Who is Jack Ryan based on? Tom Clancy wrote him before he'd ever set foot inside the CIA

Tom Clancy wrote The Hunt for Red October at night while running an insurance agency in Owings, Maryland. The closest he had come to the intelligence world was selling policies to people who worked near it.

Clancy was born in Baltimore on 12 April 1947, went to Loyola High School in Towson, then to Loyola College, where he switched from physics to English and graduated in 1969 with a 1.9 GPA. He joined Army ROTC and was disqualified from service by myopia severe enough to require the thick glasses he wore for the rest of his life. He took insurance and business certifications, worked for a firm in Hartford, and in 1973 joined the O.F. Bowen Agency in Owings, buying it outright in 1980 from his wife's grandmother. He started the novel in 1982 and sold it to Naval Institute Press in 1984 for $5,000 — the first fiction that publisher had ever put out.

The half that's autobiography

Character sketches later surfaced by the U.S. Naval Institute show how carefully Clancy assembled Ryan, and how much of the assembly was his own life reorganized into a better version.

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Ryan is born in the 1950s to a Baltimore Irish Catholic family, with a homicide detective father and a nurse mother. He attends Loyola High School in Towson — Clancy's own school — then takes an economics degree at Boston College. He earns a doctorate at Georgetown and teaches at the U.S. Naval Academy. He makes money as a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch's Baltimore office, ending up with roughly $8 million, topped up by an insurance settlement after his parents die in a plane crash.

And he gets the military career Clancy was refused. Ryan is commissioned as a Marine second lieutenant and serves three months before a helicopter goes down during a NATO exercise over Crete and a back injury ends it. The service is real enough to matter and short enough not to define him.

Clancy's technical detail came from his customers. A substantial number of his insurance clients were former nuclear submariners, officers and enlisted, and he worked them systematically for material.

The half that's a real intelligence officer

The career arc belongs to Robert Gates, who rose through the CIA as an analyst rather than an operations officer and went on to run the agency.

"You know, for the first several novels, I pretty much modeled Ryan's career on yours," Clancy told Gates.

That single decision is why the character works. Ryan is not a field operative who happens to read well; he's a desk analyst who keeps getting dragged out from behind the desk, which is a structure Clancy borrowed from a man who actually did the analytical job.

The plot wasn't invented from scratch either. Red October is built on the 1975 Storozhevoy incident, in which the political officer aboard a Soviet frigate led an attempt to take the ship out of Soviet control in the Baltic.

Five actors, one analyst

• Alec Baldwin — The Hunt for Red October, 1990.
• Harrison Ford — Patriot Games, 1992, and Clear and Present Danger, 1994.
• Ben Affleck — The Sum of All Fears, 2002.
• Chris Pine — Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, 2014.
• John Krasinski — the Prime Video series from 2018, and Jack Ryan: Ghost War in 2026.

Ghost War premiered in New York on 15 May 2026 and hit Prime Video worldwide on 20 May, directed by Andrew Bernstein from an original story by Noah Oppenheim and Krasinski rather than a Clancy novel. It opens with Ryan back in civilian finance before a Dubai job pulls him into a resurrected black program called Project Starling. Critics weren't kind: 43% on Rotten Tomatoes, 38 on Metacritic.

For the record: the version of Ryan sitting at a finance desk is the one closest to Clancy's original notes. It's also the one reviewers complained had the least to do.

Earlier we wrote: What happened to Val Kilmer? His final film was the one he'd waited 36 years to make