The Confirmation

A novel of high-stakes political intrigue on the shadowy side of Washington, The Confirmation sheds light on the men who run the Central Intelligence Agency, on investigative journalists, and on government officials fighting for control of the nation's secrets.

The confirmation of the seemingly spotless nominee Frank Cabot as Director of Central Intelligence is jeopardized when Brad Cameron, a young CIA officer looking for evidence of American prisoners left behind after the Vietnam war, uncovers a suppressed report -- a claim by a convicted American spy that Cabot cooperated with the Russians in a shameful cover-up twenty years earlier. As Cabot attempts to clear his name, reporter George Tater digs relentlessly for the story that will revive his career and Cameron doggedly pursues the truth about what happened. The result is a full-scale Washington media circus, as a host of interested parties -- the president, the press, the senators who must vote yea or nay on Cabot's nomination, and Cabot's friends and enemies -- all try to conceal, expose, or spin what he did and why.

Closely paralleling these events is a different kind of conspiracy. A clandestine militia of angry Vietnam vets, convinced that officials in high places have deliberately abandoned American POWs, plot a confrontation -- both clever and rash -- calculated to violently disrupt Cabot's confirmation hearings.

Thomas Powers, the author of books on intelligence and covert history, writes knowingly about how the CIA and its officials operate in the world of Beltway politics. At the heart of this riveting novel is a well-kept secret that, as it emerges, reveals how difficult it is to tell the heroes from the villains, the truth from the lies, the honorable from the self-serving. As Brad Cameron learns, in official Washington doing the right thing may prove to be more dangerous than anything he has done before.

Thomas Powers is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose most recent book, Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb, was published simultaneously in four countries -- the United States, Germany, France, and Britain -- where it received wide notice and sparked continuing controversy. He has written frequently about intelligence organizations since the publication of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (1979). His other books include Thinking About the Next War; The War at Home: Vietnam and the American People; and Diana: The Making of a Terrorist. He lives in Vermont with his wife. This is his first novel.