Allan Segal act as a producer on the investigative current affairs programme World In Action. Over the next five years he produced and directed over twenty films, all over the world, and often in hostile circumstances necessitating the use of hidden cameras and undercover filming. In 1976, Segal and a small film crew risked life imprisonment by posing as tourists and illegally filming in Brezhnev's USSR. Using one of the first ever amateur 8 mm film cameras, they shot "A Calculated Risk", the story of Jewish refusenik Natan Sharansky (who went on to become Deputy Prime Minister of Israel) and his campaign
Natan Sharansky High treason carried the death penalty. The following year, in 1978, he was sentenced to 13 years of forced labor. Sharansky spent time in the Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, followed by Vladimir and Chistopol prisons, where for part of the time he was placed in solitary confinement. His health deteriorated, to the point of endangering his life. Later he was detained in Perm 35, a post-Stalin-Gulag-type so-called "strict regimen colony" in Perm Oblast. He kept himself sane during solitary confinement by playing chess with himself, in his head. Sharansky appeared in a March 1990 edition of "National Geographic" magazine. The