The Eǵo
Has Landed

The office of the O. F. Bowen insurance agency is about a forty-five-minute drive from Washington, in Owings, Maryland, opposite a corn-field and just up the road from the Dash-In food store. The decor is Hartford Drab: gray steel desks, beat-up filing cabinets, wooden chairs, and veneer paneling. Near the door is a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Books and folders with such titles as Reliance Auto, CAMP Risk Management Series, and The World’s Missile Systems line a bookshelf. Another photo shows President Reagan, in black tie, introducing the owner of the O. F. Bowen agency to President Raul Alfonsín of Argentina.

The phone rings; it’s the William Morris agency in New York.

“Yeah,” says the man behind the steel desk, lighting a cigarette. He is in his early forties and wears very thick, tinted glasses. “Number eight hardcover and three soft. We’re on both sides.” He listens, inhales, um-hums. “We may have one more week, then it’ll die. But it’s been one hell of a ride.”

Indeed it has. A year ago no one had ever heard of Thomas L. Clancy, Jr. Then along came The Hunt For Red October, his book about the Soviet Union’s hottest new submarine and its captain, who decides to take the sub and defect to the United States. All hell breaks loose, and it falls to a bookish CIA analyst named Jack Ryan to tell the President whether Red October is the Trojan horse of World War III or the vehicle for a legitimate high-stakes dash to freedom.

In a business in which the average free-lance writer makes less than five thousand dollars a year, Clancy accomplished the equivalent of hitting a grand-slam home run in his first at bat.

Red October sold about 330,000 hardcover copies during twenty-nine weeks on The New York Times’s best-seller list and moved onto the paperback best-seller list, where it had risen to the number-three slot by December. He sold the book to Hollywood for “pretty serious money” if the cameras actually roll. And he has a six-figure advance for his next book, which will appear simultaneously in thirteen countries. “We missed Greece, but that’s no great loss,” Clancy says.

It should also be noted that Clancy has become Writer of Sea Thrillers to the President of the United States. The job is without portfolio, but it does have its advantages.

There’s a fat note of irony to all this, since Clancy, who started selling insurance fourteen years ago because it was the first “decent” job offer he got, had always wanted to be a writer. But as a level-headed, Jesuit-educated Baltimore boy, the son of a mailman, he knew the truth—that “writers die poor.” So he went to work selling policies and raising a family.

Eventually he and his wife were able to buy the business and make a “decent living.” They insured country things: barns, oats, the odd restaurant, tobacco (while it hung out to cure), and horses. They stayed away from life insurance, says Cheryl Terry, their assistant, “because it’s too morbid.” It was a nice, quiet, no-fireworks kind of life.

In many ways it still is, apparently, since much of what Clancy has to say is about how success has not changed him. Clancy is, in fact, so self-deprecating about his sea thriller and so generous in talking about the talents of others that he often uses the pronoun “we” rather than “I.” While he has the aw-shucks down pretty good, we—I, that is—suspect he is getting more of a kick out of all this than he is letting on.

The saga of Red October actually began on a winter morning in 1976, when Clancy was reading his Washington Post and saw a story about the Storozhevoy incident. The Storozhevoy was a Soviet frigate whose crew mutinied and tried to take the ship and defect to Sweden. They got within about thirty miles of Swedish waters before the Soviets stopped them. The mutineers were shot. Clancy clipped the story and filed it away, thinking there might be a book in it.

Seven years later he found himself listening to sea stories being told by one of his clients, a former sub driver (as they call themselves). “All of a sudden a light bulb went off and I said, ‘Hey, submariners are pretty much the same as fighter pilots. They just do it a little slower.’ ” The Wet Stuff!

He started writing, and by late October 1983 had two chapters to show Marty Callahan, an editor at the Naval Institute Press in Annapolis. Clancy had worked for Callahan once before, writing an article on the MX missile for Proceedings, the NIP’s magazine. Other than that, NIP publishes mostly naval textbooks and had never published a novel. But Callahan liked the two chapters and told Clancy to keep going. So he went home and started over at page one.

He wrote in his spare time, sticking a piece of paper into his IBM Selectric whenever he got a chance. He had no outline and didn’t even know how it was going to end. “I let my characters do all the work. Sounds crazy, but it works.”

Clancy thought it was more “fun” to write that way, anyway. “It’s a discovery process for the writer as well as the reader,” he says, “and I think that’s really the enjoyable part of writing—that everything you write is actually new, and you don’t know what’s going to happen until it does.”

He banged out the pulse-quickening last two chapters—almost one hundred manuscript pages—in two days. Then, on February 28, just four months after his initial meeting with Callahan, he showed up at the NIP’s offices with a 720-page manuscript.

Clancy says he waited three weeks “to find out if it was worth fooling with, or something to be used for starting a fire.” (We ourselves think he is pulling our leg here.) Finally an NIP editor called and said, in so many words, don’t use it to start a fire. He doesn’t remember exactly what she did say.

“It was kind of a euphoric day for me.… It was nice, but I didn’t go out and get drunk that night. I had three kids at the time. That tends to keep you down to earth.”

The NIP’s editors then asked some naval officers for an opinion of the manuscript and, according to Clancy, one of them “really freaked.” He wrote a letter to the Press saying the story was so full of classified stuff that there was no way the firm could publish it.

Clancy chuckles as he pulls out a copy of the letter, which says that Red October “is no Run Silent, Run Deep” (the classic submarine novel and film of World War II). “He’s right there,” says Clancy. “Ned [Edward L.] Beach is a much better writer than I am.”

Clancy even disclaims the title of writer; he calls himself a storyteller. “I may never make the transition. I’m gonna try. I wrote a fairly decent thriller, okay? It’s not King Lear. And it kind of embarrasses me sometimes when people make so much of it.” (We don’t remember anyone calling it King Lear, but it is a fine sentiment.)

Nonetheless, the navy was genuinely alarmed by the depth of Clancy’s knowledge of its top, top secrets. All of a sudden Clancy found himself being swarmed over by the Naval Investigative Service and a commander at the Pentagon who wanted to know how he had found out so much about the world of nuclear subs—and from whom.

Clancy obliged the commander by telling him where he’d gotten it all, without mentioning the names of any of the active-duty naval officers who had talked to him. Not that they’d given him classified material, but Clancy didn’t trust the brass to believe that they hadn’t. Finally Clancy said, “Look, if you’ll tell me what sensitive stuff you want removed, I’ll remove it.”

This put the commander in a bit of a pickle. “Well, I can’t tell you,” he answered. “Then I would be confirming some stuff that I can’t confirm.”

“The thing that really bent ’em out of shape is I knew what ‘Crazy Ivan’ meant,” Clancy says, referring to the navy’s term for a maneuver used by Russian subs to detect if they’re being followed. “I picked that up from one of my clients. They were really torched that I knew what that meant.”

When Clancy finally met John Lehman, the secretary of the navy, Lehman told him that his first reaction on reading the book had been to say, “Who the hell cleared this?”

Red October was published in October 1984 and sold twenty thousand copies in the first six weeks. “For a first novel, that’s not bad at all,” Clancy says in a classic bit of understatement; most first novels sell about one-tenth that number, total. By the end of the year it looked as if the book was going to top out at fifty thousand. “Which,” Clancy deadpans, “for a first novel is all right.”

That might have been the end of it, but for a chance series of events.

Jeremiah O’Leary, a Washington Times reporter who had served as the National Security Council’s spokesman under Reagan, gave a copy of the book to Nancy Reynolds, a friend of the Reagans and a partner in the Washington lobbying firm Wexler Reynolds Harrison and Schule. Reynolds was on her way to Buenos Aires, and O’Leary wanted her to pass the book on to the U.S. ambassador there, who is a mutual friend of theirs. Reynolds read it on the plane and was so taken with it that she ordered a case of Red Octobers for Christmas presents. One of them ended up under the president’s tree.

Not long afterward, Time printed a story on Reagan in which he mentioned that he’d read the book. He pronounced it “the perfect yarn.”

The folks at the Naval Institute Press may have been new at publishing novels, but they weren’t dumb. They ran the presidential imprimatur in huge type in a New York Times ad. “That quote,” says Clancy, “put us on the national [best-seller] list. And we’ve been there ever since.”

Red October peaked at number two on the hardcover list. “It would have been number one if it hadn’t been for Stephen King, the dirty guy,” says Clancy, attempting a scowl. “If he’d waited one more week before bringing out Skeleton Crew, I would have been number one. Well, who ever said the world was fair?”

The book was helped by the fact that it was a curiosity in the publishing world. That it came out of left field, from a company that publishes naval textbooks, “made people sit up and notice it,” says Daisy Maryles, the executive editor of the industry’s bible, Publishers Weekly. “It was unusual, and that made it easier to promote; there was an automatic angle. Obviously, it helped that behind all this there was a good book. But there was a serendipity to it all.”

And so it was that in March 1985, the insurance agent from Owings found himself being invited to the White House—three times in two weeks.

“The first [time] was meeting the president in the Oval Office,” Clancy says. “That was the day Chernenko was buried.” (So that’s why he declined to attend.) “Henry Kissinger was there. We had lunch in the Roosevelt Room with some relatively important folks: Secretary Lehman, Senator [Mark] Hatfield, General Brent Scowcroft, Nancy Reynolds, of course. The president told me he liked the book and asked me what the next one was about, and I told him. He asked me, ‘Who wins?’ And I said, ‘The good guys.’

“It was a great experience,” Clancy says with a smile, “and the next week we were back for the welcoming ceremony and the state dinner for the president of Argentina. So that was quite a week.” He adds, “I’m glad I voted for the guy.”

Clancy shakes his head. “If I had his charm, I’d be the richest insurance hustler in the world. I’d just stand there on the corner and say, ‘Bring me your insurance.’ And they would!

“It’s like walking into a spotlight. The only thing that’s missing in the Oval Office is a burning bush.”

Though it’s not a political book, Red October has a strong anti-Communist point of view that’s somewhat atypical of the genre, where normally there isn’t much moral difference between the Soviet Union and America.

The anticommunism was not part of any thought-out marketing strategy. The NIP’s editorial board didn’t sit around a table wondering what political tone the book should have. At the same time, the NIP, by its nature, isn’t the sort of outfit that would set out to make the boys in the Kremlin seem to be honest guys who are just trying to keep their heads above water.

Red October hit because it is a darn good yarn. But it is a fair guess that Jimmy Carter might not have found it so, and that the book might not have fallen on such a sympathetic audience in Jimmy Carter’s America.

Clancy looks surprised when he’s asked what influences his view of the Soviet Union. “The truth,” he says. He is skeptical about people who get arrested while demonstrating outside the South African embassy when, as he sees it, no one seems to care that the Soviets are committing genocide in Afghanistan, doing things like dropping mines specifically designed to kill and maim children.

“Everything in the book is drawn from a real incident, one way or another,” he says. The commander of Red October decides to defect after his wife dies while being operated on for a burst appendix by a drunken physician. Clancy got the appendix idea from hearing an American doctor talk on a radio show about an incident in which an American tourist in Russia died from the same thing.

“In the real world, that just doesn’t happen. But it did there. Soviet medicine is a joke. The Soviet Union is the only industrialized country in the world where life expectancy is decreasing. Very few things in that book are completely made up.”

Clancy went on to do the things best-selling authors do—although live television made him nervous: “It’s actually the nearest thing to death.” He preferred Larry King’s late-night radio call-in show.

He sold the paperback rights to Red October for $50,000. Putnam signed him to write another novel for an advance of $325,000. (His advance for Red October was $5,000.) The producer of the movie The Omen optioned Red October.

Clancy became a free-lance expert, giving speeches “at every place you can shake a stick at.” Now when high-ranking KGB officers defect, CBS calls him to appear on morning television. On one trip to the studio, he was relieved to find someone there who knew more about defecting Soviets than himself—William Stevenson, the author of The Man Called Intrepid.

“Success,” Clancy says as if he was talking about an amusing nuisance, “has complicated my life enormously.” Yes, we can see that.

He seems surprised to find himself in such demand. “The transition from insurance agent to best-seller author is kind of like being cured of leprosy,” he says. “All of a sudden everybody wants to meet you and talk to you and ask your opinion on things. And hell, I’m the same guy I was two or three years ago. I was just as smart then as I am now—or just as dumb, depending on your point of view. So all it’s done, really, is open doors for me to a remarkable degree. If I want to ride on a submarine, it’s just a matter of picking up the phone.”

The navy has adopted Clancy. For someone with Coke-bottle-thick glasses whose only previous experience in the military was army ROTC during college, it’s pure Walter Mitty. Last summer he spent a week on a Perry-class fast frigate doing research for his next book, Red Storm Rising. (“World War III at sea,” as he tersely describes it.)

“They put me in officer country. I got treated like an officer, and I’m just a dumb landlubber. In many ways, that’s embarrassing.” He found himself in great demand aboard the FFG-7, with admirals wanting to know how he wrote Red October—and, of course, where he got his information.

“They treated me like some kind of damn hero, and I’m not. I’m just a writer. All I do is write about the stuff they really do. They’re the heroes, not me. They’re the guys who go out there and work eighteen-hour days under fairly unpalatable situations.

“The crew age on any ship is twenty-one, twenty-two. These are kids, and they’re awfully good at what they do. And nobody appreciates it. All the crap you see in the media is about the toilet seats and the wrenches and the gadgets that don’t work. And that’s not what it’s about. It’s about people, and they’re good people. Especially sub drivers. I don’t know how they do it.” We think we see his eyes misting up behind the glasses. “I’m a hopeless romantic,” he adds.

So far the only subs Clancy has been on were securely tied to the dock—which is fine by him. “The first [submarine] I was on was the USS Whale. Before we went into the forward torpedo room, they took us into the auxiliary machine space, and I looked around—90 percent of the space is occupied by the machines themselves—and I thought, ‘My God, what if you’re in there and the lights go out and you hear water coming in?’ What do you do, other than say, ‘Get me out of this one, God. I’ll never chase women again.’

“At that point I decided, no, I do not want to do this for a living. No thanks. It’s a special breed of cat, and I’m not that kind of cat.”

Aboard the British nuclear ballistic-missile submarine HMS Resolution he got a chance to hoist a few beers in the control room. “They showed me around the missile control room,” he remembers. “That’s one thing I really got right”—a reference to the scene in Red October where his hero finds himself in the “boom boom room” of the Russian sub.

The phone rings, and Clancy picks it up. He listens, puts the call on hold and says to his secretary across the room, “It’s a guy who wants a car quote. You wanna wing it?” She takes the call, and we return to best-sellerdom.

“I wrote the kind of book I like to read,” he says, lighting another cigarette. “I like thrillers. I read Forsyth, Richard Cox, A. J. Quinnell, Jack Higgins. I didn’t think politics, I didn’t think philosophy; I just wrote the kind of book I like to read.

“My two objectives were, first, to have fun; I wrote the book entirely for fun. I never really thought about the money. The other thing I wanted to do was portray the people and machinery we have out there as accurately as I could. And I’ve succeeded. I’ve had too many people tell me that I hit it pretty much on the head. I’ve had sub skippers tell me, ‘I gave this book to my wife and said, “Here’s the stuff I can’t tell you.” ’ And that’s very satisfying.”

Clancy is writing his second book with a coauthor, Larry Bond, his son’s godfather and the creator of Harpoon, a naval-strategy game that sells in hobby stores for $9.95. Clancy says it was his best source for Red October. “It explains how weapons and sensors work. It’s played with miniatures. Mainly you do it on pencil and paper.”

Though reviewers praised Clancy for his extraordinary facility in explaining Cold War technology, he almost dismisses it. “Everybody makes a big deal about the technical stuff. When I was researching the book, actually, that was the easy part. Simple. The hard part was getting into their heads. What kind of guy goes to sea in a ship that’s supposed to sink?”

He reaches into an American Tourister briefcase and pulls out about three pounds of Red Storm Rising manuscript. He’s working on a Macintosh now, and told his paperback publisher he didn’t have the time to do a promotion tour, what with a February book deadline, a move into a new house, and the expected arrival of a new baby. (Anticipating a question we do not ask, he says, “Yes, if it’s a boy we’ll call him Red.”) After that he’s planning three more novels in which Jack Ryan, the hero of Red October, will figure. He says he has “only just gotten to the point where I understand the guy.” After some hesitation, he also admits that Ryan is in part modeled after himself.

Given how busy Clancy has become, is it safe to assume that his secretary will be winging it a lot this fall? Will he even stay in the insurance business?

He ponders this. “Probably. Almost certainly. It’s a family business. I’m not going to walk away from it. I’ve got over one thousand clients. A lot of them are my friends; I’m not going to walk away from them.” Besides, he adds, “That’s where I get a lot of my stories.”

Leaving the office to pick up the mail at the post office, he remembers a poster he saw in one of the subs he visited. It showed a gigantic, flaming orange mushroom cloud. Beneath it the caption read: “Twenty-Four Missiles Away. Target Destroyed. It’s Miller Time …”

—Regardie’s, 1986