Two Firms Claim TV Rights to KGB Files : Television: Both RHI and Davis say stories from the agency’s records are theirs, but there’s confusion as the spy unit is split into two segments.

KGB spy novels may be passe, but a race between two well-known producers to make “exclusive” TV movies based on secret KGB files is fraught with enough intrigue to make Hollywood deal-making as enticing as the best of Ian Fleming.

RHI Entertainment Inc. and Davis Entertainment Television, two of Hollywood’s heaviest hitters, are both claiming rights to several top-secret files on subjects ranging from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Soviet version of events surrounding well-known Cold War spy tales. The “Third Man” scandal of the early 1950s, involving British counterspy Kim Philby, and the traffic in atomic secrets that led to the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are among the stories that both producers hope to tell.

Who will tell them first, however, remains a mystery.

Robert Halmi Sr., the producer who paid a record $9 million in November for the television rights to “Scarlett,” Warner Books’ best-selling sequel to “Gone With the Wind,” announced six weeks ago that he had signed an exclusive agreement with the KGB to produce a CBS television series based on material from its archives.

The KGB files will “set America on its collective ear,” he promised at the time.

RHI Executive Vice President Kenneth Locker, a former associate of the late Armand Hammer, said on Sunday that his company’s plans to televise a docudrama based on KGB intelligence files could materialize as soon as this fall.

Locker, who speaks Russian fluently and estimates that he has made 75 trips to Moscow, said he has been working to get the KGB files for more than six months. In two weeks, the first of RHI’s KGB files will be hand-delivered to Locker in Los Angeles by a former KGB agent, he said.

”. . . We absolutely have the rights that we say we do,” Locker said.

But on Sunday, officials of Davis Entertainment Television, which is underwritten by former 20th Century Fox owner Marvin Davis, said they had cinched an exclusive deal with the successor agency of the Soviet KGB to produce television and motion pictures based on secret Soviet files.

Halmi’s stories might emanate from Moscow, but they are not from the official archival files of the KGB, said Merrill Karpf, executive vice president of Davis Entertainment Television.

Locker said the confusion over who has exclusive rights rises from a confusion over agencies. The original KGB ceased to exist as of Jan. 1 and has been replaced by two separate agencies that, respectively, deal with international and domestic intelligence. They are roughly analogous to the CIA and the FBI, said Locker.

His production company is dealing with one agency while Davis is apparently dealing with the other, he said.

Karpf returned to Los Angeles last week after three days of final negotiations with Andrei Oligov, chief of public relations for the Agency of Federal Security (KGB) of Russia, armed with contracts that he says will give Davis Entertainment and its partners exclusive access to the agency’s files.

To support his claim, Karpf also brought with him a letter from Oligov that translated into English this way:

“The KGB will not provide anybody with exclusive rights to the archival files for publication or film production. We can only discuss providing exclusive rights for certain case histories for a defined period of time.”

According to Karpf, Oligov specifically labeled as “erroneous” claims “made by certain Western companies that they were given exclusive access by the KGB to the secret files related to the atomic bomb. . . .”

Karpf and John Davis, Marvin Davis’ son and head of Davis Entertainment, told The Times that the agreement between Davis Entertainment, the KGB, Moscow-based Contact Film Studio and a Tennessee-based distribution and production partner, One World Films Inc., will mean that this new consortium will be able to dig into KGB archives for source material to develop 30 film or TV stories, including:

* The attempted assassination of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill during a World War II summit in Tehran, Iran.

* The attempted CIA assassination of Fidel Castro.

* The biography of a high-level Soviet scientist known as Tolkachov whose spying on behalf of the CIA during the 1980s led to a devastating penetration of the Soviet radar defense system and, in 1987, Tolkachov’s execution.

* The revelation of joint CIA-KGB operations during last year’s Gulf War, leading to the preemptive destruction of much of Sadam Hussein’s offensive missile power.

One set of files that Davis does not intend to seek is those relating to the KGB version of Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Last November, before the release of director Oliver Stone’s controversial “JFK,” ABC News said its producers had obtained exclusive access to the KGB’s Oswald files in Moscow.

In a “Nightline” report, broadcast Nov. 22, ABC correspondent Forrest Sawyer reported that the Soviets suspected Oswald of being a U.S. agent when he defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, but rejected that idea after watching him during his 2 1/2 years in the country.

The KGB also reportedly reached the opposite conclusion of the Warren Commission, however, deciding that Oswald was incapable of having acted alone.

But the details of how the KGB reached that conclusion remained fuzzy, dulling the network’s scoop, because the spy agency suddenly and inexplicably withdrew Sawyer’s permission to examine the 10-inch-thick files after only two lengthy sessions with the files.

At the time, “Nightline” Executive Producer Tom Bettag speculated that KGB bureaucrats decided that all news organizations should have equal access if the documents were to be opened. The KGB did not charge the network to see the file, Bettag said.

An economic deal was made between the Davis partnership and the agency, however. How much Davis paid, and to whom, in order to secure the story rights remains a secret, appropriately enough.

“We’re not going to disclose any financial arrangements here,” said John Davis. “We have an arrangement between all parties that is mutually beneficial.” Locker made a similar comment.

Davis said the first of its productions would probably be for television, though he hoped to develop some of the stories for the big screen too. The earliest a Davis production could make it to television would be next January and would likely be a made-for-TV movie on the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, as seen from a Russian perspective, he said.

Other potential productions will take far longer just to discover in the company’s fishing expedition into half a century of KGB files. The Russians themselves don’t even know what they have that will make good, commercial TV and what will not, said Karpf.

“One of the things we have to deal with is that they are really quite unaware of what is of international interest,” he said. “I mentioned ‘I Love Lucy,’ and they had never seen it. I didn’t think there was anyone in the world who had not seen ‘I Love Lucy.’ ”

Karpf said one set of files that will certainly turn up a good prime-time story is the KGB’s extensive studies of UFOs.

“It looks like we’ll get to it before Geraldo,” he said.