One of the most fascinating aspects of sailing with The Annapolis Naval Sailing Association (ANSA) was the eclectic people who participated. Typically, it was never the same combination of people, which always made things lively and never boring. The people were always as much fun as the sailing.
One Saturday we had with us a guest, an insurance agent from Annapolis. He was an amiable, relatively quiet individual named Tom. He did not appear to have sailed much, but he was eager to learn and asked lots of questions. When he learned I had a nuclear physics background, he was eager to discuss nuclear reactors and submarines. Naturally, many of us had security clearances and would not discuss classified information.
While Tom was in Geronimo's head (the nautical term for a toilet), one of the ANSA members told me that Tom had been writing a novel for some time, and that he loved to pump the Navy people for information on submarines and related matters.
Of course, this Tom was Tom Clancy, and the novel was The Hunt for Red October. As the saying goes, “The rest is history.” Red October was a successful novel and a blockbuster movie starring Sean Connery. There are, however, two tidbits about the book and its effect that many people don't know.
The book was not easy to birth. After Clancy finished it, he had great difficulty finding a publisher. As I recall, he went through over 30 publishers, and all rejected his book. The reasons varied. My favorite was: “The subject will never sell.” I'm sure that publisher flagellated himself after the book's eventual success.
In desperation, Clancy pitched the book to the Naval Institute Press, known for sailing instruction manuals and nautical charts, rather than novels. They took a chance on Clancy, and in the first printing made more profit on this one book than they had on their entire inventory for several years. After the remarkable success of Red October, all those publishers tried to woo Clancy for his second book, but he went back to the Naval Institute Press--they supported him when nobody else would.
Behind the scenes, there was considerable consternation in the Department of Defense when Red October hit the stores. Clancy over 13 years had picked up bits and pieces of naval lore and little details, which individually were no big deal and not classified (Secret, Top Secret, etc.). After all, Clancy did not have a security clearance. When those little details were skillfully put together, however, some of the information in the book would have been considered classified. However, cool heads in the Department of Defense prevailed, and the decision was not to make a big deal out of it. That tack, to use a sailing term, worked, and there was no damage to the national interest.
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I am a retired Senior Chief Sonar Technician and had the opportunity to meet Tom Clancy when he spoke to the Chiefs Mess at Surface Warfare Officers School Command, NETC, Newport, RI. I think he gave the same speech over and over across the country, but it was interesting, informative, and even funny.
I was a Senior Chief Sonar Technician when I first read Hunt for Red October, shortly after it was released. My first reaction was to go to my Department Head, who had read the book, and I asked, “How can he publish all this information?” As Mr. Clancy said in his speech and as you said, he put a lot of unclassified information together and ended up with classified information.
He did say he told the navy he would be happy to remove whatever was classified but they told him to leave it the way it was, if they told him what was classified then he would know it was classified so they couldn’t do that.