Berlin is still in ruins almost four years after the war, caught between political idealism and the harsh realities of Soviet occupation. Alex Meier is a young Jewish writer who fled the Nazis for America before the war.

Now, the politics of his youth have left him embroiled in the McCarthy witch-hunts. Faced with deportation and the loss of his family, Alex 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. But almost from the start things go fatally wrong. Espionage, like the black market, is still a way of life.