Almost four years after the war's end, East Berlin is still in ruins, a physical wasteland and a political symbol about to rupture. Espionage, like the black market, is a fact of life. Alex Meier, a young Jewish writer, fled the Nazis for America before the war. But the politics of his youth have now put him in the cross-hairs of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Faced with deportation, he makes a desperate bargain with the fledgling CIA: he will earn his way back to America by acting as their agent in his native Berlin.