"Need to Know"

Chad Britter and Joyce Apfelbaum are, respectively, aeronautical engineer and library assistant at a defense research and development organization in 1952. They experience a conventional, happy courtship and marriage of no importance to the world at large. The one spiceful episode of their lives is recognition and exposure of an arrogant coworker who is feeding classifed information to an Israeli spy out of admiration for Israel. Both Israel and the CIA know that the spy is a double agent, acting for the Soviet Union. Israel needs to catch the spy's Soviet contact; the CIA only wants the spy exposed on all counts, for the Israelis to deal with as their traitor. Pivots of the story are the questions of who needs to know what, and the crucial pivot is the CIA's briefing of Joyce so that she can publicly and spitefully denounce the spy as the "husband" who has abandoned her. Score: U.S.A. 1, Israel 0, spies 0.