War - Terrorism Fiction?
 

Imagine this, if you will, from the "fiction" writer Tom Clancy...

t.f. PATRIOT GAMES, a Jack Ryan novel, New York Times Best Seller, first printed by G.P. Putnam & Sons, August 1987 , later by The Berkeley Publishing Group a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.

"The problem with these questions was not a lack of information, but a glut of it. Literally thousands of CIA field officers and their agents, plus those of every other Western intlligence service, were scouring the world for such i8nformation. Many of the agents - foreign nationals recruited and paid by the Agency - would make reports on the most trivial encounter in the hope of delivering The One Piece of Information that would crack open Abu Nidal, or Islamic Jihad, or one of the other high-profile groups, for a substantial reward. The result was thousands of communiques, most of them full of worthless garbage that was indistinguishable from the one or two nuggets of real information. Jack had not realized the magnitude of the problem. The people working on this were all talented, but they were being overwhelmed by a sea of raw intelligence data that had to be graded, collated, and cross-referenced before proper analysis could begin. The difficulty of finding any single organization was inversely proportional to its size, and some of these groups were composed of a mere handful of people - in extreme cases composed of family members only."

Maybe the past IS prologue after all?

:q:

The thing to notice is the year the novel was written:

1 9 8 7

Sounds like last week...

I heard a story about Clancy that, after "The Hunt for Red October" was published, he had a visit from the CIA asking him where and how he got all the information about our present-day submarines, virtually accusing him of obtaining it illegaly. He told them he simply went to the Library of Congress! No "Red Alert" there, I guess.

Yup, I can't testify from personal knowledge of the facts, but I have heard that vets respect Clancy's close adherence to things the way they are...

Still Clancy's best work is "Red Storm Rising".The information he has is incredible.The way things are carried out are completely authentic.I love his work.

Yup... I just finished RED STRORM... last month, quite a piece of work.