Telefon

Telefon is a 1977 spy film directed by Don Siegel and starring Charles Bronson, Lee Remick and Donald Pleasence. The screenplay by Peter Hyams and Stirling Silliphant is based on the 1975 novel by Walter Wager. Plot After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union planted a number of long-term, deep-cover sleeper agents all over the United States, who were thoroughly brainwashed that even they did not know they were agents. They can be activated only by a special code phrase, a line from the Robert Frost poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" – followed by the agent's real first name. Their mission was to sabotage crucial parts of the civil and military infrastructure in the event of war. More than 20 years pass, and the Cold War gradually gives way to détente. Nikolai Dalchimsky, a rogue KGB headquarters clerk, travels to America and takes with him the Telefon Book, which contains the names, addresses and telephone numbers of all the sleeper agents. He starts activating them, one by one. American counterintelligence is thrown into confusion when seemingly-ordinary citizens start blowing up facilities that were once important but now have little, if any, value. The agents either commit suicide or die in the act itself. The KGB does not dare tell its political leaders, much less the Americans, about its negligence in not deactivating the spy network. KGB Major Grigori Borzov, who was selected in part for his photographic memory, memorizes the contents of the only other copy of the Telefon Book and is sent to find and stop Dalchimsky quietly, before either side learns what is happening and possibly starts a war. Borzov is given the assistance of only a single agent, Barbara, who had been planted in America years before.