Jack Ryan (Tom Clancy)

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Jack Ryan (full name Dr. John Patrick Ryan, Ph.D., Lt. USMC (Ret.), KCVO) is a fictional Irish-American character created by Tom Clancy and appearing in many of his novels. Although given an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II, he is not entitled to the prefix "Sir" as he remains an American citizen.

[edit] In films

Four movies have been produced based on Clancy novels featuring Jack Ryan, starring three different actors as Ryan:

• The Hunt for Red October (1990) – Alec Baldwin
• Patriot Games (1992) – Harrison Ford
• Clear and Present Danger (1994) – Harrison Ford
• The Sum of All Fears (2002) – Ben Affleck

The chronology of the movies was altered from the novels. The film of Patriot Games is a sequel to The Hunt for Red October, rather than a prequel, with the Ryan role recast. Also, while the novel The Sum of All Fears takes place after Clear and Present Danger, the film takes place earlier in Ryan's career.

The Sum of All Fears is not part of the Baldwin/Ford trilogy, but rather an intended reboot of the franchise. The discrepancy can be seen in the fact that he meets John Clark for the first time in Fears and Present Danger and the Clark character is significantly different; Ryan is also married in the first three films.

[edit] Biography

John Patrick Ryan was born the son of Emmet William Ryan, a police homicide lieutenant and World War II veteran. The elder Ryan had served with the 101st Airborne Division at the Battle of the Bulge. His mother Catherine Burke Ryan was a nurse.

After graduating from Loyola High School in Towson, Maryland, Jack attended Boston College, graduating with a bachelor's degree in economics (strong minor in history) and a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps (via NROTC). While waiting for the Corps to assign him somewhere, he passed the CPA (Certified Public Accountant) exam.

After finishing the Basic Officers' Course at Quantico, Virginia, Jack was deployed to a line unit as a platoon commander on the USS Guam. Three months later his military career was cut short at the age of twenty three when as part of the Atlantic Fleet Marine Force (FMF) his platoon's helicopter, a CH-46, crashed during a NATO exercise over the island of Crete. Ryan's back was badly injured in the crash. Unfortunately, the Navy surgeons at Bethesda Naval Medical Center made inadequate repairs to his back.

This occasioned a lengthy recovery process (during which he became temporarily addicted to pain medications) after which, complete with a permanent disability and wearing a back brace, Jack left the USMC, passed his stock broker's exam and took a position with the Baltimore office of the Wall Street investment firm Merrill Lynch. Jack's parents died in a plane crash at Chicago's Midway Airport only nineteen months after his crash in Crete. He has hated flying ever since.

Jack began to invest his own money, banking on a tip he received from an uncle which alluded to the workers' takeover of the Chicago and North Western Railroad, making approximately $6 million off his $100,000 initial investment. He did so well that a senior VP of the firm, Joe Muller, came to Baltimore to have dinner with Jack, with the objective of inviting Jack to the New York City headquarters. Also present was Joe's daughter, Caroline Muller, then a senior medical student at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Jack and Caroline (nickname Cathy) immediately fell in love and became engaged. One night, while having dinner with his fiancée, Jack had his back blow out. Cathy took him directly to Doctor Stanley Rabinowitz, professor of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, to be evaluated. Dr. Rabinowitz later operated on Jack's back and cured his back pain in relatively short order. Jack subsequently persuaded the government to terminate his disability checks. Cathy later went on to become an ophthalmological surgeon at the Wilmer Eye Institute of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a Professor of Surgery at Johns Hopkins.

After having his net worth assessed at $8 Million, Jack left the firm after four years and enrolled at Georgetown University for his doctorate courses in history. Jack did a brief stint at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, then accepted a position at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland as a history teacher.

Following a recommendation of Father Tim O'Riley, S.J., (a Georgetown University professor) to a CIA contact, Jack was asked to work as an outside consultant for the Agency, although officially employed by Mitre Corporation. Jack agreed and spent several months at Langley, where he wrote a paper called "Agents and Agencies," in which he maintained that state-sponsored terrorism is an act of war. He also invented the Canary trap, a method for exposing an information leak, which involves giving different versions of a sensitive document to each of a group of suspects and seeing which version gets leaked. By making sure that each copy of the document differs slightly in its wording, if any copy is leaked then it is possible to determine who "sang." Both of these things came to the attention of Admiral James Greer, the Deputy Director(Intelligence) at the CIA.

Agents and Agencies had four sections, each with a summary paragraph. Each summary paragraph had six different versions and the mixture of those paragraphs was unique in each numbered copy of the document. The expertness of the report, plus the adaptation, provided by Jack caused Admiral Greer to offer him a permanent job in the CIA, which he turned down.

While still teaching at the Naval Academy, Jack and his family (wife and daughter Sally) took a trip to London for research and vacationing. After spending the day sifting through British Navy archives doing research for a book on the British naval war in the Indian Ocean during World War II , Ryan walked to meet his family at a London park. As he joined them, members of the Ulster Liberation Army, an ultra-violent Maoist offshoot of the IRA, headed by a man named Kevin O'Donnell, attacked a car containing the Prince and Princess of Wales and their newborn son right in front of Ryan and his wife and daughter. Jack intervened in the attack and foiled their plan, killing one of the gunmen and capturing another.

Sean Miller, the man he captured, vowed revenge on Ryan and his family. But since he was going to Albany Prison on the Isle of Wight, the worst prison in Britain, the threat didn’t seem serious. After being invested as a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order by the Queen, Ryan returned to the US and the Academy and his adventure seemed like a distant dream. But when O'Donnell and the ULA rescued Miller on his way to Albany Prison, the dream turned into a nightmare as Jack and his family became the target of their revenge.

When Admiral Greer came to Ryan and asked him to return to join the CIA permanently as an analyst to help track down the terrorists, he declined initially, only to accept it later after a failed attack on himself and his family by the ULA severely injured his wife and daughter. Later, while Jack was hosting the Prince at his home in Maryland, the ULA made a second attack on the Ryans, which was foiled by Jack. Following the incident and arrest of the ULA, he was re-assigned to London as a member of a liaison group to the British Secret Intelligence Service.

Ryan's assignment to London focused on a daring mission to assist the defection of a KGB communications-center officer who has discovered that KGB director Yuri Andropov had ordered the murder of Pope John Paul II before the man's spiritual leadership and personal charisma manages to create unrest in communist-ruled Eastern Europe. Although Ryan and a small team of British agents managed to help "Rabbit" and his family get to the West, they failed to prevent the shooting of the Pope. Nevertheless, "Rabbit's" defection proved to be a major coup to both American and British intelligence, and Ryan suggested a non-military strategy to help hasten the USSR's collapse.

A little while later Captain First Rank Marko Ramius, the Soviet Navy's top submarine commander, took control of the Красный Октябрь (Red October), the newest Typhoon-class missile submarine. Ramius’s mission was to test the sub's new silent "caterpillar" drive, but Ramius and a select group of his officers were actually planning to drive the submarine to the coast of the United States and defect.

When Soviet officials in Moscow received a letter from Captain Ramius informing them of this, they sent out most of the Soviet seaforce with orders to find and destroy the Red October.

Then secret photographs of the Red October were delivered to Jack. He showed them to several naval officers familiar with missile submarines. From there he went to the Pentagon and finally to the White House. With the President's approval, a plan was created whereby, when the Red October approached the American coastline, it would be captured and hidden. At the same time, an older U.S. submarine would be intentionally destroyed and sunk in that vicinity. Then the Soviets would be informed it was the Red October. This began a week of intense search efforts, where Soviet, American, and British surface ships, submarines, and helicopters were all deployed in what became a hide-and-go-seek operation.

When Jack and Commander Mancuso from the submarine USS Dallas finally boarded the Red October, more problems began. It was Ryan who heard a gunshot in another part of the Red October, and even though he had never been on a submarine before, he found his way through many complex passageways, with Captain Ramius tagging behind, to shoot and kill a crew member who claimed to be a patriot with the intention of blowing up the submarine.

After being hit by a torpedo from another Alfa-class Soviet attack submarine, the crippled Red October, which had rammed and destroyed its opponent, was still able to advance unseen into the U.S. Naval Shipyard at Norfolk, Virginia. The defectors were lodged at a CIA safehouse near Charlottesville, VA, and Jack flew back home in time for Christmas. Although he was not a field agent in the Operations Directorate, Ryan using his luck and Marine training to save the day gave his career a real boost.

After this major coup, Ryan was reassigned to Langley, home of the Central Intelligence Agency. Now he had become Admiral Greer's assistant with the official title of Special Assistant to the Deputy Director for Intelligence. DDI Greer was grooming the rising analyst for bigger and better positions, maybe even his own job when the veteran spook finally retired. So Ryan traveled to Moscow as part of the American strategic nuclear weapons reduction negotiation team. There he met Sergei Golovko, also a rising star in the KGB hierarchy, and eventually became entangled in a complex web related to both the race to develop "Star Wars" space-based defensive technology and set-up another defection, this time compromising the KGB director to save CIA's highest informant in the USSR, known as "Cardinal", who is a colonel named Filitov..

After that Jack Ryan took a break from U.S.-Soviet confrontations to the pressing issue of the war on drugs and the use of military assets in what is a law-enforcement issue. Jack had to rescue a small group of isolated American soldiers from a Colombian wilderness and then uncover a highly covert and illegal operation approved by a corrupt National Security Advisor. Sadly, too, Jack lost his boss and surrogate father, Admiral Greer, when the older man died of cancer. Around this time Jack ran afoul of Elizabeth Elliott, international affairs advisor to then-candidate J. Robert Fowler, and a former professor of Cathy Ryan.

As Jack reached his highest post at the CIA—Deputy Director, Central Intelligence—his career was placed in jeopardy when J. Robert Fowler became President and Elizabeth Elliott became both National Security Advisor and Fowler's paramour. They not only denied Ryan any credit for an innovative Middle East peace plan, they also panicked when a mixed bunch of terrorists detonated a nuclear bomb in Denver and nearly plunged the world into a Soviet-American nuclear war. Once again, Ryan defused the nuclear crisis by convincing the Soviet leader that this was a setup. He then stepped up to the plate and stopped Fowler from launching a nuclear missile at Qom, where the Iranian Imam lived, who, according to the terrorists, (who proved later to be trying to cause increased conflict with the US in the region), had financed the terrorist operation, effectively ending President Fowler's administration and his own career at the CIA.

After a two-year semi-retirement, Ryan returned to government service to deal with a second Pacific War between Japan and the U.S. For a brief time Ryan was the National Security Advisor, but when the Vice President was forced to resign after a sex scandal, President Roger Durling tapped him for the job ... a job he was barely confirmed for in Congress when a Japanese airline pilot deliberately crashed his 747 onto the Capitol during a Joint Session of Congress, killing most of the people inside and elevating Jack to the Presidency.

The reluctant yet determined Ryan Administration emerges as Jack slowly rebuilds the government. But Jack is faced with political trickery by President Ryan's enemies (chiefly Durling's ex-Vice President), and a deadly plague initiated by the newly formed United Islamic Republic, resulting in two major military conflicts far from American shores.

During his first term as president, he also had to deal with an attempted assassination of Golovko, head of the SVR (formerly the KGB). This turned out to be an attempt to sow confusion in the Russian government because of the designs of China to annex Eastern Siberia, where geologists had recently discovered a large amount of oil and gold. These events eventually lead to the inclusion of Russia into NATO and the assistance of US forces in the Sino-Russian War. When the Chinese begin losing the war, US forces begin to target their strategic assets. An SSN sinks a Chinese SSBN which causes the Chinese Politburo to panic and to increase the readiness of their 12 land-based ICBMs. US forces did not have the ability to destroy the silos, as they could only use deep penetrating bombs, which had all been used to destroy Chinese bridges to disrupt the PLA's logistical support. This causes the US and Russia to send a joint RAINBOW and Spetsnaz team to destroy the silos. They destroy 11 of the 12 ICBMs but one of them manages to launch. The warhead heads towards Washington DC and with President Ryan taking a command initiative at an Aegis missile cruiser, the ICBM was intercepted by ABM's from the USS Gettysburg. With the looming defeat of the PLA in Siberia, which they were about to learn about via live UAV broadcasts from the CIA through the internet, student demonstrators in Beijing raid the Politburo, which causes a conservative minister to take control and arrest the perpetrators of the war in Siberia and surrender to the US and Russia.

Following this Ryan decided to retire from the presidency, which would make Robby Jackson the first African American president. However, a member of the Ku Klux Klan assassinated Jackson on a trip to the South. Before Ryan actually resigned he created "The Campus," a secret anti-terrorist organization, and wrote presidential pardons out to all of its members, with the assistance of his Attorney General Pat Martin.

In his retirement, Jack is living easy with a comfortable net worth of over $ 80 million. He is currently working on two versions of his memoirs, one for immediate release, and another detailing his career at CIA, to be published in later years.

[edit] See also

• John Clark
• Domingo Chavez
• Jack Ryan Jr.
• List of fictional U.S. Presidents
• Ryanverse