The Hunt for Red October: The Untold Story...Tom Clancy, the best-selling author of military thrillers, died Tuesday at the age of 66. What better way to celebrate his life than to publish the CIA's very own tribute to him?Sociologist Bridget Rose Nolan spent a year working as a full time analyst with the CIA, gathering observations to use in a just-published doctoral dissertation. (Among the revelations: CIA agents forward Gawker articles around. Hi, guys.)One of the weirdest and most fascinating bits of the dissertation is Appendix E: "The Hunt for Red October: The Untold Story," a detailed retelling of Clancy's famous book written as a kind of in-joke satire of the CIA. Nolan explains:Perhaps the most popular example of Agency lore is a well-known spoof of Tom Clancy’s novel The Hunt for Red October. Supposedly, during the Cold War, someone wrote a series of short episodes describing how the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence would have handled the events described in the book and the subsequent movie. It is a satire of the daily life of the analyst, and therefore articulates with a humorous tone many of the frustrations I have discussed in this dissertation. For me, “The Hunt for Red October: The Untold Story” also served as a sort of barometer for my own acculturation process. During my first week of work in May of 2007, at least five people eagerly sent me the file saying things like, “You have to read this—it is the funniest thing ever!” But I didn’t get it, of course; not right away. By the end of my time there in early 2011, however, I revisited the text and found myself laughing out loud. Even though this story echoes other themes of this chapter, I place the Red October discussion here because of its legendary status; everyone seemed to know this story, so it was a shared cultural and institutional memory among the initiated. In fact, I was specifically told that “you aren’t truly initiated into CIA until you think that ‘The Hunt for Red October: The Untold Story’ is funny.” This idea echoes Becker’s research on novice marijuana smokers and the ways in which they rely on “role interaction” with more experienced smokers for “cues” as to what the new smoker should feel and do (Becker, 1953). The Red October story is reproduced in its entirety from my field notes in Appendix E. It is rather long, though, so here I highlight some of the ways in which the humor of the Red October story echoes each of the themes of this research.
Here it is—the CIA's tribute to one of its biggest fans—in its entirety.
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