere on Sunday, March 22, 2020 at 8pm ET/PT on Smithsonian Channel. The series opener, "The Man Who Saved the World," recounts the story of Oleg Gordievsky -- a KGB agent who may have singlehandedly averted World War III. Posted to the Soviet embassy in London by the KGB, Gordievsky would become disenfranchised by the Soviet agenda and, in a shocking move, flipped to become a double agent for British intelligence MI6. What was to follow was a years-long effort by Gordievsky to pass Soviet intelligence to the British, all but preventing a nuclear Armageddon between the Soviet Union and the West.
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On Sunday, May 10, 2020 at 8pm ET/PT, Smithsonian Channel premiered the season finale of SPY WARS WITH DAMIAN LEWIS. The season ender, "Exodus," focuses on Operation Brothers, a 1980s covert Mossad mission to rescue 12,000 Ethiopians, Jewish descendants of the lost tribe of Israel, from Sudan. The mission would take five years to pull off, involving an audacious plot, a maverick field agent, and a small group of deep cover operatives who ran a fake scuba diving resort so convincingly, they actually turned a profit. Host Damian Lewis guides us through the improbable rescue mission.