Clear and Present Danger

Clear and Present Danger is a political thriller by the American writer Tom Clancy, published on 17 August 1989.

The novel follows the consequences of the murders of three American officials in Colombia. The President, in the middle of a re-election campaign, is under pressure over drugs, and his National Security Advisor, James Cutter, uses the opportunity to set up covert operations against the cartels without telling Congress what those operations will involve. Jack Ryan, who has just become acting deputy director of intelligence at the CIA, finds that he is being kept outside the loop in his own agency, and the work he is asked to approve concerns a military force that is not supposed to be there and a set of files that only make sense if somebody has been lying. The novel moves between Washington, the Caribbean and the Colombian interior, following the operation and the effort to keep it invisible at the same time.

It follows The Cardinal of the Kremlin in the series about Jack Ryan, and it was adapted into a film in 1994.