Clear and Present Danger is the fourth Jack Ryan novel written by Tom Clancy. It is the sixth chronological book, published in 1989 and taking place in 1988.
Several months after the events of The Cardinal of the Kremlin, in the midst of an election year, the President decides that he must show the voters that he is taking a hard line against drugs. His new National Security Advisor, Vice Admiral James Cutter, takes charge and enlists the CIA in order to conduct offensive operations against the Medellín Cartel. At the same time, Jack Ryan finds himself assuming the position of DDI due to his mentor James Greer succumbing to pancreatic cancer. Unfortunately, things soon spiral out of control and Ryan must find a way to stop things before too much damage is done to the government.
The novel is notable for introducing badass John Clark as a regularly recurring character, after the popularity he enjoyed in The Cardinal of the Kremlin, as well as Domingo "Ding" Chavez, who would later become the other half of Clark's Badass Duo.
The 1994 film adaptation starred Harrison Ford as Ryan and Willem Dafoe as John Clark.
This novel contains examples of:
- Action Survivor: Ryan, as in past instances, has the action come to him rather than him searching for the action.
- A Father to His Men: Lt. Tim Jackson cares deeply about the men under his command, to the point of personally making inquiries - and getting chewed out for doing so - when Chavez doesn't show up at his new posting as expected.
- Affably Evil: Carlos Larson points out that the drug cartel leaders can be quite nice and generous, while most are also dedicated family men. He could easily get a half-a-million dollar loan by simply asking, though he'd have to pay it back by doing drug courier flights. However, he also warns Clark that, gentlemanly as they are, the cartel leaders can still be ruthless and cruel to those who cross them.
- Anonymous Ringer: At one point in the book, the relationship between the US forces stationed in Panama, the military forces of Panama, and their leader, are discussed as strained. The leader of Panama at the time of writing, of course, being the dictator Manuel Noriega.
- Armchair Military:
- Discussed by John Clark who promises that if the American teams don't survive then the REMF (rear echelon motherfucker) who abandoned them is going to die. He wasn't kidding.
- Zig-zagged with Admiral Cutter. He does have the necessary naval commands for reaching flag rank but Ryan notes that most of his career was spent in the Pentagon. In practice, Cutter repeatedly is shown to be inept at just about everything except for ass kissing and has no idea how to run a covert operation.
- Artistic License/Anachronism Stew: In the real world, 1988 featured George H. W. Bush running against Michael Dukakis, since it was impossible for Ronald Reagan, who got elected in 1980, to run for a third term. However, for the purposes of the story, the President in the last two novels was elected to his first term in 1984, theoretically making him either Harold Stassen or Walter Mondale. But this is impossible, since Red October, which has the same President, clearly states that December 3rd took place on a Friday that year, which makes it only possible to happen in one of four years in the post-Vietnam, pre-2000 era: 1976 (Impossible as Ryan would have still been in college at that time, and Red October has explicit references to events that happened in 1981), 1982 (Red Rabbit, which takes place before Red October is explicitly stated to take place in this year, but Red October can't happen in this year, because the USS Dallas had tapes of Return of the Jedi, which came out in 1983), 1993, or 1999. This gets more confusing in later novels where Clancy treats the Reagan and Bush presidencies as happening as normal. Furthermore, the President in Clear and Present Danger is implied to be a Republican, or at least right-wing (the parties are never named in the Clancy novels), because his opponent Fowler's foreign policy is very dove-ish and pro-Cuba and his convention is in Chicago, a traditional location for DNCs. In addition, Clark mentions that he's been in the spy business for twenty-odd years, which, since Without Remorse had him get recruited by the CIA in the early seventiesnote , implies this story takes place in 1996 at the earliest.
- Ascended Extra: After a small but very popular appearance in The Cardinal of the Kremlin, John Clark is given a major supporting role in this novel.
- Asshole Victim:
- The pirates when they get shanked in prison. Even their own defense lawyer is relieved when he learns of their murders.
- Played with the Empire Builder owner. Everyone agrees he got his own personal just deserts for working with the drug cartel, but he does earn a little sympathy for being forced to watch his family be raped and butchered before his own murder.
- Ass Shove: How the Patterson brothers smuggle shanks into the prison shower to off the pirates.
- Badass Bystander: A Boy Scout with a .22 rifle intervenes when Cartel hitmen show up to assassinate his neighbor, Detective Ernie Braden.
- Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work:
- Cortez and Escobedo's fate. Both are captured by the end of the book, but neither can be brought to the United States for trial without exposing the illegal operation the United States was running in Colombia. So Escobedo is returned to the cartel, whose other leaders believe he was trying to flee the country after betraying them; Cortez is returned to his home country of Cuba, where he is still wanted for defecting.
- When the case against the "pirates" starts to fall apart, the Mobile police recruit a pair of convicted murderers to kill them in jail.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Cortez, when he discovers the nature of the American operation against the cartel, says he would like to meet the man who put this plan together: "truly he is a professional!" When he does get to meet John Clark, it doesn't end well for him.
- Beleaguered Assistant: Cortez to Escobedo, and subsequently to the rest of the Cartel. It's specifically noted by Ritter that whatever brains the Cartel don't have, they hire. Cortez laments several times throughout the novel that he could easily replace the men he works for and eventually does make moves to do as such.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Cortez tries to teach Escobedo this in regards to the United States, reminding him that America's open borders and lack of response to the drug trade are a result of Americans' belief in freedom and the limitations of their police forces, not a lack of resolve. He even warns Escobedo against trying to target Americans, and especially American government officials. Predictably, the cartel ignores Cortez and the U.S. starts dropping laser guided bombs through their front doors.
- The Big Guy: Julio Vega, who would later become a recurring character, is introduced in this novel, and given his nickname, Oso. A staple of this and later novels is that he's so tough that a hundred pushups a day doesn't generate even a drop of sweat for him.
- Blatant Lies: When Dan Murray investigates Captain Wagner and his crew for their interrogation and mock execution of the pirates, Wagner tries to sell Murray an obviously fake story about what happened. Murray, a seasoned FBI agent, sees through it immediately and warns Wagner to never do it again. He explains to his younger, inexperienced colleague there's no reason to get the Coast Guardsmen in trouble because they don't need the evidence produced from the "trial" to convict the pirates.
- Boring Yet Practical: Invoked by Director Jacobs, who argues that, instead of covert special operations and bombing, good, honest police work can do much more to sink the Cartel. He makes a pretty good case, seeing as how Operation TARPON makes by far the biggest hole in the Cartel's power. Similarly, once all the other operations are shut down, Operation CAPER, the monitoring of Cartel cell phone calls, is specifically allowed to continue.
- Broken Pedestal: When Jack learns about the operation and that it was signed off on by the President, Bob Ritter, and DCI Moore he's pretty lost at what to do. Previously they had been trustworthy Reasonable Authority Figures but were now involved in an invasion of a US ally all for the goal of helping the President get reelected and rebuild the CIA's covert ops abilities to what they were in the 1950s. Fortunately, they all pull off a Heel–Face Turn and manage to rebuild some of Jack's respect by the end.
- Call-Back:
- Clark's violent history with drug dealers is briefly hinted at. Dovetails with a Call-Forward in Without Remorse in which Ritter notes the CIA had been thinking of becoming involved in anti-drug operations - and recommends formally recruiting Clark in part because of said history.
- Ritter is said to be feeling pressure for his Directorate of Operations to perform as the CIA's biggest recent successes were masterminded by the Directorate of Intelligence. Said successes are, of course, the defections of a sub full of Soviet officers and the KGB chairmannote himself!
- When Ryan and Clark meet for the first time, the latter mentions that their paths have crossed before - Clark extracted Gerasimov's family after Ryan convinced him to defect, and Clark was also the liaison with the French forces that raided the terrorist camps in Patriot Games.
- The Cartel: Are the primary adversaries.
- The Cavalry: After everything goes to hell, Ryan and Clark help organize a rescue for the troops left behind on the ground, with the Pave Low, their MC-130 support, Larson's King Beech, and the Panache all playing big roles.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- Ritter's safe combination is revealed to Ryan at the beginning of the novel for a very good reason: he uses it to break into Ritter's vault to discover the facts about Operations SHOWBOAT and RECIPROCITY.
- Early in the book, it's mentioned that the Coast Guard cutter Panache has room for a helicopter, but doesn't have one of its own because of budget cuts. It comes in handy much later when the Pave Low carrying the surviving American teams needs a place to land.
- The Chessmaster: several, but Felix Cortez especially. After surviving and then discovering the nature of the American operation against the Cartel, he decides to essentially hijack their operation for his own purposes, forcing Admiral Cutter to abandon his own soldiers in Colombia and to help him eliminate most of the remaining Cartel bosses and acquiesce to his own status as the organization's new kingpin.
- Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Once Cortez discovers the various United States operations against the Cartel, he uses them in order to eliminate various Cartel leaders to solidify his position.
- Cool Boat: USCGC Panache.
- Cool Car: Untiveros' monster truck, which Clark uses as the target for the first RECIPROCITY attack, disguising an air-to-ground strike as a car bombing. Amusingly, some of the roads in Colombia are so bad that the truck is actually practical.
- Corrupt Cop:
- Ernie Braden, a detective in the Mobile police force, was hired by the Cartel to search for and steal evidence prior to the hit being put on the Corrupt Corporate Executive above. His failure to discover the records subsequently result in the Cartel putting a hit on him.
- Discussed with regards to the Colombian police and army - they aren't inherently bad people, but incredibly lousy pay plus the dangers of not being on the Cartel's payroll make their bribes hard to pass up.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: The owner of the Empire Builder had laundered money for the Cartel on a massive scale, and his elimination was due to the Cartel discovering that he had been skimming off the top. The records the FBI discover in his home lead to Operation TARPON.
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Congressmen Trent and Fellows note that if the President had simply followed the law and had the CIA inform Congress of the operation, they still would have supported it. Ryan also calls out the President's stupidity in hiding America's retaliation for Emil Jacobs' assassination, pointing out that the public more than likely would have supported it given the justification.
- Could Say It, But...: At one point, the President turns to Ritter and explicitly tells him "You have a hunting license, and there's no bag limit. Is that clear?" Ritter agrees, but the narration then notes that the omnipresent recorder hidden in the room could be used to point out that the President never said "kill", which could be used to burn Ritter in the event that things go off the rails, demonstrating Plausible Deniability at its finest.
- Dark Horse Victory: The President was heavily favored to win the election but deliberately throws it, allowing Bob Fowler to win an upset victory. As described by Arnie van Damm (Fowler's campaign manager) in later books, with actual reverence bordering on fear:Arnie: He threw it. He threw a presidential election. He fired his campaign manager and his campaign was for shit the whole way. Jesus, Jack, what did you do?
- Darker and Edgier: The Ryanverse was never a warm and fuzzy place, but it takes a level in darkness in this one. Admiral Greer dies of cancer; high ranking members of the U.S. government who had previously been shown as men of honor and integrity, including Judge Moore, Bob Ritter, and the President, are shown engaging in a covert operation that eventually slides into a criminal conspiracy; Admiral Cutter gives us our first Corrupt Politician in the series; and by the end, the President having thrown the election as part of a deal to avoid exposure, it's implied (and sadly borne out by the next book) that the incoming administration will be even worse. The American soldiers deployed to Colombia are betrayed by Cutter in a deal cut with Cortez, resulting in the deaths of half of them. Finally, the book touches on two heavily topical and controversial issues for the late eighties, the war on drugs and the Iran-contra scandal, in contrast to the general Eagleland Type 1 portrayal of America in the first few books.
- Possibly the bleakest thing about the story is the knowledge that the drug problem is unsolvable, or at least beyond the ability of the main characters to fix. Cortez points out that education may eventually reduce the demand for drugs, but in the meantime, so long as Americans want them, someone will be there to supply them.
- Derelict Graveyard: "Bronco" Winters speculates that the Boneyard
in Arizona is where the captured druggie DC-7B will eventually be dumped, given that one more old aircraft in storage there won't be particularly noteworthy. - Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: Invoked in-universe by Felix Cortez. He refuses to divulge the identity of his sources to Escobedo, saying that not only is this a principle of intelligence operations but that Castro himself once asked him the same thing and was given the same answer. Privately, he acknowledges this is baloney: not only was he never that close to Castro, but no one in Cuba would have dared refuse him if he had asked. It's a good story to improve your street cred, though. He's also privately flipping off Escobedo, a very powerful drug lord, by lying to him, demonstrating how little respect he actually has for his boss.
- Don't Sneak Up on Me Like That!: This exact line is said by Clark when Larson walks up behind him without warning first. Actually incredibly stupid of Larson, since Clark just killed four heavily armed mercenaries.
- The Dragon: Felix Cortez is this to Escobedo, and is mainly portrayed as a Dragon-in-Chief since much of the Cartel's side of the story is told from his perspective.
- Driven to Suicide
- Moira Wolfe attempts suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills, after she finds out that she was used by Cortez for the information that was used to kill her boss, FBI Director Emil Jacobs, during his visit to Bogota.
- Admiral Cutter, facing trial for flagrant violations of U.S. and international law, chooses the "easy" way out by stepping in front of a bus.
- Drugs Are Bad: The justification for the plot. Subverted when the methods the government uses to attack the drug trade are shown as clearly worse than the trade itself.
- Dude, Where's My Respect?: Cortez is constantly feeling this in his employment with the Cartel. He's a KGB trained professional intelligence officer who's managed to compromise the freaking FBI, yet his advice is usually ignored or not even sought out. It's what prompts his coup attempt against the Cartel and détente with the U.S. government.
- Elite Agents Above the Law: The book is titled after the President's judgement that the Colombian cocaine cartel has become a threat to US national security. As such, he has his National Security Advisor, James Cutter, cherrypick an elite team to conduct covert sabotage operations against the cocaine cartel. When actions escalate into an airstrike that obliterates one kingpin's compound (wives, mistresses and children included), that's United States military killing foreign nationals on their home soil, which is an act of war. Once this indiscretion starts unraveling, the politicos leave their underlings to be killed or captured.
- Elites Are More Glamorous: Played with in the case of the SHOWBOAT teams. Certain specialists like the medic and the demolitions expert are drawn from the Special Forces, and while neither was serving in a Ranger unit when recruited for the mission, both Chavez and Captain Ramirez are graduates of Ranger School. Similarly, while the light infantry units from which the majority of the men were recruited aren't elite in the strictest sense, they are described as the best units in the Army when it comes to small unit tactics.
- It is, however, explicitly averted during the recruitment process. Ritter points out that since the special forces are so tightly knit and everyone knows each other, too many of them going missing from their units would raise eyebrows and arouse suspicion.
- Enemy Civil War: Part of Clark's RECIPROCITY operation after FBI Director Jacobs is killed by the Medellin Cartel.
- Enemy Mine: Between Admiral Cutter and Felix Cortez. They both have an interest in eliminating most of the Cartel's leaders - Cutter because it's an enemy of the United States, Cortez so that he can take over.
- Exact Words:
- Ryan and Murray promise Cortez that he won't be prosecuted. True to Ryan's word, he isn't prosecuted. He's handed back to his former agency in Cuba, where his fate is most likely to be far less pleasant than what it could be under the US criminal justice system.
- It's noted both at the time he issues the orders for SHOWBOAT-II and RECIPROCITY and later, when the operations start to go to pieces, that the President never actually used the word "kill" at any point.
- Similarly to the above, when the President asks Cutter if his actions in shutting down the Colombian ops were legal, Cutter's reply is "You may make that assumption, sir," an answer lampshaded as having any number of meanings... or meaning nothing at all.
- Even Evil Has Standards
- Cortez has the mindset of a professional intelligence officer, so while he mostly has a lot of Pragmatic Villainy moments, he does show genuine disgust with the methods used by the Cartel to intimidate their rivals (even paraphrasing Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil at one point).
- Exploited by the Mobile Police Department, who use a combination of this and The Power of Love to convince two armed robbers to murder the pirates who kick off the novel.
- Every Bullet is a Tracer: Averted.
- When tracers are used (particularly in the miniguns on the Pave Low helicopters), it's specifically mentioned that only one out of X bullets is a tracer round, for the purposes of assisting with aimnote . Given minigun rate of fire, it's also mentioned that it looks like a laser beam at full "rock and roll".
- This also goes for the SHOWBOAT teams, where it's specifically noted that only the last three rounds in each magazine for the riflemen are tracers, in order to tell them that it's time to reload.
- Fake Kill Scare: The Coasties get a drug-runner to talk by pretending to hang his collaborator from the lanyard with a hood over his head. A pad of gauze soaked in ether, hidden inside the hood, knocks him out.
- False Flag Operation: In order to facilitate the Enemy Civil War, Clark uses Navy-dropped stealth bombs to make the Cartel think that their own members are killing each other.
- Father Neptune: Captain Red Wagner of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Panache. Started out as an enlisted man, became so badass that a U.S. Senator, who's nephew Wagner had rescued during a storm, took upon himself to get him promoted to officer's rank.
- Fiery Cover-Up: When Clark discovers the remains of Team Banner's men after they run into a Cartel hunting party, he burns the bodies in order to cover up American involvement in the operation. He later confronts Ritter about this, saying that he's never burned the body of a friendly before, and didn't like being forced to.
- General Failure: Vice Admiral Cutter, by sheer incompetence, manages to escalate the US operations in Colombia to illegal levels. To make matters worse, Cortez discovers the U.S. involvement and then blackmails Cutter into assisting him in his power grab, which involves betraying the SHOWBOAT teams and leaving them to die.
- Genius Bruiser: Clark. He's a former non-commissioned officer with no college degree who's kept around partly as the CIA's in-house hitman. He also speaks six languages, several of them well enough to pass for a native, is fully capable of planning complex operations (both intelligence and military), and his ability to restructure these operations on the fly in the face of changing circumstances while still achieving the best outcome borders on Xanatos Speed Chess.
- Genre Blind: Discussed by Bob Ritter. He repeatedly has to deal with Admiral Cutter making unnecessary changes to the operation, but eventually realizes that Cutter has confused the reality of intelligence work with the glory of fictional spy thrillers. He even points out there's a term for this: Mission: Impossible Syndrome.
- In lesser measure, Bob Ritter himself, as Clark explains while venting to Larson. Not only has he had a desk job for so long that he's forgotten how things work in the field, but his own career in the field consisted mostly of running spies in Eastern Europe, which is very different from the "low intensity warfare" that the CIA is now practicing in Colombianote .
- "Get Out of Jail Free" Card: Largely averted, since, as mentioned by new FBI Director Bill Shaw, none of the order-followers throughout the whole operation actually broke the law since they believed that they were following legitimate, legal orders from above.
- Bob Ritter, being a veteran of Washington politics, knows full well he needs to cover his ass and so forces Admiral Cutter to provide him with one. Unlike in the film adaptation, this is treated as covering the CIA and its assets in general, rather than just Ritter personally.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality: Outside of Ryan and a few other major characters, everyone involved gets morally compromised in some way. And while Cortez is evil, he's occasionally shown in a positive light for his competency and skill.
- Heroic BSoD:
- Moira Wolfe falls into this when she realizes that she inadvertently helped Felix Cortez compromise the FBI, which in turn lead to the assassination of Emil Jacobs. She tries to kill herself out of guilt.
- Captain Ramirez falls prey to this at the Battle of Ninja Hill when he realizes that most of the other American soldiers are dead and no help is coming.
- Hollywood Silencer: Played completely straight, notable in a book by Tom Clancy, whose claim to fame is meticulous research and realism in the technological aspects of his storiesnote
- Home Field Advantage: In one case, some Cartel workers manage to escape from Team Knife due to knowing the terrain better and using it to flee.
- Honey Trap: Cortez is said to be a master of this, and demonstrates as such, in manipulating Moira Wolfe into giving him sensitive FBI information.
- Honorary Uncle: Due to Buck Zimmer's death, Ryan effectively becomes this, looking after Zimmer's family and making sure they all go to college. It becomes a major plot point in later novels.
- Idiot Ball
- The Cartel's decision to assassinate the US Ambassador to Colombia, the Director of the FBI, and the head of the DEA displays a tenacious grip on the Idiot Ball. Cortez is the only one that realizes this.
- This is reciprocated by the United States when they decide to start using the SHOWBOAT teams to hit Cartel processing sites, which essentially is an act of war against Colombia since they're now technically using armed soldiers to kill Colombian citizens inside of their borders. It's also noted that hitting the processing sites is stupid, because there's hundreds of them, and taking out 2 or 3 a night won't have any effect.
- Informed Ability: In-universe example. Admiral Cutter was appointed as National Security Adviser because he was supposedly an expert on Latin-American affairs. By the time the President realizes that he most certainly is not, it's already too late.
- Innocent Bystander:
- After the Cartel kill Jacobs, Cutter's response is to approve a surgical bombing of a Cartel meeting. Of course, the bomb isn't as surgical as he deluded himself to believe, resulting in the deaths of various Cartel heads' family members and servants. This has a direct impact on the election rhetoric, putting even more pressure on the President.
- When the SHOWBOAT teams commence operations hitting Cartel processing sites, it's implied that many of the peasants who do the dirty work have no other choice to feed their families.
- Ernie Braden's wife happens to catch a stray round when Cartel hitmen murder him in his front yard, and she later dies in the hospital.
- The family of the embezzling money-launderer, although they were targeted on purpose.
- Interservice Rivalry: An interesting aversion. Acting FBI Director Shaw and Dan Murray are both uncomfortable with exposing the CIA's operations because the resulting political scandal would likely result in the CIA being crippled as an intelligence agency. This would be a devastating blow to the FBI's war on terror since the CIA is a major, though silent, partner in it and provides vital overseas information.
- Still crops up on a smaller level from time to time, however. Part of the reason Ritter is eager to join the Colombia operation is because he resents the fact that the CIA's two most successful operations in recent times, as pointed out by Admiral Cutter, "actually started in Greer's department" (the analyst department of the CIA) and is anxious to prove that the Directorate of Operations still has it together.
- Ironic Echo: When the CIA gets word that Cortez is heading to Washington, they bemoan the fact that the FBI didn't get a picture of him when he was known to be in Puerto Rico. When they deliver the news to their FBI contact, the FBI agent's first thought is, "If only the CIA had gotten a photo of him..."
- Ironic Nickname: "Bronco" Winters got his callsign after falling off a horse while drunk at a party.
- It's All My Fault: Moira Wolfe, on discovering that she was used by Cortez, and that the information she gave directly resulted in Emil Jacobs's death, attempts suicide because of this.
- It's Personal:
- Jeff "Bronco" Winters, who pilots the F-15 that takes part in Operation EAGLE EYE, accepted the job because his mother was killed by a druggie when he was a child.
- When the Cartel discover the implications of Operation TARPON, and that Emil Jacobs would be flying to Colombia to meet with their Attorney General, they make the rash decision to murder him. Of course, this results in compromising Moira Wolfe, the FBI source who gave Cortez the information.
- In response to the above, the President gives Ritter a "hunting license with no bag limit," which results in the killing of various Cartel heads, as well as the SHOWBOAT teams attacking Cartel drug processing sites.
- In one scene, Ritter explains to Cutter that John Clark is more than happy to go after the Cartel because Clark's former girlfriend was murdered by a drug-dealing pimp (referring to events that would later be depicted in Without Remorse).
- More generally, the CIA deliberately select for this trope, picking for their operation military men they feel will be angry about drugs - the Gunnery Sergeant in command of the Recon Marines who received the intercepted drug flights, for instance, served in Vietnam and saw a platoon wiped out by the Vietcong because some of them were doing drugs.
- Just Following Orders: When Clark initially refuses to cooperate with the FBI, out of fear of being used as a scapegoat for the operation, Bill Shaw reassures him that he could legitimately claim this as his defense. As far as Clark and all the other low-level operations people knew, they were following the legal and proper orders of their commander-in-chief.
- The Killer Becomes the Killed: The Alabama police use some wildly illegal and creative means to get two black felons to murder Ramon and Jesus, the pirates, after their lawyer gets the death penalty taken off the table.
- Last Stand: The Battle of Ninja Hill, in which fifteen US Army soldiers take on 200 Cartel gunmen. While the SHOWBOAT teams manage to kill close to half of the gunmen and wound most of the rest, only five of them end up surviving, with one of them captured and later killed.
- Leave Behind a Pistol: Admiral Cutter is given the "choice" by Clark of suicide to avoid facing trial for flagrant violations of U.S. and international law. Later novels clarify that Clark did this entirely on his own initiative.
- Literary Allusion Title: the "Clear and present danger" clause in law. Title Dropped. Interestingly, it is related to the First Amendment freedom of speech provision and has little, if any, relevance to the plot.
- Locked Out of the Loop: Ryan, despite being the acting Deputy Director (Intelligence), is kept in the dark and lied to by his colleagues, and remains mostly in the background until the very end.
- Men of Sherwood: The commando teams sent against the Columbian cartels have many unnamed or unimportant members, but all of them rack up a lot of kills even after being put on the defensive by armies of gunmen, with the two least featured teams surviving entirely and the other two teams killing scores of enemies and still leaving a few survivors.
- Mentor Occupational Hazard: James Greer, Ryan's mentor throughout his CIA career, is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and spends the first half of the book wasting away in a hospital before finally dying. This also becomes Back Story for Clark, who mentions that he also owed a great deal to Greer.
- Mercy Kill: how Cortez views his murder of the wounded prisoner from Ninja Hill, in addition to Leave No Witnesses, of course.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Chavez has this reaction when, after an attack on a cartel processing site, he runs down and kills a man who he thinks is a cartel soldier but instead turns out to be an unlucky peasant. He then is forced to carry the man's body back to the site, all the while realizing the peasant was just working there probably out of necessity rather than any desire to hurt people with drugs.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Ernesto Escobado is a thinly-veiled stand-in for real life Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
- No One Gets Left Behind: Averted. Half of the American teams don't make it out and even the ones that do suffer heavy casualties, with those who fall being left behind and likely ending up in unmarked graves.
- Played straight for Jack Ryan and John Clark, who risk their careers and their lives by flying down to Colombia to rescue the surviving soldiers, and for the FBI agents and military personnel who back them up. The book takes the stance that this should be an inviolable principle when sending men into combat, but that not everyone will see it that way.
- The Nondescript: The description of Cortez that the FBI and CIA have to work with boils down to "Latino male, early middle age, average height and build, no distinguishing marks" - which they freely admit is utterly useless from the perspective of a counterintelligence officer trying to find him. However, after Escobado has the FBI director assassinated and the leaks of the director's travel plans is traced back to his executive secretary, Moira Wolfe, she is (due to embarrassingly intimate circumstances) able to produce the most exact and in-depth physical description any law enforcement officer had ever seen. This is further helped later on by camera footage of Clark's laser-designated air strike on Untiveros's house, which is corroborated by Moira.
- Odd Friendship: Alan Trent, a gay liberal from Massachusetts who was introduced in The Cardinal of the Kremlin, is first seen in the company of Sam Fellows, a conservative Mormon from Arizona, at the end of the novel when they force the President to throw the election to Fowler.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: After the Battle of Ninja Hill, Chavez and the other survivors, nearly out of ammo for their own weapons, manage to acquire AK-47s before linking up with Clark. Just how and where they obtained enemy weapons is left unexplained - even Clark is told simply, "Bad guys," when he asks.
- Ominous Legal Phrase Title: From the landmark Schenck v. United States Supreme Court decision.
- Out-of-Character Moment: In-universe example. Bob Ritter notices that Jack doesn't show up for Admiral Greer's funeral, which is something he would never do. After calling up Cathy Ryan and finding out that Jack also hadn't told his wife he would be, something he would also never do unless it involved a CIA mission, Ritter and Moore realize that Ryan knows about the Colombia mission and is mostly trying to rescue the stranded soldiers. Fortunately, this is what prompts their Heel–Face Turn against Admiral Cutter.
- Pragmatic Villainy: Larsen warns Clark that the Colombian drug lords are more than just very well-funded macho thugs. The smartest thing they did, he confides, was to form the cartel and (mostly) avoid the kind of infighting that cripples many other criminal enterprises.
- Put on a Bus: National Security Advisor Jeffrey Pelt is mentioned to have retired sometime prior to the novel, paving the way for Cutter to take the position.
- Retcon: Clark is now stated to have had a minor part in the events of Patriot Games, having been the liaison to the French forces tasked with raiding the terrorist camps. He's even stated to have been aboard one of the choppers during the abortive raid on the ULA camp.
- Resigned in Disgrace: The President agrees to throw his own reelection campaign in exchange for the illegal military operations in Colombia being kept secret from the public.
- Right Man in the Wrong Place: Ryan is only able to do what he can to shut down the operations because of his position as DDI.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The United States's response to the Cartel for murdering Director Jacobs.
- Series Continuity Error: In The Hunt for Red October, Admiral Greer mentions that even his grandchildren have grown out of the Barbie Doll toy phase. However, at his funeral in Clear and Present Danger, Greer is buried next to his only child, a son killed in Vietnam. With no other living relatives and Ryan not present at the funeral, the American flag draped on his coffin is instead presented to Judge Moore.
- The text says only son, not only child, and Without Remorse when featuring a scene with Greer and another Vietnam-era bigwig who lost his son in combat mentions that both have other children.
- Shoot Out the Lock: Larson shoots out the lock at an airplane strip where Colonel Johns's chopper lands to refuel before heading out to Panache. Though it is slightly justified in that he uses five rounds to do so and specifically aims to separate the lock mechanism from the door.
- Sinister Shiv: The pirates meet their end in the showers of the Alabama jail, courtesy a couple of these.
- Smug Snake: Ernesto Escobedo's default attitude towards America and Americans. This eventually becomes his downfall.
- Someone to Remember Him By: In The Sum of All Fears, it's revealed that Carol Zimmer was pregnant with her husband's eighth child, and was planning to surprise him with it the next time he came home.
- The Starscream: Cortez, after the Cartel make the decision to murder Jacobs in response to TARPON, decides to subvert their leadership with the aim of eventually taking over.
- Suicide by Pills: Moira attempts this after she realizes that she was the leak whose intel was used by the cartels used to assassinate Director Jacobs.
- Swiss Bank Account: The Cartel launder their money through an intricate network of bank accounts (some of them Swiss) set up by an Alabama businessman, which was almost untraceable (had the FBI not found the businessman's copy of the records, they wouldn't have known it existed at all). However, once it's cracked by Operation TARPON, it inflicts a net loss on the Cartel on the order of half a billion dollars. Keep in mind, these are 1988 dollars, so the result is equivalent to over a billion dollars today.
- Take That!: Clancy wrote the novel after the Iran-Contra scandal broke, and wrapped in elements of the Vietnam War, to highlight what he saw as political operators making mistakes with covert operations for obscure, unjustified, and sometimes illegal goals.
- Title Drop: The drug trade is identified via secret executive order as a "clear and present danger" to national security.
- Training from Hell: The SHOWBOAT teams train for their mission in the Colorado mountains, where the oxygen level is very low, in order to prepare themselves for operations in the Colombian mountains. The trainers avoid any Drill Sergeant Nasty elements, though, because the men being trained are all experienced sergeants themselves who neither need such treatment nor would stand for it.
- Unexpected Successor: Enforced. The sitting President is forced by Al Trent and Sam Fellows to throw the 1988 election, resulting in Bob Fowler being elected.
- Was It Really Worth It?: This is discussed in a later book when we learn that the operation was a success, in the sense that the Cartel eventually came apart as a result of the Enemy Civil War initiated here. On the other hand, this had no long-term impact in Colombia's organized crime problem or in the drug trade, as another cartel simply took its place. On the other other hand: "True, and they haven't killed any American officials, have they? Somebody explained to them what the rules are."
- We Have Reserves: Invoked by Cortez when he sends hundreds of Cartel gunmen to eliminate the SHOWBOAT teams based on the information provided by Cutter. In addition to killing the U.S. soldiers, he wants to reduce the Cartel's available manpower so that he can make his power grab.
- Worthy Opponent:
- Larsen warns Clark (and via him, the CIA), in the strongest terms: "Don't underestimate them, my friend. The cartel is smart, it has all the resources it needs, and it's ruthless enough to scare a veteran Nazi."
- Cortez feels this way about the Americans who set up the operation against the Cartel (Bob Ritter and John Clark, though he doesn't know it), noting that it's an unusually subtle yet ruthless plan by CIA standards and the sort of thing he himself might have thought up.
- Cortez also shows significant respect for the skill of the American soldiers, largely because they're unwittingly helping him to whittle down the Cartel's own troops ahead of Cortez's planned coup. After the Battle of Ninja Hill, the Cartel gunmen bring Cortez a heavily wounded American soldier they managed to capture. Instead of interrogating him, Cortez just gives the soldier a dose of morphine and lets him die in peace.
- In much lesser measure, Clark with the Cartel. He despises drug dealing and organized crime on a very personal level, but is also a veteran Cold Warrior and grudgingly respects the Cartel's very successful history of confronting Marxist insurgencies in Colombia.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Admiral Cutter thinks he's in an episode of Mission: Impossible, which greatly annoys Bob Ritter.
- You Are in Command Now:
- Bill Shaw ends up becoming the new FBI Director upon Emil Jacobs's death.
- And Jack Ryan, with Admiral Greer in the hospital and eventually dead, becomes the new acting Deputy Director of Intelligence (head of the CIA's analysts).
