Circle William A Novel

“Two brothers — one a presidential press secretary, the other a maverick captain on a Navy destroyer — scramble to prevent a Libyan plot to use chemical weapons against Israel and the United States.”

Jim Schmidt is a master of spin. As White House press secretary, his job is to cajole, sweet-talk, and otherwise persuade the nation’s most powerful journalists to play a story the way the White House wants it played. Jim’s younger brother, Bill, is equally skillful, but in a different realm. He’s the charismatic captain of the USS “Winston Churchill,” and he leads an able but rambunctious crew with a penchant for causing well-publicized “liberty incidents” around the Mediterranean.

Both men instinctively understand their jobs, but more important, they understand power and how it works: He who controls the facts controls the response. So when the United States learns of a Libyan plot to drop a planeload of chemical weapons on the Israeli Knesset, the brothers — thousands of miles apart — unexpectedly find themselves working together to defuse the plan. Their first step is to set “Circle William,” a Navy phrase meaning to prepare for chemical, germ, or nuclear attack.

As Jim huddles with the country’s top defense and intelligence officials to plot a viable strategy to prevent the strike, Bill, on the front lines of the crisis, prepares to implement the plan. Complicating their mission is the inconvenient presence of Sue O’Dell, a smart “Washington Post” Style reporter who wants to write a feature on the commander and his notorious ship.

How the brothers counter the Libyan threat and how they spin the story make “Circle William” as much a story of internationalterrorism as a contemporary political thriller.

Drawing from more than two decades of service in the U.S. Navy, his work inside the Pentagon, and from his tenure as an assistant White House press secretary, Bill Harlow combines the insider’s detail of “Primary Colors” with the technical expertise of “The Hunt for Red October. Circle William,” as authentic and chilling as any news event, is an impressive debut by a writer with an intimate knowledge of the workings of Washington, the military, and international terrorism.