Ask him.

[email protected]

[url]http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=author:tomclancy%40aol.com+[/url]

Nope Tom never served in the armed forces. IIRC he wanted to join the navy, but being severly myopic(sp?) kept him out.
BTW my senior year in HS '89 I convinced my English Lit teacher (he was a coach so it wasent too hard [:D] ) that TC was born in England so I could do my final paper on him.
the deciever,
echo6

If he was, he would probably be in Leavenworth now.

I was in the navy on subs when "the Hunt for Red October" came out.  We were told it exposed a lot of confidential material, NIS was investigating, and if reporters asked us about the book, we were to refer them to Public Affairs and say, "No comment."

I'm sure each sub on each base was responsible for buying 125 copies of that first edition.  We were sure he was going down for life.  While his navy slang sucked, alot of the technical details were pretty close.

Apparently he spent a lot of time in bars talking to submariners - "loose lips sink ships."

IIRC, when "The Hunt for Red October" came out, He was able to prove to the NIS investigators the all of his data came from public sources.


  Vulcan94

NOT.  His debrief is well known.  99% of his info was called "common knowledge" (got it off the web!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!and from public libraries).

Dave S

So basically the authorities (as well as some of you guys) vastly underestimate how much information exists in the public domain and the level of expertise of sources such as Janes Information Group and writers such as Norman Friedman and Norman Polmar.

I freaked out when "Clear and Present Danger" was first published....

From: Tom Clancy ([email protected])
Subject: Re: clancy contacted by cia

People, I get so damned tired of dealing with this rumor.

When RED OCTOBER came out, it was published by the Naval Institute Press, which
is the semi-official mouthpiece of the US Navy, whose board is composed almost
exclusively of naval officers, and whose titular president is the Chief of
Naval Operations. The original manuscript was vetted by two active-duty
submariners, and while there were some sensitivity issues, I demonstrated where
I'd gotten all of my information to the satisfaction of the one officer who had
misgivings at the time. You may safely assume, therfore, that there were no
issues of classification with my first novel.

No, nobody from CIA ever visited me about RED OCTOBER.

However, I *did* get a visit about CARDINAL.

CIA discovered what I was writing about, and two people from Langley came down
to talk to me about it. One handed me a few pages from the initial draft of the
manuscript (never mind how they got it; it would have been illegal if done in
this country [they told me how it was done], but it had not been done in this
country, and not, in any case, by CIA [other countries have different laws
and/or their agencies are not as fastidious about abiding by the law as our
agencies are], which is amusing, but something I agreed not to talk about) and
then he said, "That is classified information."

The room got a little cold.

But then I handed this guy my satellite photo of the place in question and he
said, "Oh." Then he asked where I'd gotten the photo. (The Dushanbe site, you
guys will recall.)

"Turn it over," I said, and he did. He blinked hard.

"I didn't know they were that good," he observed. That effectively ended the
problem. The CIA guy was used to seeing KH-11 overheads and hadn't troubled
himself to check out what was available to private citizens. The other visitor
that day was one of the FBI guys whom William Webster had cross-decked from FBI
to CIA when he changed places of employment. The spook drove back to Langley,
and the FBI guy and I continued the conversation.

The FBI guy, a gent named Bill, now retired, and I drove to the land I'd just
bought on which to build a house. Walking the beach, we came to an agreement. I
would send the Agency a copy of the completed CARDINAL manuscript, and if the
Agency had a problem, I would remove the offending passages, if any, but CIA
agreed to tell me why they wanted me to tamper with the book, because it was a
serious commercial property??and fair, we agreed, was fair. Bill and I
shook on the deal.

I finished the book, and duly sent a MS copy to my pal at the Agency, and no
objection was ever made. Thank God Bill was a cop rather than a spook. You can
do business with cops. Spooks are less accustomed to living in the real world.
This is one of the many reasons why I have such high respect for the FBI.

I've had other contacts with CIA, including a defection ("officially assisted
immigration" might be a more accurate phraseology) which I helped to set up,
but this was the only one that touched upon issues of classification in my
books. My relationship with the intelligence community remains cordial, but
distant.

TC