Tom Clancy’s state secrets: why The Hunt For Red October had the US Navy running scared

In 2009, former CIA intelligence officer Bill Hadley described how The Hunt for Red October – which surfaced in cinemas in 1990 – made some waves in the intelligence and submarine world. The Cold War techno-thriller, in which Sean Connery’s Soviet naval captain goes rogue with a souped-up nuclear sub, apparently confirmed the existence of classified naval technology.

The original Tom Clancy novel, with its knowledge of military hardware, strategy, and technical insights, had a similar reaction from some corners of Washington when it was published in 1984. The best-seller was endorsed by the Commander in Chief himself, President Ronald Reagan, who called The Hunt for Red October “my kind of yarn” and “unputdownable”. But Clancy recalled meeting Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, who asked, “Who the hell cleared this?”

The novel describes how the Soviet super-sub, the Red October, uses gravity gradiometry, a technique of stealth navigation that measures variations in gravitational pull. At the time, no actual Soviet submarines were equipped with such technology, though the US Navy had developed gravity gradiometers in the 1970s. According to some sources, the tech was used on Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines. Bill Hadley, writing in a CIA quarterly, described how the film script used technical jargon confirming the use of gravity gradiometers aboard US subs. The tech, explained Hadley, was once “a billion-dollar black project” – but it was declassified just a few months after the film’s release.

However, watch the film back and the offending jargon – a reference to “milligal anomalies” aboard a US sub – is like the Red October itself: undetectable.

The Hunt for Red October was the first story – both on the page and on film – to feature Tom Clancy’s CIA analyst Jack Ryan. The character was played by Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October and by Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, and Chris Pine in subsequent films (of varying quality). John Krasinski has now returned for the fourth series of Amazon Prime’s aptly named series, Jack Ryan.

Baldwin’s original iteration set the mould for a popular heroic type: a whip-smart boy scout who saves the day with American-bred gumption – by deploying good old-fashioned guesswork and thinking three steps ahead.

It’s Sean Connery, however, who commands the film, playing a maverick Lithuanian submariner, Captain Marko Ramius – the most-weathered old battleship in the Soviet fleet. Ramius is one of Connery’s not-even-bothering-with-the accent characters, ranking alongside his Egyptian-born, Scottish-voiced Spaniard in Highlander – irrefutable proof that star power reigns over realism.

In the story, Ramius and his closest confidants (including a shady-looking Sam Neill) plan to defect to the United States with the Red October, a Typhoon-class ballistic missile submarine. Ramius – grieving for his wife and disillusioned with the Cold War – recognises the magnificent Red October for what it really is: a first-strike weapon that could kickstart World War 3. The advanced Red October is fitted with a “caterpillar drive”, which allows it to travel silently, undetectable by sonar.

Under the threat of losing the sub to the Americans, the Soviets send a fleet to find and sink the Red October, without alerting the Americans (who already know). The Americans, however, want the technology so attempt to take the Red October for themselves – without the Russians knowing they’ve pilfered it.

There’s some debate about the inspiration for the story. Tom Clancy, who died in 2013, said he was inspired by an article about the mutiny of a Soviet frigate, the Storozhevoy, in 1975. “That mutiny rattled around in my head for years,” Clancy told Time Magazine. He also named the author of the article, Gregory Young, as a source. But a 2021 docu-drama, The Real Hunt for Red October, claimed the book was based on the disappearance of a Soviet submarine, the K-129, in 1968. Kenneth Sewell, author of a book on the K-129, Red Star Rogue, thinks The Hunt for Red October was a “cover story” for American involvement with the K-129.

According to Sewell, a former nuclear engineer aboard the USS Parche, the submarine world liked the film adaptation. “It was the first film that had a lot of realism as far as the capability of the equipment,” says Sewell. Sewell’s own book was turned into a film in 2013 – the Ed Harris-starring Phantom.

Directed by John McTiernan, The Hunt for Red October is sturdy, immersive stuff. McTiernan – on an unparalleled run of macho belters, after Predator and Die Hard – handles it like a thunderous action film. Though it’s mostly a load of men standing around and looking at charts and intel, talking about how they’re going to pull a fast one on another load of blokes also standing around and looking at charts and intel. 

The original book was the first work of fiction published by the Naval Institute Press. Tom Clancy had no military experience. He was, in fact, an insurance salesman. There were questions about his insider knowledge of hi-tech naval warfare. Claims that he had intelligence connections were “a lot of crap,” said Clancy. Clancy explained that he’d studied technical manuals and books – light reading such as The World’s Missile Systems and the Guide to the Soviet Navy. He also interviewed submariners and learned from a naval strategy game called Harpoon, which was used to train Reserve Officers’ Training Corps cadets. He was, ultimately, a naval warfare geek. 

Ronald Reagan received The Hunt for Red October as a Christmas gift. The president apparently told friends that he was losing sleep over it – because he couldn’t stop reading the novel. Though, as rumoured by Time back in 1985, Reagan did wonder: “How in the world did [Clancy] have all this knowledge?” Clancy credited Reagan with helping sell more than four million copies. Reagan wasn’t just a fan of The Hunt for Red October. He was reported to have recommended Clancy’s follow-up novel, Red Storm Rising, to Margaret Thatcher over the phone – after a summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik. Reagan also liked the film version of The Hunt for Red October. “It was great,” said the former president. “Just great.”

There was some back and forth on the screenplay – written by Larry Ferguson and Donald E. Stewart – and Jack Ryan himself. Before Alec Baldwin was cast, the producers had wanted Kevin Costner, the A-lister of the moment. But Costner was too busy with what producer Mace Neufeld called “this buffalo movie” – the multi-Oscar winning Dances with Wolves. Neufeld went on to produce further Clancy adaptations with different Jack Ryans: Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger (Harrison Ford), The Sum of All Fears (Ben Affleck), and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (Chris Pine). 

Amusingly, Sean Connery almost passed on The Hunt for Red October. With the Cold War coming to an end, the story made no sense to him. The script had been faxed to him and was missing the first page, which explained that the story was in fact set in 1984. Neufeld hastily faxed him the opening page and Connery signed on. Last year, John McTiernan appeared on the Empire Podcast and admitted being intimidated by Connery. 

“He didn’t suffer fools easily, but you tried not to be a fool and then you got along fine,” said McTiernan. “Yes, he scared me at first, from his reputation or whatever, but about the second day I worked with him, at the end of the day he said, ‘Good night, boy’. And, you know, from my family that was a kindness, an endearment, actually. And I knew I was okay. Sean was a tremendous professional.” McTiernan added: “He was a tough old bird.”

Connery is undoubtedly a powerful presence: a Soviet stalwart with a perfectly coiffed hairpiece – tinged with melancholy though perfectly capable of breaking a man’s neck. Not only is Ramius defecting, he’s on the trail of a saboteur aboard the Red October – a bonus whodunnit amid the rising tensions.

The United States Navy gave the film significant support. Captain James H. Patton enlisted as a technical consultant. He wrote about the production for a Naval Institute magazine. “From the outset,” wrote Patton, “I was given some good advice from Admiral Bruce DeMars, then-Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for Undersea Warfare: first and most important, I was not there to attest to ‘real or authentic’, since real and authentic were none of [the filmmakers’] business.”

According to Patton, who served on multiple nuclear and ballistic missile submarines, the US Navy had learned something from Top Gun: that entertainment was good exposure for potential enlistment. Bill Hadley noted something similar: submariners hoped that The Hunt for Red October would do for them what Top Gun had done for naval fighter pilots.

“The Navy was always trying to recruit top-tier people because submarines are the most complicated pieces of equipment in the world,” says Kenneth Sewell. “Our submarine was more complicated than the Apollo ship that went to the moon.”

The US Navy approved the use of the aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise, helicopters, frigates, a dry-dock crew, and the submarine, the USS Houston, which doubled as the USS Dallas, a real Los Angeles-class submarine portrayed in the film (Baldwin’s Ryan boards the Dallas as it tracks down the Red October). The USS Houston performed 40 emergency surfacing “blows” for the film. The cast also spent time aboard another Los Angeles-class submarine, the USS Salt Lake City, which took them down 600ft. 

Scott Glenn, who plays Mancuso, the commanding officer aboard the Dallas, shadowed Thomas B. Fargo, the commanding officer aboard the Salt Lake City. Fargo told his crew to treat Glenn as his equal, and he kept Glenn in the loop (within reason) with his decision making. Glenn later said he owed his performance as Mancuso – cool and even-keeled in the face of nuclear war – to Fargo. According to James H. Patton, the crew of USS Dallas in the movie was a 50-50 split of actors and real sailors, including crew from the real-life USS Dallas. Patton made them run through basic routines such as changing course, coming to periscope depth, and manning battle stations. “Submariners will be hard-pressed to identify the real crew members,” wrote Patton.

Real submarines were too small for the film crews, so interiors were constructed for the Red October, USS Dallas, and the Konovalov (an Alfa-class Soviet sub captain by Stellan Skarsgård). The interiors were constructed on 50ft platforms, which were on hydraulically-powered gimbals – enough to give Sean Connery seasickness.

The interiors were accurate down to working gauges. A 500ft fibreglass mock-up of the Red October was also built (the top part of the sub, from above the waterline) which was capable of surfacing and submerging. For underwater scenes, they used miniature submarines with heavy smoke to simulate the effect of water.

As James H. Patton said, authenticity was not a primary target. “The concept of a Russian submarine defecting was the wild fantasy part of it,” says Sewell. “I know a lot of Russian submariners – they would no more defect than we would.”

Sewell also baulks at the idea of Russian submarine superiority, as represented by the Red October. “I think it gave a lot more credit to the Soviet boats at the time – technically and operationally,” he says. “And they were noisy as hell – they sounded like washing machines.”

Though Clancy said The Hunt for Red October was based on the Storozhevoy, Sewell says that’s “BS”. Sewell’s book, Red Star Rogue, claims that the Soviets planned to start a nuclear war between the US and China, which resulted in the disappearance of the K-129, and details a secret American operation to retrieve the missing sub. Sewell argues that Clancy’s book was a cover story for the truth behind the K-129 – an attempt to spin the story before the truth leaked. He says Clancy was “an asset” and was fed information by the CIA. The Hunt for Red October, claims Sewell, was what the CIA called a “company book” – an exercise in leaking information about US military capabilities and warning off the Soviets.

It sounds like a colourful conspiracy theory, though former Navy Secretary John Lehman – the same man who once asked “Who the hell cleared this?” – confirmed that this sort of thing did happen. Lehman, talking on The Real Hunt for Red October docu-drama, said they used Hollywood and popular culture to promote the power of the US Navy and demoralise their enemies. Geophysicist John Milsom, who wrote about the gravity gradiometry information leak (which he didn’t think was very plausible), wondered if Clancy’s novel was a bit of deliberate disinformation aimed at the Russians. 

Whatever the truth behind The Hunt for Red October, Tom Clancy certainly knew his stuff.