Treadstone

Production by Universal Content Productions

Directed by Brad Anderson, Alex Graves, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, Wayne Yip, Ramin Bahrani, Jeremy Webb

Treadstone explores the origin story and present-day actions of a CIA black ops program known as Operation Treadstone, a top-secret black ops program of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the Jason Bourne series of novels and movies.

It recruited only U.S. Service members to turn them into nearly superhuman assassins and was formed in direct response to the Congressional Act which banned the U.S. from partaking in any assassinations, as sometimes assassination is considered necessary to keep the United States safe. It used a behavior-modification program to break down the assassins' morality and make them effective nearly unstoppable living weapons. After the morality break down, presumably, the assassins received advanced training in all kinds of spy tradecraft. The last surviving member of Treadstone is Jason Bourne. It had a successor, which was Operation Blackbriar. In the novels, it was formed after the Vietnam War. Treadstone71 was the successor to the pre-Vietnam Operation Silverlake.

The first season follows sleeper agents across the globe as they’re mysteriously “awakened” to resume their deadly missions.