In June of 1977 the CIA dismissed 820 Clandestine Service officers in a single day -- this is the factual basis for 'Shadow Trade', one of the most sophisticated and detailed treatments of that covert community ever realized in American fiction. It is a novel about the reality of contemporary intelligence: computers, mail drops, anonymous fund transfers, honey traps, and, first and foremost, duplicity -- the ability to falsify endlessly, allowing operatives to move so far into the shadows that they disappear.