A CIA Man Faces Moral Choices Amid Intrigue in the Beltway

The moral ambiguities and dilemmas raised for American government officials during the half century of the Cold War with the Soviet Union present a rich opportunity for novelists. In “The Confirmation,” Thomas Powers, who has written a number of books about intelligence services including “The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA,” addresses such complications in his first novel with considerable success.

Frank Cabot, a career CIA man and now deputy director of Central Intelligence, has been nominated by the president to be head of the CIA. The Senate Intelligence Committee has scheduled hearings. The White House had previously asked him: Was there anything in Cabot’s background that could surface at the hearings and embarrass him and the president? Absolutely not, Cabot replied.

Cabot and the committee chairman, a Georgia senator, are old friends. The senator has had a longtime interest in the MIAs of the Vietnam War, and Cabot solicitously searched every report of a “sighting” as a favor to the senator. Remains were found, but no live MIA ever turned up. The hearings were going to be a breeze--but, of course, one realizes that this will hardly be the case.

“In this town,” Powers explains, “your enemies never attack directly. They bide their time until weakness shows: some ancient indiscretion of youth, some folly of middle age, some stupid joke told in the wrong company, standing by the wrong friend, an investment too good to be true, a brother boasting of access. The crazy thing was that none of it mattered until your enemies wanted to bring you down. . . .

“Cabot had watched the awful spectacle many times,” Powers adds. “Washington is a town of wolves, not lions. They seek out the weak, they come in numbers, they attack from the side and from behind. Each bite is small but draws blood. They drive you frantic with the pain of small admissions--yes, it happened; yes, I was there; yes, I made the phone call. In this town a man caught in a lie was red meat.”

Just before the hearings begin, Cabot’s wife, driving home after too much wine at a lunch with their niece, strikes another car and badly injures a small child riding in it. She herself is critically injured. Cabot’s wife is an alcoholic. Nobody in Washington knew that and Cabot hadn’t told.

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“Cabot knew his chances hung by a thread,” Powers writes. “If that little boy in the other car died, it was all over. Even if the child lived, a DUI charge against Cabot’s wife would send out a signal like blood in the water.”

Cabot squeaks by on that one. But he faces a far more serious threat--a rival of equal rank in the CIA who had wanted the job Cabot was nominated for. This man has weapons too. Like the Nazis, the CIA keeps copious records, even of crimes.

Cabot had assigned a bright and personable young CIA recruit to keep tabs on his precious MIA reports. Into this young agent’s hands, Cabot’s enemy has arranged to have delivered a set of files that implicate Cabot in a dark deed committed some 20 or 30 years earlier, one of those things done in the name of national security and under high authority that, nonetheless, come to be seen in later years, even to the perpetrators, as acts that offend the conscience. From here the novel runs to its close with many a surprising turn.

Powers knows his Washington. His characters are nicely drawn, so are the settings, which are deftly placed in the landscape of the world’s largest, and smallest, company town. Real Washington characters--former President Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger, former CIA director William Casey--make their way through its pages. (Of Casey’s legendary mumbled speech, Powers writes that a CIA man who asked Casey more than twice what he had said faced a demotion or worse.)

In “The Confirmation,” the moral challenges facing Cabot and others in the American government are skillfully rendered by Powers. In fact, Powers is so skillful that one feels a bit let down when the surprising end comes off almost too easily, the evil finally concentrated in one man, the consciences of the well-meaning characters largely relieved of their burdens.