Just Say Colombia : CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER <i> by Tom Clancy (G. P. Putnam’s Sons: $21.95; 656 pp.; 0-399-13440-9) </i>

Although publicists have been known to go to extraordinary lengths to create interest in a new book, all G. P. Putnam’s Sons had to do to promote Tom Clancy’s latest novel was to let events follow their course in Colombia. The central thesis of Clancy’s book, however, a secret invasion of Colombia by elite U.S. troops, is scarcely new.

Credit for that ingenuous idea seems to belong to New York City Mayor Ed Koch, who first suggested a “friendly” invasion. Earlier this year, Washington sources reported that the Bush Administration was seriously considering such a plan, but apparently it was shelved after the Colombian government declared war on the cartel last August after the assassinations of a judge, a police chief and the leading contender in next year’s presidential race, Sen. Luis Carlos Galan.

That the bad guys in Tom Clancy’s latest political novel are drug traffickers, instead of Soviets or Arab terrorists, is a measure of the change in U.S. perceptions: Numerous surveys show that the public believes narcotics a greater threat to national security than a possible Soviet invasion. Nowadays, the “Evil Empire” is run, not from Moscow, but from Medellin, the cocaine cartel’s headquarters--a geopolitical shift confirmed by none other than James Bond, who in his latest thriller confronts the evil Frank Sanchez from you guessed where.

Both the Bond film and Clancy’s novel prove that reality equals and sometimes surpasses fiction. Among the villains in Clancy’s book, for example, is a Cuban intelligence officer who has deserted his country to work for the cartel as a mercenary. As revealed during the recent drug trials in Havana, Cuban government officials have indeed worked with the cartel. According to the Colombian government, however, the mercenaries who have trained the traffickers’ armies are British and Israeli.

A former insurance salesman who has made a fortune from spy novels packed with details about Pentagon and CIA procedures and equipment, Clancy in “Clear and Present Danger” has written a generally credible tale about an attempt by Washington to destroy the cocaine cartel. In retaliation, the “druggies” assassinate the U.S. ambassador to Colombia and the director of the FBI, who is in Bogota on a secret mission. Meanwhile, four battalions of U.S. troops prowl the Andes in a hit-and-run war on drug airfields, coca-paste factories and the fortress headquarters of the cartel. The covert plan unravels, however, because of poor security and the ineptitude and double-dealing of the man in charge of the operation, in a variation on the Iran-Contra scandals.

Where Clancy fails is in the details. For one thing, there are too many of them--page after page of minute technical explanations of weapons, airplanes and ships. For another, some of them are mistaken.

While Clancy may have seen the weapons he describes, he did not do any research in Colombia, relying instead on the first-hand experiences of others. This shows up in some basic errors, such as a description of the region between Medellin and the city of Manizales as jungle highland, bringing to mind dense tropical forests when the area is actually a temperate coffee-producing zone with scattered woodlands. Medellin itself has a year-round spring-like climate.

Similarly, Clancy places a number of coca-paste centers in the same area, although the region does not produce substantial quantities of coca leaves. Paste factories are always near the raw material because it is uneconomic to transport tons of leaves hundreds of miles elsewhere, particularly since cheap local labor is readily available to “dance” in vats of leaves with kerosene and sulfuric acid, stomping the mixture into paste.

Most such operations are conducted in Bolivia and Peru, the world’s principal sources of coca leaves, although some paste is made in southwestern Colombia--far from Medellin and Manizales--where the Indian tribes have grown coca leaves since pre-Colombian times. The tricky technical part of converting the paste into powder is carried out primarily in Colombia, including areas around Medellin and Manizales. But there is a substantial difference between paste factories and powder laboratories and the types of people involved.

Such details would be unimportant, only a significant part of the book’s action evolves around supposed paste centers in the Medellin/Manizales area.

Clancy likewise shows himself uninformed about the connections between the drug traffickers and local guerrillas. While the latter receive money and arms from the traffickers in return for protection, there is no evidence to suggest, as Clancy claims, that guerrilla threats were the original cause of the cocaine cartel’s formation, which developed for purely business reasons. As pointed out by Pablo Escobar, the cartel’s organizational genius, the traffickers could make more money by working together than cutting each other’s throats.

Clancy also implies that the M-19 guerrillas in 1986 seized the Supreme Court and murdered its judges on orders of the cartel. The claim, which was part of the Reagan Administration’s disinformation campaign against Nicaragua (which was supposed to have been a party to the plot), was discredited by several Colombian government investigations, the most recent of which blames the local military for killing many of the hundred-plus victims in a bloody counter attack on the court building.

Though half-baked, Clancy’s theory that the M-19 and other Colombian guerrillas are tools of the drug traffickers is held to be fact in U.S. military circles, and in Clancy’s books the military and police are always the good guys, with the correct information and ideals.

Despite such annoying simplifications and the overwhelming detail, the basic plot is realistic and entertaining. Fortunately for plausibility’s sake, not all the Americans are good guys, one of the principal villains being Vice Adm. James Cutter, the President’s special assistant for national security affairs, who is in charge of the covert military invasion and who, for reasons of political expediency, is prepared to sacrifice the idealistic soldiers sent to Colombia to destroy the cartel. Roughly modeled on John Poindexter, Cutter personifies the political duplicity that abets such illegal covert actions as Lt. Col. Oliver North’s aborted operations. Suffice to say, the good guys win in the end, thanks to the timely intervention of an intrepid CIA agent.

The most informed sections of the book deal with the personalities and backgrounds of the principal drug traffickers and the threat they pose to Colombian society. Whoever briefed Clancy on those subjects did a good job, because the characters ring true, particularly Ernesto Escobedo, a thinly fictionalized Escobar, whom Clancy correctly pegs as “a carry-over from another age--a classic robber baron capitalist.” Unlike the railroad and oil barons of yesteryear however, drug criminals are shunned by society, and, for all his wiliness and marketing skills, Escobedo can only impose his will through bribes and brute force. To achieve social recognition, he and the other cartel leaders need political power. As a character in Clancy’s book observes, the drug chieftains already have the de facto power of a government. “Sooner or later they’re going to start acting like one. . . . They keep expanding their own limits, and they haven’t found the brick wall yet, the one that tells them where to stop.”

The recent assassination of Sen. Galan aimed to test such limits. Whether the cartel has encountered a brick wall in the government crackdown just begun remains to be seen. Five years ago, the previous administration announced a “war on drugs” after the cartel’s assassination of the minister of justice, only to give up within a few months.