Tom Clancy, Clear and Present Danger

This book has always been one of my favorites. It was the first Clancy book I read, and got me hooked. It is classic Clancy. He brings together diverse elements of the plot into a great narrative. It is full of detail and interesting characters.

It’s a tough book to summarize, but I’ll try to hit the high points. Drugs are a major threat to America. In an election year, the President decides to do something about it. He approves a covert operation to send US troops into Colombia to recon landing strips used by the Cartel, and radio info about drug flights, which are then intercepted. This is going fine, but when the Cartel successfully kills the Director of the FBI while he is in Colombia, the mission changes, and the troops are redeployed to actively take out the drug production operations. They also take out a number of the leaders of the cartel using precision bombs. These operations are successful, but the Cartel, and their chief intelligence operative, Felix Cortez, start to figure things out. And Cortez is also able to deduce who is in charge of the operation—James Cutter, National Security Advisor to the president. So he blackmails Cutter, threatening to make the whole operation public, especially including the deaths of numberous civilians in the “precision bombings.” Cutter agrees to strand the teams in Colombia, allowing Cortez and the Cartel to capture the troops and claim victory, while at the same time reducing the volume of shipments to the US, thus allowing the President to claim victory. Jack Ryan is acting Deputy Director of Intelligence for the CIA. He learns of action the US is taking, and comes to figure out that the troops have been stranded. So he organizes a mission to get them out, and goes himself. The troops are successfully extracted, or at least the troops who have still survived are.

Clancy’s book is unparalleled as espionage fiction. He has almost a genre unto himself—or he at least sets the standard. But his book is also a great study in character, and in the art and conduct of war. He illumines some of the implications for terrorism for our understanding of how nation-states conduct war and respond to violence against them. In that way, it is actually amazingly current, and proves to be an imformative and thought-provoking look at responses to terrorism, both good and bad.