George Clooney's Smokehouse Gets Film Rights to Joe Navarro's "Three Minutes to Doomsday"

George Clooney and his Smokehouse Pictures partner Grant Heslove have just bought the filming rights to Joe Navarro's book "Three Minutes to Doomsday" according to Deadline.

Navarro, a former FBI special agent and supervisor who specializes in the area of non-verbal communication and body language, has written and co-written a number of non-fiction and instructional books including, "What Every Body is Saying," "Dangerous Personalities," "Louder than Words: Take Your Career from Average to Exceptional with the Hidden Power of Nonverbal Intelligence," and "Hunting Terrorists: A Look at The Psychopathology of Terror." During his 25-year tenure with the bureau, he was assigned in the area of counterintelligence and behavioral assessment.

In "Three Minutes to Doomsday," which Navarro co-authored with Howard Means, he recounts how he tracked down and cultivated a working relationship with Rod Ramsey whom he got to cooperate in sharing his knowledge about Clyde Lee Conrad, a US Army officer who sold top-secret classified information to the People's Republic of Hungary from 1974 until his arrest on August 23, 1988, during the Cold War era. Conrad was tried and convicted for the crime of espionage in 1990 and was sentenced to life in prison. He later died of a heart attack inside Diez prison in Germany on January 8, 1998, at age 50.

Navarro's expertise enabled him to decipher the hidden meaning behind Conrad's suspected associate Ramsey's nervous tics. Noticing miniscule movements on how he carried his cigarette led the former FBI agent to a series of interviews that would uncover one escalating revelation after another, until he eventually discovered the most dangerous security breach in US history. Along the way, he succeeded in getting Ramsey's trust. He also chronicled how he managed to convince a skeptical federal bureaucracy to allow him to spend hundreds of hours just preparing for each of 42 interviews with Ramsay over the course of a year.

Means, Navarro's co-author, has collaborated on a number of bestselling books, including "See No Evil" and "Sleeping with the Devil," both by Robert Baer, which provided some of the basis for the film Syriana, which Clooney produced and starred in, and for which he won an Academy Award for his performance.