Clear and Present Danger

The President of the United States is running for reelection. His fierce opponent in Ohio, Governor J. Robert Fowler, has rallied the American public behind the current administration's failures in the War on Drugs. National Security Advisor James Cutter seizes an opportunity to help the president initiate covert operations within Colombia with the intent to disrupt the illegal drug trade there. Aided by CIA Deputy Director (Operations) Robert Ritter and CIA director Arthur Moore, the plan involves inserting light infantry troops of Hispanic descent (divided into four 11 man teams, codenamed BANNER, KNIFE, OMEN and FEATURE) into the country to stake out airstrips used by the cartel (SHOWBOAT), which then allows F-15 Eagles to intercept drug flights (EAGLE EYE). In addition, mobile phone communications between cartel management are intercepted through CAPER, which is also the communications arm for SHOWBOAT.

Meanwhile, a United States Coast Guard Cutter intercepts a yacht in the Caribbean Sea; two Hispanic men are found cleaning the vessel after murdering its owner and his family. When a senior crewman says the murderers could escape justice by claiming they found the ship after the murders took place, the Coast Guard captain orders a mock trial and execution, and the killers are forced to confess their crimes; it is later learned that the murdered owner was a businessman involved in a money laundering scheme for a Colombian drug cartel. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seizes laundered money and other assets from several U.S. and European banks totaling over $650 million.

The seizure of the cartel money by the FBI infuriates drug cartel leader Ernesto Escobedo, who ordered the hit on the American businessman. Meanwhile, his intelligence officer, Felix Cortez, starts dating the secretary of FBI director Emil Jacobs and finds out about Jacobs's official visit to the Attorney General of Colombia. Escobedo orders the assassination of Jacobs without informing Cortez. Upon arriving in the city of Bogotá, the FBI director's motorcade is ambushed, killing him as well as the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. ambassador to Colombia. Enraged, the President authorizes Operation RECIPROCITY, stepping up Cutter's operations and declaring war on Escobedo's drug organization.

Later, a surgical airstrike on a drug kingpin's mansion during a meeting of several cartel members kills everyone inside. Escobedo did not attend the meeting and sent Cortez to represent him; Cortez was delayed and witnessed the explosion as a result. Cortez later deduces that the Americans have been conducting operations against the Colombian drug cartel, but plays along, planning to engineer a war within the cartel that will leave him in a position to seize power. He dispatches cartel men to hunt down the American troops, and later blackmails Cutter in a secret meeting into shutting down all covert operations against the cartel in exchange for reducing drug exports to the United States. The point man for team BANNER, not paying attention due to suffering from food poisoning, accidentally blunders the team into an encampment of cartel men, which results in a firefight that kills half of them, with the survivors later meeting up with team KNIFE.

Meanwhile, Jack Ryan, former Marine and acting CIA Deputy Director (Intelligence) after his boss, Admiral James Greer, was hospitalized for pancreatic cancer, suspects the Agency's involvement in the situation in Colombia. His position enables him to be aware of most operations, but he realizes he is being kept out of the loop on what is happening in South America. After his friend, fighter pilot Robby Jackson, makes an inquiry into activity in the region, Ryan becomes determined to find out what is going on. He learns about the covert operations by breaking into Ritter's files. Outraged, he seeks help from the FBI and later meets John Clark, a CIA field operative and former Navy SEAL coordinating CAPER. The cartel men surround and attack team KNIFE and the survivors of BANNER, killing most of them, leaving just Staff Sergeant Domingo "Ding" Chavez and a few other escaping survivors, while suffering heavy casualties of their own.

Having been previously ordered by the President to shut down all covert operations against the cartel to avoid the political fallout, Cutter does so after his secret meeting with Cortez. He secretly provides Cortez with the coordinates of the American troops in Colombia for him to hunt down. Their meeting having been shadowed by the FBI, Ryan and Clark are outraged. They team up to rescue American troops left behind in Colombia, using a U.S. Air Force special operations helicopter. This results in their missing Greer's funeral, which raises the suspicions of Moore and Ritter. Although the rescue team suffers casualties from the cartel men hunting the American soldiers in Colombia, they successfully extract the survivors, including Chavez. Later, the team captures Cortez and Escobedo in a raid on the cartel's command post. They then fly out to sea, where they safely land on the cutter Panache.

After being confronted by Clark with evidence of his treason, Cutter commits suicide by jumping in front of a bus. Ryan confronts a defiant President for not informing him about the covert operations in Colombia and nearly starting a war. After he briefs the heads of the Special Intelligence Committee, the President deliberately throws the election to Fowler in order to hide the operations and protect the honor of those involved.

Escobedo is turned over to his fellow cartel chieftains, who will surely execute him. Cortez is later returned to Cuba, where he has been branded as a traitor by his former DGI colleagues. Meanwhile, Clark takes Chavez under his wing and recruits him into the CIA.

Clear and Present Danger is considered to be a work of dystopian fiction. It talks about the abuse of political and military power, and addresses the dangers of a government bureaucracy where no one can be held accountable for actions implied to be illegal by a democratic society. The book was released around the time of the Iran-Contra affair, which strikingly bears many parallels with the novel. Additionally, it pushes the narrative that the War on Drugs, which was also a major issue during the time of the book's publication, is corrupting law enforcement, and that the status quo is enforced in this struggle.[2]

The book was adapted as a feature film, which was released on August 3, 1994. Harrison Ford reprised his role from the previous movie Patriot Games (1992) as Ryan, while Willem Dafoe played Clark. The film received positive reviews, with Rotten Tomatoes giving it a rating of 80% based on 40 reviews.[9] It was a major financial success, earning over $200 million at the box office.[10]

As in the previous film Patriot Games, Clancy was less than pleased with the movie due to script changes. He favored John Milius’s initial script, which was written before Patriot Games started production and closer to the book. However, when Donald Stewart was hired by Paramount Pictures to rewrite the script due to Ryan not being the central character, Clancy lambasted the new screenplay as “really awful” and criticized its technical inaccuracies. “First things first,” Clancy continued, “Clear and Present Danger was the No. 1 best-selling novel of the 1980s. One might conclude that the novel’s basic story line had some quality to it. Why, then, has nearly every aspect of the book been tossed away?” Regarding the different ending, in which Ryan testified before Congress about the covert operations instead of privately confronting the President, Ford said: ”We have softened somewhat the political bias [Clancy] brings to the subject, not because we’re bleeding-heart liberals, but because we wanted to divest it of some of its baggage and let it walk on its own two legs.”[11]

In a 2018 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan creators Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland revealed that they originally opted to adapt Clear and Present Danger for television. Roland then explained: “About a month into it, we realized the reason the Clancy books worked so well was because they were relevant for the time that they were written. So we had to take the spirit of what he did and create our own original story.”[12]