TOM CLANCY, DOUBLE AGENT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000201140008-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 25, 2012
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: January 29, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

~, Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/25: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201140008-9
WASHINGTON POST
29 January 1985
Clan cY,
ant
Besides the Spy Novel
`Red October,' He
Also Writes Insurance
By Peter Masley
Washington Post Staff Writer
You could tell right away that the
approaching lecturer was a CL4
type. He walked across the snow and
left no footprints. He said his name
was "Tom Clancy," but everyone
knows there are hundreds of "Tom
Clancvs" at the agency using thou-
sands of cover stories. Then he de-
clared that he was really an insur-
ance broker down in rural Calvert
County, where that big nuclear re-
actor pulses, and that he got an Eng-
lish degree at Loyola College in Bal-
timore. Ha.
But the part of his "legend" that
most strained credulity was this,
'Clancy"said someone paid him $35
to write a letter to the editor a couple
of years ago and so he became a writ-
er. Then he said he wrote a novel
called "The Hunt for Red October"
that has sold 45,000 copies, and it
wasn't even published in New York.
And he did this without a literary
agent.,
Tell us another one, pal.
Thomas L. Clancy Jr., 37, who
uses the sobriquet "Tom Clancy,"
sLarted writing "The Hunt for Red
October" in July 1982 "from the
beginning, not knowing how it was
going to end. It really was a lot
more fun doing it that way ... If
you plan things ahead of time you
lose spontaneity."
Double
Thus flying in the face of hal-
lowed literary tradition, he created
a story based on the 1975 at-
tempted defection to Sweden of a
Soviet destroyer crew. From that
event, and a few others, Clancy
crafted a fast-paced, strongly
plotted and technically solid account
of a half-Lithuanian "sub driver"
defecting to the West with the Red
October, the Soviet Union's new-
est, stealthiest and most powerful
nuclear missile submarine.
"I knew I could look up the facts,"
Clancy says. "What I didn't know
was what kind of people go to sea in
ships that are designed to sink." He
found out by interviewing subma-
riners and technical experts.
Since publication by the Naval
Institute Press in Annapolis last
October, "The Hunt for Red Octo-
ber" has had four press runs and hit
best-seller lists in Washington, San
Francisco and New York City. The
Naval Institute Press is preparing a
fifth edition of 25,000 copies.
Because "Red October" has sold
45,000 copies, publishing experts
call it a "stunning success." (Most
first novels by unknown writers sell
3,500 to 5,000 copies.) Considering
the additional barriers Clancy
faced-no agent and a nonfiction
publisher that had never before pro-
duced a novel and lacked the brute-
force sales and distribution machin-
ery of the New York houses-"Red
October" also could be called a
breakthrough.
Word of mouth and more than a
dozen, reviews, some enthusiastic,
propelled sales. Paperback rights
went to Berkley Publishing Group
for $49,500 and United Kingdom
rights went for around' $15,000.
The Naval Institute Press has sold
foreign language rights for Dutch,
West German, Japanese and South
American editions.
"We don't have any pretensions
that this is great literature," says
Naval Institute Press marketing di-
rector Jim Sutton, "It is just a hell of
a good read..".
"O.F. Bowen Agency," Clancy an-
swers the telephone.
This is Clancy at work. He writes
policies as well as books. In the
summer thousands of people drive
by his office at the Bowen Agency
in Owings on Maryland Rte. 260 on
their way to Chesapeake Beach,
four miles down the highway.
"When did you last have a policy
with us?" he asks a caller. "What is
your name? How old are you?"
Clancy and his wife, Wanda, who
operate the agency, have 1,000 cli-
ents in Southern Maryland.
On the floor of Clancy's office is a
large blue bag that houses the Ap-
ple Macintosh computer he com-
poses on when there's down time in
the insurance business. Along the
walls are war games, books on
weapons, and government-pro-
duced maps of,Germany he is using
to write his second novel.
"When you're your own boss,"
.Clancy says, "you can budget your
,time." If writing weren't fun, Clancy
says, "I wouldn't do it. I don't need
the money. This business supports
me rather well."
- Among Clancy's insurance clients
are people he calls "nucs"-pro-
nounced "nukes"-former Navy nu-
-clear engineers who operate the
Baltimore Gas & Electric Co.'s Cal-
vert Cliffs Nuclear Power Station
on the Chesapeake Bay, 20 miles
south of the Bowen Agency. Clancy
mined them for technical informa-
tion about the nuclear and naval as-
pects of "Red October." He says the
Navy's "nuts" are "the best in the
world."
Clancy is well read in his genre of
thriller novels. He says Frederick
Forsyth "is, at his best, probably
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/25: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201140008-9
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/25: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201140008-9
the best in the business. Richard
Co:;, he hasn't done much work but
what I've seen I really like. Jack
Higgins, at his best, he's awfully,
awfully good. A.J. Quinnell (a
pseudonym;, the new guy, nobody
even knows who he is. There's a
number. of good writers out there;
fortunately or unfortunately, most
of them are Brits and I figured it's
about time an American did it."
The central character and hero of
"The Hunt for Red October" is CIA
analyst and historian Jack Ryan.
Ryan, a clean-cut all-American,
"started to take form in the late
1970s," Clancy says. "In most any
thriller fiction, the hero is an un-
married guy in his thirties who likes
to drink and smoke and run around
... What's wrong with a hero
who's married, loves his wife and
plays with his kids? That's what
most people are," says Clancy.
Like Clancy, Ryan was born in
Baltimore, but here creator and
createe diverge.
Ryan, Clancy explains, "got a de-
gree at Boston College in econom-
ics and went into the Marine Corps,
was injured and retired on a medical
discharge, along the way he got a
CPA, went to work for a stock bro-
kerage firm, made himself a lot of
money ... married a doctor, an eye i
cutter-Kathy Ryan is an ophthal-
rmic surgeon-and then he decided
he was just going to leave the bro-
kerage business and got himself a
doctorate in history ... and
through a circuitous route he found
himself being invited to join the
CIA."
There is no room, in Jack Ryan's
world, for doubters and second-
guessers. Ryan himself is a self-as-
sured man of mental and physical
action. Jack Ryan's activist CIA, in
contrast with portrayals by some
other espionage writers, is not im-
mobilized by fear of Soviet moles.
It's the reverse: Ryan's CIA runs
our mole in the Kremlin.
"When America deals with other
parts of the world," Clancy says,
"we should concern ourselves less
with what. we're against as opposed
to what we're for. Too often, con-
servatives, you always hear what
they're against and there's a re-
verse side to that. We are for free-
dom, we are for justice,*-and the rea-
Son that we and the communists
can't get along is the 'reason that
they are not for freedom-and they
are not for justice. They are the
[tegative guys and we are not."
I For his next work, Clancy has
teamed up with a naval analyst, Lar-
ry Bond, to write a book tentatively
called "Sunset."
"It has a naval subject matter and
it's quite a bit more complicated
than 'Red October,' ", Clancy ex-
plains. His plans after "Sunset" call
for three more Jack Ryan thrillers.
The first of them is called "Patriot
.Games," Clancy says, and deals with
terrorism and the period of Ryan's
life that preceded the events in
"Red October." Clancy may have
been an untested' novelist when he
wrote "Red October," but he still
had the good sense to lay the
groundwork for a sequel.
"I'm not that good a writer," he
says. "Maybe l will be some day but
that day is not yet in sight . I do a
good action scene. I handle technol-
ogy well. I like to think that I do a
fair-fairer-job of representing
the kind of people we have in the
Nai,v ... Portraying them the way
they really are. Beyond that, I'll try
to listen to my critics and improve
what needs improving."
Having concluded his lecture in a
Loyola College classroom, "Tom
Clancy" has faded away into snowy
Baltimore. The darkened room is
empty except for a curious' spectator
hunting for clues to this man's iden-
tity. On the lectern he spots some-
thing under a few scraps of crum-
pled paper. It's an ID card enclosed
in plastic. Being careful not to leave
fingerprints, he picks, up the card
and exananes it. Printed across the
front, in red, white and blue, he sees
the words, "Official Literary Li-
cense." His search Ends suddenly
when his eyes drop to the next line.
The card was issued to Jack Ryan.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/25: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201140008-9