Bored billionaire executive Thomas Crown entertains himself by stealing a Monet from a reputed museum with an elaborate diversion. When Catherine Banning, the insurance company's investigator, takes an interest in Crown, he may have met his match, and a complicated back-and-forth game with seductive undertones begins between them.
It's the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union with the Communists launching a spy satellite that has the Free World leaders in a panic. Fears about the nature of the satellite force the United States to send an agent undercover behind the Iron Curtain to discover what the Soviets have learned. What he finds is the Communists have used the information acquired from their spy satellite to help them perfect a new and even more deadly nuclear weapon.