TOM CLANCY'S BOOK PUT BITS AND PIECES TOGETHER

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000201140003-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 19, 2012
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: August 30, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

ST Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/19: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201140003-4
"?? 30 August 1987
STAT
Are Self-Revealing
Tom Clancy's Books Put Bits and Pieces Together
For the -Patient Reader, Military Secrets
WASHINGTON
F RQil wealth of authentic de-
best-selling novels
about superpower brinkmanship,
many people assume that Tom Clancy
must have served in the armed forces.
In fact, he has no military experi-
ence. But he has been reading naval
history since the fifth grade, he is fas-
cinated with technology and he reads
many specialized journals and refer-
ence books intended for engineers and
military officers. And the way he has
brought it all together in print is an il-
lustration of the kind of synthesis,
using only unclassified materials, that
Government officials are increasingly
concerned about.
Mr. Clancy, who minutely described
sophisticated weaponry in such books
as "The Hunt for Red October" and
"Red Storm Rising," said that no one
in the Government had given him
"classified information of any kind."
But he recalled that when he had lunch
at the White House in 1985, John F.
Lehman Jr., who was then Secretary of
the Navy, asked him who had
"cleared" the information in his first
book, "Red October," about the hunt
for a defecting Soviet submarine.
Mr. Lehman, in an interview last
week, recalled telling Mr. Clancy in a
good-natured way: "If you were a
naval officer, I would have you court-
martialed because of all the classified
information in your book." Up to that
time, Mr. Lehman said, "operational
procedures of antisubmarine warfare
had been classified." But, he added,
Mr. Clancy had simply "pieced it all to-
gether by voraciously reading the open
literature for 15 years, things like the
Proceedings of the United States
Naval Institute."
In the course of research for his
books, r. Clan a so spent a at
sea on a Navy ri te, went aboard
several su ma s interviewed to -
tgence o cers, studied a 1 war
dame a to to a Soviet defector.
In an into w from his Maryland
home, he acknowledged that there may
be some validity to the Reagan Admin-
istration's concern. Using unclassified
information, he said, it is sometimes
possible to infer secrets about the
"operational capabilities" of certain
weapon systems.such as the Stealth
bomber. He calls this process "con-
necting the dots" because it links bits
of information to form a big picture.
Nevertheless, it is, he said, unwise
for the Government to try to restrict
access to unclassified inforrnktton in
the public domain. "One of the reasons
we are so successful is that we have a
free society with open access to infor.
mation," he said. "If you change that,
if you try to close off the channels of in-
formation, we'll end up just like the
Russians, and their society does not
work. The best way to turn America
into another Russia is to emulate their
methods of handling information."
Besides, he said, "the principle of
deterrence depends on having the
other guy know something about what
we do. It everything we do is secret,
they won't know enough to be afraid of
us. Secrecy is a tool for national secl ci-
ty, but like any tool it must be used in-
telligently."
Mr. Lehman agreed that "there
should never be any kind of Govern-
ment restraint on unclassified litera-
ture." He said that Mr. Clancy's accu-
rate portrayal of undersea warfare
had helped people understand the dam-
age done by the Walker family spy
ring, which sold Navy secrets to the
Soviet Union, and by thg Toshiba Cor-
poration subsidiary that sold sensitive
technology to the Russians, enabling
them to make quieter submarines.
ROBERTPEAR
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Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/19: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201140003-4