The Sandbaggers

- Season 1

(1978)

Neil Burnside is the Director of Operations for the British Secret Service, the SIS. His special operations unit is made up of three agents, known as Sandbaggers, who specialize in covert operations. He's approached by the head of the Norwegian secret service who needs assistance in recovering the crew of a spy plane that has gone down inside Russia. He's dead set against it, but the Foreign Office has its own interests and Burnside is ordered to mount an operation. Unfortunately, the Norwegians are playing their own games and the lives of the agents are put in danger.

When the SIS station in Vienna reports the presence of Dr. Sir Donald Hopkins, Burnside is afraid that they may have a defector on their hands. Hopkins is the chief scientific advisor attached to the Cabinet Office and was supposed to be on his annual fishing holiday in Scotland. After much wrangling, with both the Foreign Office and his superiors, he gets permission to send in two Sandbaggers to bring Hopkins in. At the same time, the SIS learns that an East African dictator has killed a journalist accusing him of being an SIS agent, which is not correct. Burnside is...

Burnside faces all kinds of difficulties when Operation Nightingale - which he mounted without permission as a favor for the CIA - fails. Burnside's superiors are questioning his judgment particularly so when they learn that Sandbagger #3 Alan Denson had to kill Sandbagger #2 to keep him from being captured. When Denson decides to marry, he also wants to quit the job, so Burnside orders Willie Caine to look into the fiancée's background. When the SIS learn that a British diplomat in Paris, the brother of a senior Cabinet Minister, is having a homosexual affair the ...

Now down to only one Sandbagger, Burnside looks to recruit new members and offers the job to Laura Dickens. When they learn that the number two SIS man from Algiers is killed in Gibraltar, Burnside dispatches Sandbagger #1, Willie Caine, there to find out what was going on. He also send Dickens to Algiers to find out what the agent was doing in Gibraltar in the first place. Burnside has another problem when his CIA colleague tells him that an SIS officer, Colin Grove, has been seeing a psychiatrist privately. There is concern that the psychiatrist may be a foreign ...

The SIS start planning a government throw-over of an Arab nation that has close links with Moscow.

While Neil Burnside woos the lovely but sexually repressed Laura Dickens, Willie Caine is on a operation in Cyprus to recover a kidnapped British engineer, and finds himself falling for the attractive female KGB agent that was planted on him.

When an East German spy in the employ of SIS offers them photographs of a new missile site, Burnside finds that the only person qualified for the job is Laura Dickens. For personal reasons - he's quite fallen in love with her - he's reluctant to send her. When she is captured by the East German security service, he makes a pact with the devil by promising the French secret service access to CIA materials in exchange for a high-ranking KGB agent they could swap for her. In the end, Burnside must opt for a solution that pleases no one, least of all himself.