I've seen him in interviews asked the same question, and I believe him. Most of what he knows, or knew, you can find out just by poking around boring technical publications. Even before the internet, there wall all sorts of stuff floating around in hobbyist circles. (From a GI JOE collector in Japan, I was told which Army units were deploying with Crye multi cam and who had gotten HK416s....) Being good with numbers, that's all Clancy did.
Look at me, I'm a suburban homemaker, and yet I somehow know how to get sat phone time off the books in third world countries, or at least what worked before the PMCs had accesss to M955 (it used to just show up on SAW belts, that might have changed, but you wanted it in case the locals had ESAPI or XSAPI plates and guys working contracts didn't have it, at least at one point). People either read a lot, or aren't always as banal as they seem. Tom... pretty banal. Just had an eye for stuff and learned the lingo to a certain extent and knew where to look.
Most things that get classified aren't that interesting save to a few people, so there is usually some source somewhere for the same information that is open.
It usually shocks people in intel just who actually knows what. For most folks that "know things" they just don't use the information or really have any use for it. Thus it is never a problem.
My favorite scary thing that I know, aside from the interesting fact that the snack bar at Quantico has to lock up the power bars to keep them from being stolen (reassuring, ain't it) was always the designated commanders scheme whereby most people think only the President can authorize nukes, but in fact since Eisenhower certain designated officers have the authority in case the Russians or Martians or whoever destroyed or disrupted the chain of command. Sometimes the designated commander had someone that they designated, at least for a while anyway, it might have been changed in recent years.
All open source data. All boring unless you're a writer, hobbyist, or foreign spook that has to fill in data to get paid.
As Tom Clancy observed, nothing in his novels is classified, it is all open source since the things that folks want hidden are often simply in obscure places rather than classified, you only have to know where to look.
Simply not true. Lots of references, plot lines, code words and procedures that appear in Clancy novels were extremely classified. The guy was an insurance salesman from Connecticut for Pete's sake. All of this data was illegally fed to him by obviously unnamed sources all of whom, including Clancy, could have faced serious federal charges. Perhaps by the time his novel saw print the data may have been dated but trust me he used highly classified intel time and time again. One of the things I like about his novels is the accuracy, that I know first hand is inherent, and when he writes of things that I wasn't privy to my assumption is that he is just as accurate. Bottom line, lots of folks have fed him highly classified data for years most of which found it's way into his many fine novels.
One could argue that Clancy did no harm but the crashing of a commercial airliner into the capitol in his book was a blueprint for the 9/11 attacks. Al Qaida speaks and reads English and is probably looking hard at all of the details coming out in the media about the vulnerability, (attack ability), of the 4,000+ oil rigs in the gulf. Scary stuff!
SC; Yep 98C/B but I did my share of listening to ditties. It helped a lot when I got my Ham ticket - KE6NQC (Not quite crazy). (o;
