Angry Planet - How Tom Clancy Explains America

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

Here’s an episode for anyone who thinks art can’t change the world. Tom Clancy topped the best seller charts for decades. He’s so popular that even his death couldn’t stop sales, and the flow of new products. Books, TV shows, movies, and video games all bear his name. But Clancy wasn’t just a popular author—he was also a geopolitical player.On the show this week is writer Matt Farwell, creator of the The Hunt For Tom Clancy substack. Farwell’s unique blend of memoir, history, and critique casts a light on the weird world we live in now. A world that Clancy helped create.https://thehuntfortomclancy.substack.com/I would have liked to have seen MontanaOver The Top in TexasThe Teeth of the The TigerThe Sum of All FearsAngry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeAngry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. We've been talking about Israel and Gaza a lot on this show. We need to break from it. I'm very, very excited to do this specific episode. Can you tell the lovely people who you are and what you do? Yeah, my name is Matt Farwell, and I'm a writer currently working on a project called The Hunt for Tom Clancy, which was a failed book proposal detailing how both the CIA and the military put a considerable amount of effort into cultivating novelist Tom Clancy as a propaganda asset and tool for all sorts of things, actually. And I thought it would sell. My agent thought it would sell. All the other writers I do thought it would sell. I needed a book to pay my taxes. You know, like shit, very relatable shit.

And didn't get it. But what I got instead was something almost better. So most of the original, like, Hunt for Tom Clancy book proposal has already come out and formed drafts. And I went through and did, I don't know, when you describe it as like, like dispatches riffing on like various Tom Clancy books or like using them as a springboard talk about the real world shit that inspired it. It's memoir slash Clancy analysis slash pop culture and history analysis kind of all woven

together. But you use like the specific Tom Clancy book. And this is a substack by the way, we should say, that you can pay for and read right now. Yeah. The hundred time points. So, yeah, like each, I would say dispatch is a good word. You use the specific books to kind of then talk about Clancy and also we've some personal memoir stuff in there and talk about his career, not just as an author, but as everything

else. And like, it's fascinating to me that this book proposal didn't go. anywhere because it's like such a slam dunk and there's Tom Clancy's name is on it's ubiquitous. He's a Stephen King figure in my I mean no that's how it started out was I was joking with a person that was close to me at the time that like Tom Clancy's name sold to a like a Kevacla software company for like $45 million. But if I put it in a title, that's fair use

and like the whole thing it started as like kind of a like oh man this is it like this is actually kind of a good idea

because he's ubiquitous right and like if your dad probably knows him from like the novels and the movies and like

people are age and younger know him from the video games but I mean I don't know like why is the office guy playing Jack Ryan you know and why is this particular mythology like so important to the American like late cold war and early I don't know end of history? Yeah it's funny because the as you point out, uh, Hunfer is it Hunfer Red Storm Rising is the first one.

Red Storm Rising is published by the U.S. Naval, which one? Well, Hufford October was the first. Okay. Uh, is published by the Naval, U.S. Naval Institute, right? It's like not even... The whole Institute Press operating like basically out of a suite of offices on the second floor of like a colonial building in Annapolis. And they acquired it for, I think, like a $5,000 advance and printed up 5,000 copies.

Some of which found their way into the hands of Reagan's ambassador to Argentina, then hand carried it back to Reagan, gave it to him as a Christmas gift. And he spent like two days. He's reading this book and all of his advisors who had trouble getting through to Reagan. Because he's a weirdo. You know, I mean, his wife is paying an astrologer $5,000. That's the other thing about this is just pointing out how like, I'm dressed in a like, I got a coat and tie on right now.

But like all this shit's absurd. And we dress it up as if it's not absurd. But so you've got Reagan who is being influenced by his wife. if he's paying an astrologer $5,000 to like review his travel schedule and call the chief of staff has to be like, no. He won't sit through briefings. He's like old and kind of, you know, just like wants to do his thing. But he spends two days reading a Tom Clancy book, like intently.

And so if you're somebody like Bill Casey who's interested in how you capture someone's attention and how you hold it and how you can exercise covert influence over somebody, all of a sudden Tom Clancy becomes incredibly interesting. And you might just send your Hatchetman, Bob Gates, out to get Tom Clancy. Can we back up just a little bit? And can you give me the bio of Clancy up until he writes this book? He was 37 when it's published, right? Yes, he was 37 when it's published.

He was working, like he had an insurance storefront that he had, purchased from his mother-in-law. So he basically was running his wife's family business, trying to pay it off at, uh, he bought it in the 70s. So there's similar to today, high interest rates. Um, and he had gone to Loyola College in Baltimore, Jesuit school, where academically he was all right. Um, he claimed that he had tried to be an Army ROTC, but his eyesight was too bad, which I don't know, man. I have like really bad eyesight and I was in the Army. I met some people with really bad eyesight.

Not sure that holds water. But he was in college at a very strange time. And in Baltimore, which at the time had a base called Fort Hollibird that was still active, which was where, and people don't, when people get paranoid about stuff, they tend to get paranoid about like, say, CIA, FBI. you know, okay, fair enough. But the Army is oldest security service in the United States. And it's been doing internal security forever and will continue. So at the time, this was all being run out of Fort Oliver in Baltimore. Just to give you some context for the times, Tom Clancy

graduated in like 68, 69, hide of Vietnam War, how to buy anti-war protests. At the same time, the leader of the students for the Democratic Society at CU Boulder is an army captain undercover running SDS. But, you know, he then turns it over to his handpicked replacement, who's an undercover army sergeant also enrolled as a student, who gets arrested when he throws a chair at a Japanese American university president who comes to speak, presumably being anti-war. he's the only one that gets bailed out. The rest of the SDS guys stay in jail.

The Army guy gets bailed out. It was estimated that any anti-war gathering or subversive gathering that had over 20 people, there was an Army agent there. Not necessarily somebody in the Army, but somebody reporting to the Army. You have Department of Energy running stuff at the same time. They have a huge broad purview. You should also be paranoid about the Department of that. energy. They have a huge

counterintelligence apparatus that has a super wide per unit because they're in charge of nuclear security. Yeah. I would love someday, this is a tangent to do like in my own reporting just a deep dive into DOE like intelligence services, you know,

especially now. Well, and they're paramilitary services too because like the guys that guard the labs I've talked to some of them and they shoot more around than my line infantry the team shot.

And we shot a lot like in training. But they're like a football team that never goes to war. They recruit from the branches, right? It's like they'll pull from Marines and Army and everyone. They do that and they also,

I mean, DOE labs, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Hanford site, Washington, Iowa National Lab, Jefferson Lab, the like lab down by

whatever, is it called the Nevada National Security site where they did all the nuke testing a lot of those guys too are recruited from the local area their farm boys who have like and if you can be a farm boy where you have

a $90,000 a year job where you just shoot guns all day and run around in the desert especially in some of the communities where they build these things right because it tends to be far away from everybody and everything and that tends to feed into the secrecy of right like we also have this

conception that it's hard to keep, or that like we can't keep secrets in America. The American government is bad of keeping secrets. Well, the Manhattan Project seems to me proof that like, they're not actually, they're pretty damn good at it.

And when you think about the like multiplicity of efforts that we're going into the Manhattan project, the atomic bomb, you can't hide that. It's pretty visible. You blow it up. Someone knows something's

blown up. But what belts were they working on at that time that they could hide? Because I think, I mean, when you start to really get into it, the atomic energy like act of, I think, 47, go around the same time CIA is created, Air Force is created, et cetera, et cetera. That introduced a whole level of like classification and stuff where the government can really interview. So that's when FBI background checks on high level people in the government start to come up. It's a really like watershed moment that we don't much talk about. There's a great book from Alex Willerstein that is all about this, that is just about the birth of the

the secrecy apparatus that comes out of the nuke stuff. I suggest everyone read it. I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head. But I remember it's written by... I can't. He's great. He's a smart dude, though. He's excellent.

One of the reasons I love him so much is he's one of these guys that he can communicate the topic very clearly to you in person. And there's like so many, especially in the nuclear field, There's so many people that are, I love them, but they start talking and your brain shuts down. No, because they're so on the, it's like when my dad starts talking about car engines, and I'm like, okay. Like, you know, I just like, I power down. And I know what you're talking about. But back to Clancy.

So Clancy graduates. So Clancy graduates. He's kind of a, like, he's just an insurance dude. but he's an insurance dude in a part of Maryland where his clients include retired nuclear sub-mariners. His best friend was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. And he hangs out like he goes to the Naval Institute to get clients because he's a pretty savvy businessman and he's a good talker.

I mean, if you listen to any of his early speeches, he gives one to the National Security Agency in 1968 or 1986, like two. like two years after Red October comes out where I mean this guy was selling insurance three years ago and now he's got all

like nation's top leaf droppers just like intently listening to him and laughing. I mean they're eaten out of the palm's hand. It's a really interesting leap for me and it was an interesting lead for me at that time too

because like the same age, right? That a book come out but like sold for shit. You know, and like, clearly having another one coming out is going to take more effort than I thought it would. So, you know, at the time, there was a little bit of, like, me kind of doing a little Roger, or Walter Middy through Tom Clancy, right? Because, like, I mean, he was kind of living the dream as a writer. Yeah, the Walter Middy aspect of it, I think, is really fascinating. So it's always struck me that Jack Ryan is a little bit.

like a dream version of Tom Clancy that he gets to control and gets to be president and gets to have all these adventures. Their backgrounds are very similar. But also, so, and Clancy has talked about this, like how Ryan is kind of an amalgamation of himself mapped on to like the career of Bob Williams. But he also talks about how John Clark, who's another major character in the Klancyverse, retired, or ex-Nabee seal, who goes, like, freelance for a little while and then gets recruited by CIA.

He's Klansey's Dark Side. And, like, when I listened to all of the, like, interviews this guy did. And so many of my friends, when they'd, like, come over while he's telling them, they're like, what in the hell are you doing? How can you stand, like, listen to this guy talk? But I'm like, because it's like listening to all, like my parents' friends growing up. Like I was a military grant growing up.

So I grew up around all these people and I joined them for a little while. And so there's something kind of like comforted weird to it. But like also, I mean, he's like he's kind of a snide like pompous son of a bitch. You know? Like right? I mean, especially as he kind of like once he's inviting Colin Powell over like shooting his underground shooting range, kind of knows he's untouchable. Yeah, once Tom Clancy, the brand takes over, right?

Yeah. Why do you think, I mean, obviously Reagan loved that first book. What was it about it that, like, hit that made the DC intelligentsia kind of pay attention to him and start, make this book a bestseller? Well, okay. So we have to go back in our heads a little bit. And luckily, we're in sort of a parallel time. This was a little, this would have been more difficult to explain or understand in 2012 or 2008 even when the propaganda for like the military and security services was kind of at its height and everyone's sort of like on board. But now we're at a similar time where, you know, the Army's missing with grid and goals.

People don't want to go in. You know, like, you've got Republicans in the Senate that are just, like, screwing with the military hard, which you wouldn't expect. Just everything's kind of topsy-turvy. It was similar post-Vietnam. We're in a similar, like, state, right? Afghanistan, went out of there with our tail between our legs and just never talked about it, you know, which is good because that's the war I fought in. So the Taliban are rollerblading now. They're real innovators.

They really figured out propaganda aimed at the West, didn't they? They're so good. It's like, it's been wild. I mean, it's wild to me, too, to, like, some of my vet friends, like, we sprinkle in, like, jihadi language just to our, like, talking. Like, it's a, it's, yeah, it's a weird cultural exchange. So, 1984, military power is, like, they're just starting. to get over with some Vietnam, right?

You're starting to see films like Rambo, 1982 or first blood, the proper title, which is a great movie that you should all watch immediately if you haven't. You're getting like Chuck Norris movies coming out, kind of reckoning with Vietnam. And you also want to build up like the military

and also the draft is gone. So you really have to sell this shit, right? Like, in a way where you couldn't be for. And that also creates a divergence between the general American public and people who serve, right? Like, my family, we've been fighting, like, we've been in the service for a long long time. It's just kind of something you do.

Not everybody's like that. Most people don't have any connection. You're better off board. But the project of Tom Clancy was to remake the image and kind of make it. and more durable than it was even during like like even during say the john way and rebering his Vietnam right the early kind of um and it was easier to do that with the general public because so many more of them are divorced from the reality of the situation right like in korea when you had you know half of people's uncles who were like brothers who were going on to do something

there people would come back and be like this was bullshit But if the only people that come back and, like, say stuff are, hey, this is awesome. These people rule. And they're, like, protecting you. Then you start to have it. And that's the generation I was born into. I was born in during Operation Able Archer. Or around that time in 83.

And so it's really the start of kind of the rise of militancy in America that I think we'd probably say it hit its peak of like June 2003, like we just not gotten to Baghdad, knocked it over. It hadn't yet gone like south because it hadn't yet gone

anywhere. And then we're on the other end of that. So I'm kind of waiting and they've tried to do various classification of conflicts with any of the wars that have popped up since

who weren't have to I can say the less success, honestly. Yeah, why do you think that is? Do you think it's just because there's not a great champion or a great artist that is putting out the work like Clancy was or is the fact that we are, most of the populace is so divorced,

is it like 1% serves, right? That they have no context for it and aren't interested. I think that's it. And most, and I, okay, so I have this, I have kind of an interesting case study because I go to Lowe's squad or like when I wasn't living in an apartment like I am now, I went to loads all the time. You get a, you get a discount if you're military. And I always had like kind of a smart ass response to like the thank you for your service

that came up with that, right? And I would get pushback on that probably from 2010. up to about 2020, like pushback. And then I noticed it would be cashiers for like, you know, thank you for your service of Mike. Listen, we were like gangsters. You know, like here's what we were doing. Here's the people we were supporting.

And here's what happened to them like years after. And I noticed that that started to shift where I had one where it's like, and my brother was in and says it's bullshit. And I'm like, tell your brother. said hi, you know, like, and so I, I think, one, it's subject matter, right? Like, you can't, and we see that, we've seen that recently on social media with the bin Laden letter, right? Which so fascinating, because, like, again, all those, when I went out to the Bush Library in 2017,

I, like, pulled up, some of the only stuff you could pull up is the Presidential Records Act. I wound up getting these like memes that they had made in the white house on like Photoshop and printed out and like paper moving around the white house moving around a very poorly way. It's a log as it's entered in certain places. You see who sees it. You see who's chopped off on it. And that's like somebody's a job to like make sure that.

That's like a whole thing of jobs to make sure that happens. These were going around everywhere. and like everyone was loving them. But they over-extended. They out-kicked their coverage. I mean, I'm probably one of the more politically cynical of the, like, I'm like either team's good. And I think both teams seem to like, like the wars, which I don't.

Subject matter, right? Like, it's hard to do propagandist art on, like, what's essentially a disaster. right there's no real victory to like build up up about that um two i think there's a certain amount of weird like cultural identification with the enemy that or the enemy quote that's going on now where

you have a shift where like conservative Christians you start to realize like but we have a lot more in common with like conservative like sooner or she have people than we do with like these epistemalians you know like and so it's I don't know man

it's just it's I think too it's such a weird moment that no one has been able to like and it's such a fractalized moment here that the internet the lack of like TV as kind of the orchestra conductors

the fact that like I can openly make fun of the New York Times and like a lot of people will agree with me even though like they were the first people who published and I kind of like the New York like I've got friends work there. I like it. But you can

like, you can give these media outlets that were once kind of you can give Harvard shit. You know, like it's a time when a lot of the icons are getting pulled down. And I don't think I don't think there's

the there's the incentive certainly but there's not yet the moment where you can go capture that. To that kind of fractured, everyone has found their niche point. I think there is still some traction in like operators as heroes. And I would point to, you know, there was a Jack Ryan show on Amazon starring Jim from the office.

As you said, like my parents certainly love and watch. Also on Amazon there is Reacher, who I would say is kind of is very much like an operator. It's more of a detective story, but. good show. Yeah. But, so, like, I think that stuff is still there,

but I think, like, the general public is kind of tuned out from it. Or at least, maybe just the general public that's talking online, actually. Well, I think there's,

like, there's a weird part of video games that comes into that, too, where, because you play Rainbow Six,

you're called people, you now identify with these people. I went, when I was in Arkansas, I went shotgun shooting with a friend of mine and a brother. And on the way back, like, the brother was peppering with questions about guns and, like, very specific shit about guns. And I know that, like, I know the tools I work with very, and, like, you know, I like, go down and shooting ski. So, like, I know how I like shoot shotgun.

But I'm not really, like, a super gun guy. And this guy had, like, weird encyclopedic. knowledge of like various submachine guns. It's because he played video games. And like had internalized all that, like, without even thinking about it in a way where like, he'd never really held a gun before really shooted shotguns. Yet his kind of like his internal catalog is better than mine. The video game stuff I think is really, really interesting because I'm pretty, I'm, I'm,

enmeshed in that world a little bit. Yeah. And I remember you mentioned in one of your pieces that may have been one of the first, the first ones that like the division, Tom Clancy's the division, something that basically just kind of has his name on it, essentially, is this giant franchise that made lots of money for parent company Ubisoft. I remember when that game came out, I interviewed a guy whose job it was at Ubisoft.

to keep the Tom Clancy lore. That was his whole job was to be the person in charge of knowing, like creating a shared universe for all of this Tom Clancy stuff, not just his original works, but also all the apocrypha. Yeah, Rainbow Six, like all of that,

you know, all of that stuff and the games. And the division comes out of, like, that guy digesting all of that stuff and trying to turn it into a, like a video game story. Well, and it's kind of a fucked up video game story. Like, it's a fun video game. I played a lot.

And it also came out, I mean, it came out pre-pandemic and pre-January 6. And I argue kind of had precognition of both. You know, I mean, it's hard to say like a video game is psychic, but like shit. That video game was pretty psychic. Yeah, that's the one, if I remember correctly, that one is, the pandemic that starts on paper money, is that right? Right.

Right. The pandemic starts on paper money. D.C. kind of falls, like there's roving gangs of like pandemic survivors out through revenge and like rogue, like rogue operators.

And your part, you inhabit the character of like, a weird kind of like a gladio secret agent, right? Like no one knows. you're a commando until you get that call and then you're like

drop your gym bag where you're like a personal trainer or you like get out of the ambulance where you're the EMT and go to a secret bunker and like give your gun and your orders and often the orders like go hunt down to fellow Americans

so it's a weird like it's a head trippy like first person shooter scenario and also one where like obviously the pandemic ended in re-60 go that way. We kind of see how, like, with a little more, you know,

a little more fuel on that, like, it might have. My other big, and this is maybe breaking an NDA, but we won't tell anybody. My other, my other weird, Clancyverse, Ubisoft interaction was I got pinged,

this is maybe five years ago or more by a consulting firm that were working on something for Ubisoft and they were trying to figure out how to make a video game that could sell internationally and had enemies but wouldn't make anybody upset.

And it was going to be a Clancy versus set game. And they were trying to, basically they came to me and they were like, hey, we want to know what the next five, ten years of war is going to look like. our big problem is that we want to be able to sell a game in China. We want to be able to sell a game in all these different countries that would traditionally be the enemy in a Tom Clancy game. Right. So like no Russian villains, no Chinese villains, et cetera, et cetera.

Just had a long conversation with them about who you would set up as the villain in a Clancyverse game in the 2020s without naming, without naming. a country, right? It's the Red Dawn reboot problem. I mean, but the division is like, that's a perfect answer to that. I mean, that's a great Satan eating itself. Who doesn't want to buy that overseas, right? That's a good point. I didn't thought about that. Like the fantasy of going through New York or D.C. as an operator, fighting Americans might be pretty appealing. If you're from like cartoon, I bet it would be like...

All right, Angry Planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this. All right, Angry Planet listeners. Let's get back to some Tom Clancy. Maybe just a little Maryland. Let me pull us back into the main Clancy timeline, though. Yeah. He gets recruited by Robert Gates.

Yeah, I go into this in, I think, one of the first essays. But, so we'll be... disclosure, I'm also a master's candidate right now from the University of Virginia studying English, partially based on like, I had so much fun doing this over the last couple of years that I was like, let me get back in and get a little more like training and how to like do this better. And it's been like really cool actually. I love it here. I'm in a classroom right now.

But the University of Virginia has a thing called the Miller Center, which is kind of a semi-autonomous like Saturn House and the same. mansion that William Bautner lived in when he came here in 1957 for what I'm building a case for right now is the U.S. intelligence community is focused on modernism as a way of like spreading American values throughout like during the whole war period. We'll put a pin in that. I want to get back to that actually. We'll come back to Frank Wisner.

I will talk about the Frank Wisner archives all fucking day. But so the Miller says. Center does these oral history interviews with administration officials after, like, new president comes in, all the old crew, you know, like the National Security Council's like secretary, the deputy chief of staff, all these dudes come down and ladies, they all come down and you interview historians at Miller Center, who were all presidential historians who worked up from the presidential recordings projects. So they listen to a bunch of mix in, a bunch of Kennedy, a bunch of that.

And they compile, like, long oral history interviews that are then sealed for 20 years. And that encourages the, like, officials to be candid. You know, they know what's going to pop up isn't going to come out in the times, like, next week. So I was an intern there when I was at college the first time. And part of my job was, like, Xeroxing, reading some of these. So I just plugged in Tom Clancy into like the search thing. Sure enough, Robert Gates' transcript from when he's leaving the Reagan administration, has a whole section on Tom Clancy where he says it outright.

Like I saw, you know, Humpford October came out. I invited Clancy to like see my office. I'm doing this from memory. So he chided him for like, he's like, look, there's no Turkish copy maker. like you have with Admiral Rear, you know, the wood paneling is different. But like, you got everything else pretty much right. So you're pretty good at this. What do you think about working with us?

And, you know, whether he had a, what's the, like, CIA's approval of the 302? Like, there, it's like a 2-0-something file. Anyways, the, like, file you open up on, like, perspective. by the way, I've never been in the intelligence community. I was a soldier. That's it. It's all of my stuff the second hand. But there's a file that you open up when you're recruited.

I don't know if he was an officially recruited agent or if it was more like the wink, wink, nod that they might have like telecommunications, exactly. Or, you know, guys from baby and something, whatever. But he gets on the team. And Gates was very clear and very proud of how much he had gotten fancy on the team because he was one of the guys in charge of restructuring the American public's consciousness on the military and security services. And so part of the way he did that was he embraced journalists. You know, he says having a Miller Center interviewed you, you know, the CIA cultivates friendly journalists. and that's not like,

paranoia, that's reading the newspaper and seeing who gets a scoos. And I mean, right? Like, the, and so it was all part of that same kind of strategy, which was basically to take people to do, they don't do good things.

Like, you know, they may be doing it in like the service of good or whatever, but like it's kind of a shitty job where like the dirt bags you're like backstabbing people all the time. And I think it takes like a toll on your soul. So part of it, too, is you got to keep the internal workforce motivated. And like this was a type too with like you, Stanfield Turner, like fired a ton of operations officers. They weren't getting much money.

They weren't getting much respect. Like, you know, they weren't even able to have much like fun. So it was aimed not just at an external American public audience, but at an internal audience. as like a, look how great we are. And that's what we need to be coming in and lecturing to all those places was so important. Yeah, there was the, there's the post-Vietnam soul searching, and there was also like a lot of high-profile scandals and investigations. I think people have forgotten about now, like stuff with contract, like Operation Ill Wind

and all these kinds of things, right? My favorite is, you know about yellow fruit, right? I don't think so. So Yellow Fruit was a Army intelligence organization. It still exists, by the way, this different name. And it's basically like the OSS never ended after World War II. They just transferred to like the Army's G3. And so Yellow Fruit was kind of an iteration of that in the meetings.

And they were these dudes. I mean, I talk about it because they were like pirates, right? They were using taxpayer money to buy like fucking hot air balloons. The commander went to Vegas for like, or Salt Lake City for a training against and in the year I was born in Utah. And he spent like $16,000. That was what eventually got him like court martial because he filed an expense report for $60,000. But they had this whole other thing where like there's another secret army.

organization called the ISA, which is like Delta Forces, advanced recon element. They're known as like task force warning during the war on the air. You have like ISA and yellow fruit fighting each other and doing it in weird ways.

Like ISA, they put on a, like they were putting on a dining in at a hotel in like Crystal City. And so Yellow Fruit, Yellowfruit's commander who didn't like ILSA's commander, decided he was going to use a a prostitute to like entrap the commander

get like photos and then report him as a security thing. The whole thing goes like, whack. And eventually these guys kind of the top gets like removed and they restructured the thing, including with like some people I wound up interviewing for my book and for some of the stuff that informs this. but so you have these unpredictable like people tend to assume too that it's a monologue within the U.S. government or organizations but they're always fighting each other and they're always fighting other bureaucracies right like the Navy's main enemy it's like the Air Force it's they need funding yeah they need funding and there's areas of responsibility that

have some that overlap a little bit. Right. So there's going to be fights. Which, I mean, is why I guess you had to make Space Force, right? Because otherwise you're going to have like the Werner von Braun element of the army. Fighting against the Jack Parsons element of the Air Force. You know? Wow.

I don't think I've heard the name Jack Parsons in a long time. That's another one of my favorite, like, weird military industrial complex stores. They made a TV show about him that no one watched. No, I went out to Los Alamos earlier last year. And I lived in New Mexico, and I was young, never to high school out there. But I had never been up to Los Alamos.

And I think part of the other fun of this project is, like, since I'm not constrained by, like, there are major publications who are all nice people, but they're like pretty conventional squares who have like gotten where they are by not making waves. I'm kind of unleashed I can get like weird a shit with it,

which also nears how weird the practitioners of this stuff are. You know, I mean, we started off talking about Nancy Reagan and astrology. Whatever can motivate influence move a person's soul is used. Yeah, which is what Clancy was perfect at.

Jesuit educated Clancy. I mean, he was steeped in how to use, you know, influence. We talked about this a little bit at the beginning, but I wanted to circle back around to it. There is, this is all very Maryland, right? Like, there's a, like, all of the, a lot of this stuff is very steeped in Maryland and Baltimore in kind of the mythology of that state. And I had someone explained to me, I'm from Texas originally. We're part of Texas. North Dallas, outside of Dallas.

And I had someone explained to me recently that, like, people from Maryland are as proud of being from Maryland as, like, Texans are. Yeah. I had a girlfriend in the Army. It's from Maryland. Maryland is about Maryland. What is it about Maryland? Like, what is this that gets into Clancy's writing? I mean, I think it goes back to how it was formed in colonial period, right?

where it was more of a lawsuit fair like merchant area than like say the religious fundos that were up like in the Northeast.

I come from some of those people so like they're all right but they were crazy. And the like the kind of English aristocracy that's this part

of the beginning, right? And so there's kind of a like similar to like how Jersey people are, right? Like, they're in the shadow of these other things, but they're like, we're better than

them. We have, like, the old bay, you know, which is a good seasoning about it. I'm not kissing Old Bay. I don't want the Maryland who's mad at me. But, I mean, I go into Maryland's ability to lie to itself, too, because in the without remorse essay, which is very Baltimore focused, I never knew this. And I lived in Izmir Turkey. He was like a little kid.

My dad rejoined the Air Force of the 80s. I moved there in 89. So I was there for like Portugal War. So in 1801, a ship left Baltimore Harbor called the USS Utah, E-U-T-A-W, bound for Smyrna, where he was going to pick up a whole shipload of opium, then take the opium around the horn of Africa, around India, and the Chenin to run the blockade for British

during the opium wars which was a popular way for Tory families that lost their land in the revolution to keep some money in their pockets many of the Boston

Brahmins today made their money in this way but they like went and slummed it down in Baltimore to do it and came back to Boston we never talk about that

we never talk about how the Barbary pirates who were the the Ottoman Empire is kind of like paramilitary wing you know were they were attacking their ships

we never talked about what the ships were carrying and why and who it was enriching right just keep that on the down though it doesn't matter what matters is that the Marines landed or tripling and kicked ass right

and so I think Maryland is kind of like they know how important they've been in like the United States's grand scheme of things, but they also don't get in respect. And Texans do, you know, we just demand it. Yeah, we demand it. We're really good at demanding it and complaining about it loudly until we get it. Yes.

My interpreters live in Fort Worth now along with like their whole village because they all got out. And they, I was trying to get them to move to. I don't know, like my folks are from, because the land's very similar. They're Texas. They don't want to move. They're in Texas. Why? They're in the best place in the United States.

Why do they want to move? It blew my mind. I love it. I'm so glad you said this because there's this really fascinating, especially like Dallas Fort Worth, is way more multicultural than I think it would shock people. I'm just going to keep plugging the hunt for Tom France. for this because you can go on there and read an essay that was killed by the economists where or the economists like web magazines in 1843 because I made a big effort of saying that how many

more whole alarms there were in the Dallas-Fort Worth area than like say Brooklyn how like the Afghans I met they didn't want them in Egypt or California or New York they want to live in Texas and Texas being, or like Port Worth being the Medina of America, because in the 50s, one of the nation of Islam leaders decided they needed to do a reverse migration from Chicago area down and like colonized parts of Texas. It's that area specifically is very, very flat. The land stretches forever in either, in all directions. and it's very easy to set up your own enclave far away from everyone else so no one bothers

anyone, right? My interpreters are trying to get on. They called me saying, like, hey, we need help finding a parcel of land where we built 222 houses and a mosque. And so what I'm desperately trying to do right now is get in touch with George W. Bush because I would love for George W. Bush. to donate a subdivision for Tajik Afghan refugees

who largely worked for the army of the CIA. Doesn't that seem appropriate? It does, just off of I-75 somewhere. You know, anyway, really. Just, like, near the Oklahoma border. Somewhere like... No, no, I was down in Wichita Falls for another story. That place.

I love Texas. I... Wichita Falls scared. Yeah, that place has a... as a bad energy for, there's a couple like spots that have real negative energies and Wichita Falls is definitely one of them. Yeah. Yeah. I have a piece coming out in Harbors in January where I talk about a trip down to Wichita Falls.

It's also one of those like, we think we're, we're, we have the pretense of being a city, but we're not quite. And we used to really, I went to high school, um, just at, side of a town called Las Vegas, New Mexico. Not Las Vegas, Nevada. It was an international school that caused problems with a couple of kids of, you know, fly it into the wrong place. But Las Vegas, New Mexico, when the railroad was first there,

was like the biggest, most prosperous, coolest town in New Mexico. Then the railroad shifted and then the highway shifted. And the Manhattan project happened. And the I-40 coil-air, became, you know, I-40 and I-25. And so Las Vegas kind of, it has its past. It has when Teddy Roosevelt used to come there for up-riders conventions. It has the Plaza Hotel featured in no country for old men.

But it's similar, like similar kind of energy to Wichita Falls where it was once a place. and they don't know how to quite to claim to that. Yeah, and in Texas, it's really proud of it. Yeah, so you've got to, there has to be, there's like different levels of pride, and city pride is a big part, especially like in that area, people real, real proud of the specific city or region

that they're from within, like, the greater Texas thing. I get said you're going to talk about this whole day. Yeah, many Germans. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that too. And I'm part of Swiss-German. I'm like my mom's saying, so I guess I can say that. But like, a lot of Germans. You know, I mean, the best part of traveling from Dallas to Austin is stopping halfway through and getting a bunch of Kalachis.

That's all like all the German bakeries that are in like West, like all that stuff. That's the good stuff. It's the real good stuff. Yeah, no, but it's like it's also something where you don't necessarily think that's, specific like who cared of it like happily like

a bunch of the people in Virginia were like German back in the day they're still very German and then Wichita Falls also has the like

Air Forces like fighter pilot training school where they train foreign pilots there too so like you look at on pins at like a gas station I mean

you're a Turkish fighter pilot and your first exposure to America is living in which you talk falls. God bless Texas. I mean, I guess your other option is like Shepard,

right, which is still Texas. Right. Yeah, I mean, you're going to, you're going to be there no matter what. And you're like,

we got to talk, we got to back on Tom Clancy. Okay. Yeah. I like Texas. And I had never really been there before I was an adult. So,

you know, like, it's an opinion that comes like, I've spent most of my time in Texas. is hanging out with Afghans. That would I mean that totally tracks. It totally tracks to me. Like the ability to like basically like you said like set up your own kind of

enclave on the highway, have your own community. It's like very achievable there because there's so much land. The regulations are laxer. So yeah, I mean I lived the lot. One of the last places I lived, I lived in like, I lived in an apartment complex that was full of, like, they had some sort of special deal with an Indian telecom company, and they, and a bunch of Indian Muslims started immigrating to it. And then, like, I got to learn what Ramadan was, really fascinating. One of the last places I lived there, I could, like, the food that was

around me. And it was all, it was all like Southeast Asian and, like, Indian subcontinent communities that had built like these incredible restaurants and these strip malls to service their like the communities that they had there. It's just a fascinating place. Yeah. It's awesome. And it's also not necessarily

like what say somebody who's grown up in Northern Virginia, gone to UVA, then gone back to D.C. to start their career. And maybe like there was that to tell you're right or Sedona. You know, be real adventures to go to Santa Fe.

Like, that doesn't compute necessarily until you go and kind of like see it and experience it. Yeah, there's, I mean, there's drawbacks. You've got to have a car. You've got to really like being on the highway. Or a horse. Or a horse, depending on what part you're in. Yeah. Further you go west, the more horses there are.

Well, and I mean, Clancy, I was trying to bring it back and, like, talk about Texas with him. But honest to God, he doesn't really feature Texas that. I had never thought about Clancy's like Maryland. What state version of nationalism? I can call it Maryland nationalism. Maryland nationalism was to the exclusion of Texas. Because he mentions people, he has people from, I guess, no, Judge Moore and Robert Ritter both from Texas.

But we never learn anything else about them. They're just like, and they're both Seattle. CIA Cowboys. They are. You know, you're right. Like, yeah, they're mythic figures that come in, right? Whereas, like, Clark is from Indiana, with Indiana University's a good farm team from the CIA.

So that's Bob Gates went there. So that's a good inside joke. And then Jack is Maryland. Jack's Maryland. He lives in the same estate that Clancy did, right? Perrigan Cliff. which had an undergrad shooting range. His wife bought him a Wanda, his first wife bought him a

war on a fortune tank. That's beautiful. It's so awesome. Get you a woman that'll buy you a tank, I think. Well, and then they got a divorce and he married Colin Powell's second cousin. We aired a apseco fortune. I've got to keep the money rolling in. But the other interesting part with Clancy, too,

is he's writing in the 80s and 90s, primarily. But he, I mean, and the leads are like, white dudes, right? Like John Clark and Jack Ryan in the way. But around them, it's a really like multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, like gender integrated. Like Kathy Ryan has spoken about with like a lot of respect. she's a surgeon

and so it was weird to me and Clancy's second wife is a black woman and so none of the like

it's it's conservatism like and kind of but widely cast because I mean honestly

that the army was super diverse and the schools I grew up in it as a military kid like I never understood the problem

of like monoculture because I never experienced it And I always found that a little like, I don't know, kind of redeeming about him, but also a more cynical read on that is you appeal to more people to invite them into the security state by like showing there's a place for you, Mormon FBI agent, working with Italian American woman Secret Service agent who's a champion shooter. I would say that's part of the military project now, right? This is part of the thing that has Republican lawmakers in such a tizzy is the appeal to different kinds of people that the military needs to keep going, right? Right. Well, and that type of people they're going to need to keep going into the future.

Because, like, I mean, anyone can do what I did. as long as you have like legs and arms you can pretty much do my job I can't I can't do like some of the computer jobs you know

I can't do some of the like blind stuff around jobs and those are going to be more and more important and so certain taboos have to share marijuana you know

like we've seen the military have a really I mean just since I've been around it. I was in, like, I was a child during domestic Telly era. You know, and the shift in the military from that to like where it is now is a good thing. And it's also like kind of a stunning thing. You think about it. Like, that's within, within a generation. Yeah. One of the most popular pieces of military fiction that I think most people find instantly recognizable is about

Marines collectively punishing a gay man. Right. Oh, is that few good men? A few good men. Yeah. Yeah. Like that in the, the story I think is like so rooted in that time and place and is would I hope be completely foreign to the modern military, right? Well, I mean, I don't know. Fair.

Probably not. Fair. Yeah. I was in it like I described the infantry as like at once both the most homerotic and most homoeroy. environment I've ever been in. So yeah, I don't know, actually. Well, but then you think about who wrote a few good men and what else is he written? Like, Charlie Wilson's war, huh, social network, like some interesting stuff. Working through some things, working through some thoughts and feelings about both his father

and American Empire for sure. And I mean, I always thought it would be fun to be kind of a a hunt for Tom Clancy spin-off that was focused on like the West Wing and how the West Wing created a whole like culture of like DC Dorks that wanted to be Josh Lyman. Oh yes. Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah. I think that's a good. It's so I think one of the central, like, conflicts in my brain in my, uh, in my adult life is the push and pull between realizing that like art is this transatlantic. force that changes the world, but also making sure that that thought doesn't lead to then an idea that art should be controlled, we should be censorious, and that it's dangerous in a way that we need to suppress it. Does that make sense?

I understand that things like Tom Clancy are influential and effective, that people want to be Josh Lyman and that they moved to D.C., maybe. not specifically because they watched too much West Wing, but that had an influence, right? But I also don't want to end up being Tipper Gore telling people that they can't listen to Prince albums because I'm afraid of what that art might do to them. And then I'm in a more like third camp, I think, which is where the way that you deal with art that is not conducive to your program, right? If I'm if I'm some mystical government figure, right? And you just promote the shit out of what other art that is conducive to your

way. That's the healthier way, I think. But I think that's also like, I'm thinking of wartime like writer equivalents or like writer equivalents of Tom Clancy around that time. And there was a book called Buffalo Soldiers, which had a movie based on it with King Phoenix. And the movie, the movie tanks because it comes out like,

the movie doesn't get released because it was right after 9-11. Yes, because it's this scathing indictment of like 90s military culture in Germany where they had like the joyride with the tank. On heroin. On heroin. Yeah. The protagonist is a crooked like supply sergeant.

It's just stealing as much as it can. while also like having it a fair with the sergeant, your daughter who has one arm. Like, it's so good. But it's also, you read that. And honestly, I think that's more the truism of the military that I saw versus like Clancy. It gets technical details very accurate and gets like how people want themselves to be perceived

and how they think of themselves, but not necessarily how they are. Correct. Right. Because, like, I don't know, people forget that during Vietnam, the sergeant major of the Army, the highest ranking dude in the Army, or highest ranking enlisted dude in the Army, was running at, like, criminal enterprise predicated on, like, enlisted clubs in Vietnam and elsewhere, getting kicked back to the tune of about $600 million a year that they were able to figure out, but they weren't necessarily able to figure the whole thing out. because the sergeant major's subordinate in the criminal enterprise was the two-star provost marshal of the army. So the chief law enforcement of the army of the officer of the army was the deputy to somebody who should have outranked in the criminal infrastructure.

And if you think that stuff stopped, like, come on. It did not, no, not at all. if the incentives didn't go away, then it didn't stop. Different people are doing different things that look very soon. And which I think leads back into your original question, which is why is it hard for this type of thing to take seed right now? And, you know, the one remnant that you mentioned that was like still kind of, oh, those guys are kind of good operative culture, right?

why we're also starting to like realize that maybe some of those green beanies down in like Columbia were like shipping cocaine back maybe some of them like not only that but like hey how did that why is that beheaded body found on the beach like just yeah yeah well in my what I what I've understood that was um so there's a close relationship between uh the out of Out on motorcycle games in the United States were formed after World War II, largely with like returning vets and the government. And so I have been told that part of the reason

for the spades of murders on Brad was, once the fall of accountable happens, you've got a pipeline that's been shut down, right? Like the way you were getting product back from Afghanistan to America is now going, right? But the drug business is a credit-based business, right? It's not necessarily a cash-based business. So if you have had an outlaw motorcycle rate, if you $100,000 advance to purchase heroin,

you don't deliver that? That's really bad. And you might end up dead. and then you expand that. That makes total sense. Yeah. I never thought about that angle. Yeah.

That's fucked up. I mean, it's a, you would or wouldn't be surprised at the number of, the other thing that is interesting is, you know, some of those, some of those clubs flew their colors

outside of black sites in Afghanistan because the guards are the like what do they call the sports? The CIA is like PSD views. I don't know. I can, I'm just thinking about that picture. The picture of the like

the guys with the armor on and the blue jeans and the button up and the classes like your glass. You know, I can't remember what they call them, but I know what you're talking about. But, no, they weren't scorpion. I forget what they're called. But like the dudes that rolled around in Afghanistan, like, drove the, like,

hyluxes with the case officer, right? A lot of them were, like, patched-in motorcycle gang dudes. Who, there's civilian job. And weirdly enough, that doesn't affect your security clearance. Who knew? You know, there's jobs to get filled. You know? have people working.

No, and I mean, I can see again from like that that that gray beard, government graybeard eye. You got people that are going to be criminals. Like, you might as well have control over it. So I understand that aspect. But it's also like, it's not what we're told. Well, I mean, you can't. That's not a, only a certain kind of person wants to hear that story.

But it's the story. Yeah, it's a good one too. I guess it flies in the face of a lot of things you tell ourselves. It does. And we like, some of us like simple stories. Right? And anything that gets complicated or nuanced, sometimes we turn off. You know, let me ask you a couple more questions here.

And then let's get out of here. But I think I'm like you're going to have to come back on the show. There's too much to talk about. This is fun. Yeah, I've enjoyed it. What's the canon? What is the Clancy Canon? Okay, the Clancy Canon, I think is the 13 Jack Ryan novels plus Red Storm Ries.

If you want to read it. Like, I think Op Center is worth reading. And my white whale op center book is Opcenter three games of state because it was co-written with Dr. Steve Bichennett. who I talk about in like one of the essays. But I got to get deeper into it. He's like, this guy both did kind of everything.

He's a Flynn-like character, honestly. Like, where you're not quite sure when the crazy started. And so those are the, those are the canon books. I would start off reading them in chronological order if you want. So that's Patriot Games first, and Humpur Act over

Cardinal of the Kremlin Clear and Present Danger, etc. You can stop after they start getting ghost-ridden. You can honestly stop at Teeth of the Tiger. It's the one that's partially said in Charlottesville. Not very good. And he pissed up.

But he has weird I also like to read Clancy novels for the weird nuggets that he has in there. So in the Teeth of the Tiger one, he talks about video game companies and how it's hard for the national security agency to like recruit the smartest person at sanford computer science right because like they want money but it's easy for them to get that

person a job in a video game company than non-disclosure agreements and uh hey you want like a million dollars to put this back door into this one thing yeah okay and so that's that's more of the model and that's one of the things he talks about in Tevenutai. He also talks about apparently, and I haven't found it yet, the Jay Edgar Hooves' graymail files are secluded in a mansion in Charlottesville. So I've got to find it.

See what's in there. And I would also recommend for anyone that's getting into Clancy or wanting to reread Clancy to pull up the substack and read along as you go through the novels. What's the URL? the URL is the hunt for Tom Clancy. com. Perfect.

We're going to have you back on to talk about more. I would love that. This has been, like an hour and 20 minutes has kind of flown by. Yeah, it's been great. All right. Thank you so much.

You're going to come back for part two, I'm sure. Sounds great. That is all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Jason Fields and Kevin O'Dell. Thank you also very much for tuning in. We love you. I think this was a pretty good episode for our Thanksgiving week. I know the audio is not as good as we want it, but we're going to fix that for the next time Matt comes on. Really fascinating stuff that he's writing about Tom Clancy over at The Hunt for Tom Clancy on Substack.

You must read it. And hey, did you know that we also have a substack? Angryplanet.com or AngryPlanent.com or AngryPenet. pod.com where you for a mere $9 a month can get early access to our episodes and some other stuff that we've got cooking. It's going to be coming out pretty soon. It really helps support the show. It keeps us going. Thank you all so much for everything you do. We've had a lot of great feedback, some angry feedback over the past few weeks. We'd like to hear all of it. And I think we're going to be sharing some of it on the show soon. Some of it has changed the way we're going

to go about producing the show. But we'll get into that. a little bit later. Again, thank you all so much. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.