The Fourth Protocol

The Fourth Protocol (1987) is a Cold War spy thriller you can watch online on iFILM, directed by John Mackenzie from a screenplay by Frederick Forsyth — adapting his own novel. MI5 operative John Preston, played by Michael Caine, picks up traces of an illegal Soviet operation on British soil. His orders: stop it before it goes off. Literally.

The KGB has placed a trained agent — Pierce Brosnan, icy and precise three years before he'd audition for Bond — in a quiet English town with orders to assemble a nuclear device and detonate it near an American air base. The fallout isn't just radioactive: it's designed to swing a British election and shatter NATO. Nobody in Whitehall wants to admit the threat is real.

Forsyth built his plot around a plausible loophole in arms-control diplomacy, which gives the film an unusual procedural weight — this isn't gadgets and car chases but tradecraft, detection, and institutional paranoia. The Caine–Brosnan face-off is worth the runtime alone. Stream The Fourth Protocol (1987) online on iFILM.