Tradecraft: Mossad And Assassin

Here are two stories that I missed in the trades, but luckily Dark Horizons caught them. 

Variety reports that producer Eric Eisner's L+E Pictures "has acquired feature rights to Shmu-el Segev's 'Alone in Damascus,' which recounts the story of Israeli spy Eli Cohen."  Israeli filmmaker Lior Geller will write the script.  So what, exactly, is Alone in Damascus?  The trade doesn't say.  Presumably it's a book, but perhaps a forthcoming one.  There is no book of that title currently available in America, at least.  The plot sounds interesting, though.  The trade reports that "Cohen worked as a Mossad agent from 1960 until his public execution in 1965 and built close ties with Syrian leaders, almost rising to the rank of Syrian defense minister. He's credited with supplying Israel with many details on Syrian political and military matters."

An Israeli spy rising through the ranks in Syria (albeit a less successful one) was also the subject of the fantastic documentary The Champagne Spy (full review here) in 2007.  That film criminally remains unreleased in America, though you can purchase an expensive German import DVD through Amazon.  At one time, it was reported that The Champagne Spy would also be developed into a fictionalized narrative feature for Hollywood.
And The Hollywood Reporter reports that True Memoirs of an International Assassin, an action-comedy spec script by Jeff Morris that was on the 2009 Black List, has been picked up by Mark Gill and Neil Sacker's West Hollywood-based independent production company The Film Department.  According to the trade, "Memoirs focuses on an accountant who writes a novel about the life he wishes he had, that of a fearless assassin. He sells the book, the publisher labels it a memoir, and the world comes to believe he is his alter ego. When he goes on vacation to Belize, he finds himself coerced into killing the country's prime minister and must now become the hero he's always written about but never dreamed he'd be."