& FBI
From: tomclancy@aol.com (Tom Clancy)
Date: 2000/06/25
Newsgroups: alt.fan.tom-clancy
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