The Bear and the Dragon

Or: When the Sun and the Moon and the Stars aligned

Debuting on the top of the New York Times best seller list on August 21, 2000, 386 days before the attacks on September 11, Tom Clancy's "The Bear and the Dragon" came out in time for the Labor Day crowd to read on the beach.

Probably took more than a long weekend to finish this one, though.

It was Clancy's longest novel—1137 excruciating paperback pages or nearly 43 hours of audio that has a Chinese Politburo executive assistant referring to a CIA case officer’s male member as “Japanese Sausage” multiple times. In fact, it is the last line of his longest work. The CIA officer, Chester Nomuri, is covered as a salesman for NEC and a Japanese citizen for his spy mission to Beijing.

In another weird twist, Tom Clancy has retired Lt. Col. Alan Gregory, now a section chief at TRW, staying in the same Marriott hotel that American Airlines Flight 77 buzzed before slamming into the Pentagon.

Gregory, you'll recall, is a character from The Cardinal of the Kremlin is the genius soldier scientist working on the Strategic Defense Initiative in New Mexico, back when he was a Major in the Army and kidnapped by a squad of KGB paramilitary officers who were then extra-judicially killed by FBI agents in a real world hostage rescue scenario.

Speaking of weird SDI connected physicists who also get involved in artificial intelligence work: William E. Caswell, age 54, was a civilian employee of the Navy who died in the 9/11 attacks. He was a Princeton physicist who'd spent time in the Army as a draftee during Vietnam and "admired his drill sergeant."

An obituary by colleagues reads:

In 1983, Bill’s career took an abrupt turn when he moved to the Naval Surface Weapons Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, to work on applying artificial intelligence and nonlinear dynamics to signal processing problems. In 1985, he was invited by the navy to work as a civilian scientist on a major classified defense technology project. Bill rose rapidly to a position of overall technical responsibility for this project, ultimately directing a team of more than 100 scientists working on one of the navy’s most challenging problems. His technical skills and hands-on management style won the respect of his colleagues at the same time as his kindness, good humor, and thoughtfulness won their affection. Although the classified nature of the project meant that he could not discuss it with outsiders, those who knew it well tell us that Bill made many important contributions, grounded in his skills as a theoretical physicist, to its success. Indeed, he received several navy commendations on his work, one of which cites his role in a “highly successful top priority Chief of Naval operations project of unprecedented technological complexity … developing a profoundly new capability for the US Navy.” A long way from the two-loop beta function and a remarkable career in physics!

Clancy, you’ll recall, got briefed in on some programs , including the broad strokes of the Strategic Defense Initiative, so he could better sell them to the public. He also seemed, in interviews on CNN and the Charlie Rose show that day, real weirded out by the attacks on 9/11, which mirrored a plot point in Debt of Honor.

***

It was early June. I was sitting in a bar called "The Shadows" in Wichita, Kansas. I was drinking cranberry and pineapple juice and watching a young stage mentalist - mid twenties - very professionally go through an entire set to a less than receptive crowd.

This trip out west had a nicer mission than my last trip to New Mexico to sit with my bro Monty in a hospital room the day he died and then be a pallbearer at his funeral later that week—this late spring, early summer period has thrown some loops my way, so I appreciate you all being patient with The Hunt for Tom Clancy’s recent irregular publishing schedule, getting back in the groove now.

In early June, my mom needed to get out to Idaho to hang out with relatives for the summer, she wanted to take the car but didn't want to take the car herself and I needed a road trip, so it was a match made in heaven. My mother was asleep in the Holiday Inn Express next to the Wichita airport, and I couldn't sleep yet.

I was too wound up, I'd been driving all day; plus there were other things on my mind.

My Mom and I have a good time on the road; once when I was in fifth grade we made the journey in a 1994 Jeep Comanche that my sister called "Bubbles: The Dominatrix" because of the bubble decal on the side.

It was only a four cylinder and there were radiator problems, so we had to take the car to a shop in Russell, Kansas, where Senator Bob Dole, who lost to Bill Clinton in the 1996 Presidential Election.

On that trip, we listened to Gore Vidal's "Burr," the whole way.

We said "AAAAAAAAAAASPEN" in the Dumb and Dumber voice when we passed the signs for the Colorado Ski Town that moved mountains of cocaine in the 1980s.

Dumb and Dumber was a movie we'd seen together while my Dad was on an Air Force deployment to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (in the 1990s, pre-jurisdictionally ambiguous prison camp days, when it was a jurisdictionally ambiguous refugee camp).

Now that I do the driving, when I’ve been driving for a while I wind down by taking a long walk. We were at a Holiday Inn Express, but one only a block or two past the $59.99 Motels where people seemed to go to do drugs with prostitutes or die—or both, an ambulance pulled up to one as I was walking past; I kept walking, no need to gawk—so I found myself in “The Shadows” watching the mentalist run through his stage patter.

He was a dead ringer for the younger version of one of my best friends in Yorktown, the son of an F-15 pilot—my friend’s Dad went by the name of Buzz, professionally and personally—so after his set we struck up a conversation as he lit up a cigarette.

He did his mentalist act on a circuit from Wichita to Joplin, was twenty-five, and deeply appreciated a comment about his professionalism in the face of adversity. I've found it's a good idea to always compliment and encourage young artists, even if they suck, when they're doing the work. Otherwise, they might wind up in politics.

He excused himself and left. To my right, at the bar, I heard a guy who worked in some specialized form of commercial construction wearing a nice polo shirt say to his buddy "I still can't quite believe it, I barely graduated from high school, now I make as much as a doctor." God bless him.

Wichita is one of those power centers in America you don’t think of until you go there and see it. My mom and I went to the Art Museum the next day. It is a fine art museum, jam-packed with beautiful pieces. We took the whole morning taking it in; the woodcut exhibit was particularly delightful.

The museum also has a painting called “The Pit” which is described on the placard as “The Creepiest in Wichita.” Makes sense, given that the museum is sponsored heavily by the Koch family, old American industrialists who sold crude oil refineries to both the Soviets and Nazi Germany after old man Koch perfected an innovative new process in 1940. When you can make money off both sides of a war, you’ve really made it in America.

They’ve been unstopabble for two generations since. They currently sponsor not only right wing political activity, but all sorts of left wing cultural programming—artists, writers, musicians—using fronts that you may not expect. They don’t advertise this that much, and the beneficiaries of their largesse rarely mention it either. That family has long experience in playing both sides against the middle, their impact is enormous.

Much of it happens in the shadows, in the middle of the country, away from the places we normally think of as fulcrums in American life—New York, Washington, Los Angeles. It makes me think of the Manhattan Project’s security procedures—you just move a whole colony of scientists and academics to a town in the sticks, buy off the city fathers and the residents of the town with good paying, highly secret jobs. It’s actually not *that* hard for the government to keep a lot of secrets, provided it’s the main source of income for a town in eastern Idaho or Northern New Mexico or South Dakota or even Manhattan, Kansas.

That’s where the National Bio and Agro Defense Facility is run under the auspices of the United States Department of Agriculture and the United States Department of Homeland Security currently has a new multi-million dollar bioweapons research facility right in the middle of America’s beef corridor.

Here’s their pitch:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to bring online a new National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) in Manhattan, Kansas. This state-of-the-art facility will be a national asset that helps protect the nation’s agriculture, farmers and citizens against the threat and potential impact of serious animal diseases.The DHS Science and Technology Directorate is building the facility to standards that fulfill the mission needs of the USDA which will own, manage and operate the NBAF once construction and commissioning activities are complete. USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) will conduct foreign animal disease research, training and diagnostics in the facility.

What could possibly go wrong with that in the heart of American food production, the Land of Oz, somewhere, somewhere, over the Rainbow?

***

Alan Gregory’s assignment in “The Bear and the Dragon” is to make sure an AEGIS cruise missile ship can shoot down an ICBM, a plot point that becomes critically important in the last fifty pages of the book, when a joint NATO/Russian Special Forces team is dispatched deep behind Chinese lines to take out an ICBM silo site; one gets away and nearly vaporizes DC as Jack Ryan sits, smoking cigarettes on board the USS Gettysburg. Luckily, Alan Gregory learned how to code before that was cool, and the AEGIS ship takes the ICBM down before it can destroy DC.

Tom Clancy was truly gifted in his ability to make the US Nuclear Weapons industry seem like it was in the hands of sane professionals; a clear eyed look at the history of nuclear weapons seems to me to indicate the opposite.

A couple days after we left Wichita it was lunchtime on Colorado’s Western Slope, so my mom and I pulled off in Rifle, Colorado. I wanted to go visit the Project Ruilison site. That’s a spot in the mountains between Rifle and Parachute colorado, where on September 10, 1969 the Atomic Energy Commission dug a big hole and exploded a nuclear device underground as part of a multi-prong’ed experiment in Nuclear Fracking; it was under the same Operation Plowshares similar to the Project Gasbuggy Test conducted near the Jicarilla Apache reservation in Northern New Mexico on December 10, 1967, when my friend Monty was just about to turn two years old.

Rifle was not, as it turns out, the place you turn off to get to the nuke site (on my most recent trip out to Idaho I learned that the site is, in fact, inaccessible now) and my priority was getting my mom to Idaho, not scratching my itches, so we decided to get lunch in town

As close as I could get to the Project Ruilson Nuclear Test Site between Parachute and Rifle Colorado

.

Parachute

Of course, we wound up at Shooter’s Grill, a restaurant owned by Lauren Boebert, Colorado’s Representative for the Third Congressional District. All of the waiters and waitresses are uniformly attractive, dress like gucci cow hands and carry sidearms. It was Sunday afternoon and the place was not crowded. The woman who brought our lemonades carried a revolver because it was easier to clean than an automatic; one of her fellow servers once dumped a whole thing of syrup in a holster with an automatic, total nightmare.

Rae, the waitress who brought the excellent brisket, carried an automatic. She wasn’t worried about syrup. It struck me that while I’d read quite a bit about this restaurant. It came up whenever Lauren Boebert would reprise her role as congressional character of the day, usually from horrified suburban puritans on twitter.

I’d never once heard a twitter user or national media representative mention Shooters Grill’s proximity to an underground nuclear fracking site from the late 1960s. Nor that the site near Lauren Boebert’s Shooters Grill was deemed too dangerous to use, as it produced radioactive natural gas, for decades—cleanup was supposedly finished in 1998. Perhaps thats because there are companies in Houston trying to drill in the buffer zone, today. Better to keep the public’s eye on the literal bread and circus than the issues below the surface.

Benny Johnson was there when my mom and I dropped in. The man once fired from Buzzfeed for extensive plagiarism—which is a real accomplishment, the American press equivalent to getting kicked out of a German Blood-play swingers club for being too much of a weirdo—was there trying to get the common folk to talk about how much they loved guns, desperately feeding talking points to a couple of people while a camera man with a Steadicam followed him around.

No one in the restaurant mentioned the underground nukes, nor the levels of radioactive elements or nuclear explosion biproducts present in the groundwater.

***

The Nukes, Specifically the Chinese Nuclear Weapons attached to Chinese Ballistic Missiles, become a really big deal in The Bear and the Dragon. Such a big deal that after China invades Russia to steal Gold from Siberia and so America invites Russia to join NATO to fight China. Then John Clark’s NATO Rainbow team is dispatched with a Spetnaz unit and a detachment of Apache Helicopters to destroy a Chinese ICMB site. Reading it today is real parallel dimension shit, especially considering Tom Clancy’s publisher released it in the year 2000, before 9/11, the Patriot Act, and the Wars in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The Guardian’s Chris Petit nailed it in a review:

The Bear and the Dragon lends new evidence to the theory that Clancy is in reality a CIA committee designed to produce US propaganda in the form of popular entertainment. In its bulk and lack of conspicuous authorship, the work is clearly beyond the scope of a single writer, just as it is equally obvious that the jacket photo of "Tom Clancy" is in fact Big Ron Atkinson moonlighting as an author double.

Clancy, who generally was pretty progressive in a weird, Jesuit-educated Vietnam War supporting insurance dude from Maryland way. Black characters and women featured in prominant roles in most of his books. He wrote both Arab terrorists and Russian nationalists with a real keen sensitivity. He had Jewish characters in prominant positions where their intelligence and integrity was key and made a woman and Japanese American fighter pilot named Amelia "Buns" Nakamura pilot the first Space Ace in Red Storm Rising . Maybe because the villains are Chinese accounts for this being his most racist book, a fact that the Publisher’s Weekly review addresses obliquely

""Klingons"" is how hero Jack Ryan describes the villains the Communist Chinese Politburo of Clancy's mammoth new novel; other Yanks refer to Chinese soldiers as ""Joe Chinaman."" It's not for subtlety of characterization, then, that this behemoth proves so relentlessly engrossing.

While Bruce Frets, in Entertainment Weekly, gave the book a B, noting the racism more directly

Still, Ming stands as the closest thing to a sympathetic Chinese character in a book alarmingly peppered with such racial slurs as ”yellow barbarians,” ”Chink bastards,” and ”slant-eyed motherf—er.” Naturally, any thriller needs villains, and China is one of the few evil empires left in the post-Cold War world.

do we really need to be reminded three times that Chairman Mao was a pervert who enjoyed deflowering young virgins? (”It could have been worse — at least they were girls,” Ryan observes in a homophobic aside.)

That all is to lead up to the Climax: Chinese Leaders, on their last days before the CIA topples their government by streaming military victories on a CIA site that sounds a lot like what Youtube would become, manage to launch a couple of ICBM's at the end; one winds up getting shot down by an Apache Helicopter at the launch site and the USS Gettysburg's Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System near the impact site in Washington, DC.

This is all streamed to the Chinese people, through a CIA website, when they march through Tiananmen square and invade a Politburo meeting. Remember, this is the year 2000; Youtube wouldn't be launched until February 14, 2005 and then amassing more that 2.5 billion monthly users. It was launched by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, all early employees of Paypal, which also launched intelligence connected indistrialists Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

"Hurley and Chen said that the original idea for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service, and had been influenced by the website Hot or Not.[17][19] They created posts on Craigslist asking attractive women to upload videos of themselves to YouTube in exchange for a $100 reward.[20] Difficulty in finding enough dating videos led to a change of plans, with the site's founders deciding to accept uploads of any type of video”

Sequoia Capital was an early investor in Youtube. Meanwhile, the CIA’s explicit venture capital arm, continued its work in Silicon Valley, developing digital tools for global counterinsurgency based on the pioneering work done through the Manhattan Project and later the Phoenix Program, dressing it up with slogans like “Don’t Be Evil” and “Think Different.” The Koch family isn’t the only powerful force in America that knows how to play both sides of the street; when you look at their history, it was the American government’s secret side that probably showed them most of the tricks during World War II.

We’ve all been living in the Shadows since at least then, but occassionally a beam of light shines through, the stars aligning and the sun illuminating the moon as it dances through Ursa Major and Draco, which Tom Clancy might call the Bear and the Dragon.

That’s it for this edition of The Hunt for Tom Clancy; Thank you so much for reading and remember to tell your friends.

Housekeeping news:

ClancyCon2023 is tentatively Scheduled for Las Vegas in April or May 2023, more details as I get everything firmed up this month.

Next Month:

The Teeth of the Tiger, Private Assassins, Charlottesville, Virginia and Hedge Funds as Covert Actors. Thank you for your patience, we’re back on a regular publishing schedule now.