from the April 13, 2015, VARIETY:

George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s Smokehouse Pictures has picked up the film rights to Joe Navarro’s “Three Minutes to Doomsday.”

The book follows the FBI’s leading body language expert, Navarro, who was sent to track down Rod Ramsay to report on his knowledge or association with Clyde Lee Conrad, an U.S. Army officer who sold top-secret classified information to the People’s Republic of Hungary. It documents Navarro and Ramsey’s relationship and interviews against the backdrop of the Cold War.

Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, recently acquired North American rights for the book.

Howards Means, who collaborated with Robert Baer on “See No Evil” and “Sleeping With the Devil,” assisted Navarro in his writing. “Syriana,” for which Clooney won an Oscar, was based on Baer’s books.