John Patrick Ryan, Sr.KCVO (Hon.), nicknamed Jack, is a character created by American author Tom Clancy in 1984. He is the main character of the Ryanverse series of novels, films, video games, and a TV series. Clancy wrote fourteen novels featuring Ryan, which have charted at the top of the New York Times bestseller list.[1]
Clancy developed the Jack Ryan character while working as an insurance agent in Maryland, drawing extensively from his early interests and personal background.[7] Clancy, who grew up in an Irish-American family in Baltimore and was unable to serve in the military due to nearsightedness, developed a passion for military history and strategy from an early age. He was described as a "nerd" who enjoyed playing military board games and was an avid reader of military history books and science fiction.
The author's research methodology became central to his character and world-building process. Many of Clancy's insurance clients were former nuclear submariners, both officers and enlisted personnel, whose expertise he systematically gathered.[8] He conducted extensive research using military publications such as Armed Forces Weekly and Jane's Defence Weekly, and collaborated with subject experts ranging from Soviet defectors to retired Air Force generals. Clancy based his first novel on the real-life attempted defection of the crew of the Soviet frigate Storozhevoy to Sweden.[9][10]
According to character sketches discovered by the U.S. Naval Institute, Clancy originally envisioned Ryan as born in the 1950s, the son of a Baltimore police officer and hospital nurse. The character was designed to attend Clancy's own alma mater, Loyola High School, and earn an economics degree from Boston College before joining the United States Marine Corps. The detailed background included Ryan's career path from a helicopter crash injury during military service, through work at Merrill Lynch, to eventual recruitment by the CIA while working as an associate editor with the U.S. Naval Institute.[11]
The character of Jack Ryan was modeled partly on former Director of Central IntelligenceRobert Gates, with Clancy telling Gates that "You know, for the first several novels, I pretty much modeled Ryan's career on yours".[12] This grounding in real-world intelligence careers helped establish the series' commitment to authenticity in depicting government operations and military technology.
Background
Early life
Ryan was born on May 17, 1950, to an Irish Catholic family in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, Emmett William Ryan, was a homicide lieutenant for the Baltimore Police Department and World War II veteran, while his mother, Catherine Burke Ryan, was a nurse. Ryan also had a younger sister who lived in Seattle.
After graduating from Boston College with a bachelor’s degree,[a] Ryan became a lieutenant with the United States Marine Corps while also passing the Certified Public Accountant exam. However, his military career was cut short after three months when his platoon's helicopter crashed during a NATO exercise over Crete, which badly injured his back. After a lengthy recovery process where he became addicted to pain medications, Ryan was discharged from the Marine Corps. He later took a position with Wall Street investment firm Merrill Lynch at its Baltimore office.
As a stockbroker, Ryan began to invest his own money. He meets Caroline "Cathy" Muller, then a medical student at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, through her father Joe, a senior vice president at Merrill Lynch. They fall in love and get engaged. Cathy becomes an ophthalmic surgeon at the Wilmer Eye Institute of the Johns Hopkins. Jack and Cathy get married and give birth to a daughter Olivia, nicknamed Sally.
After creating a net worth of $8 million, Ryan left Merrill Lynch after four years and studied at Georgetown University, later graduating with a doctorate degree. After a brief stint at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he accepted a position at the U.S. Naval Academy as a civilian professor of history. As a history professor, Ryan wrote books on naval history, including a biography of World War II Admiral William "Bull" Halsey.[c]
CIA career
Ryan was first asked to work as a consultant for the Central Intelligence Agency. He wrote a paper called Agents and Agencies and devised the canary trap, which come to the attention of U.S. NavyVice Admiral James Greer, the CIA's Deputy Director of Intelligence. Greer offers Ryan a job, which he initially declined.
While on a work trip in London with his family, Ryan (played by Harrison Ford in the film adaptation) thwarts a kidnapping attempt on the Prince and Princess of Wales by the Ulster Liberation Army, a splinter group of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. For his bravery, he is granted the honorary Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order by the Queen Elizabeth II. One of the ULA attackers, Sean Miller, was captured and sentenced to life imprisonment, but is freed by his compatriots. Embittered over the failure of the kidnapping attempt, he exacts revenge by attacking his wife and daughter. After pleas by Greer, Ryan agrees to join the CIA as an analyst, originally to gather intelligence on the ULA. Later, Miller and his men stage another kidnapping attempt on the Prince and Princess of Wales, who are visiting the Ryan family in their Maryland home; however, they are overpowered by the combined efforts of Ryan, his friend Robert Jefferson "Robby" Jackson, and the Prince as well as law enforcement and naval officers. Shortly after, Ryan's second child Jack Ryan Jr. was born.
Ryan's first CIA assignment is in London as a member of a liaison group to the British Secret Intelligence Service. Initially called in to assess the Soviet government and economy, Ryan is later tasked to assist in the defection of KGB communications officer Oleg Zaitzev, who had discovered that his boss Yuri Andropov had ordered the assassination of Pope John Paul II. Although Ryan and a small team of British SIS agents helps Zaitzev and his family get to the West, they fail to prevent the attack on the Pope (which happened in real life). Nevertheless, the pope is wounded and his would-be assassin captured, while the British execute his Bulgarian handler. Zaitzev's defection proves to be a major coup for both the American and British intelligence agencies.
Marko Ramius, the Soviet Navy's top submarine commander, takes command of the Красный Октябрь (Krasny Oktyabr, or in English, Red October), the newest Typhoon-class ballistic missile submarine, with which he plans to defect with his officers. Having briefly met Ramius at an embassy function several years before, Ryan (portrayed by Alec Baldwin in the film adaptation) is asked by Admiral Greer to brief National Security Advisor Jeffrey Pelt and his staff on Ramius' background and the deadly new capabilities of Red October's secret revolutionary silent jet propulsion drive system called the caterpillar drive. Ryan recognizes that the renegade ethnic Lithuanian captain may want to defect rather than attack the West. Ryan works to establish contact with Ramius and get him and his crew along with the submarine secretly into the U.S., eventually succeeding.
Ryan is tasked with investigating a possible East German defector. Accompanied by CIA officer Mary Pat Foley, he meets the defector, a Stasi major named Kurt Pfeiffer, who had passed on intelligence about radar technology and identified a mole at the CIA station in West Berlin. After finding out that Pfeiffer had taken the intelligence from physicist Uwe Hauptman's research through his wife Elke, Ryan instead transports Hauptman and his family across the border to West Berlin, and arranges for Pfeiffer to be given back to Stasi in exchange for a U.S. Foreign Service officer who had been captured by Stasi after Pfeiffer had originally passed her the information.
Ryan is reassigned to the CIA headquarters at Langley and becomes Admiral Greer's special assistant. He is sent to Moscow as part of the American nuclear weapons reduction (START) team, and later engineers the extraction of CARDINAL, the CIA's highest agent-in-place, from the country. Ryan also forces KGB chairman Nikolay Gerasimov to defect due to his anti-American nature, which could jeopardize the arms reduction talks once he becomes General Secretary.
Ryan (portrayed by Harrison Ford in the film adaptation) is promoted to acting Deputy Director of Intelligence when Greer is hospitalized with cancer. He realizes he is being kept in the dark about covert CIA operations to disrupt the illegal drug trade in Colombia, which involves inserting light infantry troops of Hispanic descent, intercepting drug flights, and surveillance of drug cartel management. When the American troops are later betrayed to avoid the political fallout, Ryan works with the FBI to rescue them. He also meets CIA operative John Clark, with whom he would become friends.
Ryan (portrayed by Ben Affleck in the film adaptation) becomes Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. His career is jeopardized when J. Robert Fowler becomes President and his lover Elizabeth Elliott becomes National Security Advisor. They not only deny Ryan any credit for an innovative Middle East peace plan, but also panic when Palestinian and former East German terrorists detonate a nuclear bomb in Denver during the Super Bowl and nearly plunge the world into a Soviet-American nuclear war. Ryan defuses the nuclear crisis by commandeering the Moscow-Washington hotline and convincing the Soviet leader that the crisis is a setup. He then refuses to confirm Fowler's order to launch a nuclear missile at Qom, where the Iranianayatollah lives. After Fowler resigns, Ryan retires from the CIA.
Two years later, Ryan returns to government service as National Security Advisor under President Roger Durling. They deal with war against Japan, which includes an attack on America's economic infrastructure. After a clean sweep of Japan's forces in the South Pacific, Vice President Ed Kealty is forced to resign after a sex scandal. President Durling taps Ryan for the job, which he accepts on the condition that he will only serve until the end of Durling's term. However, a Japanese airline pilot crashes a 747 into the U.S. Capitol building during Congress's joint session, killing most of the people inside, decapitating the U.S. government, and elevating Ryan to the presidency.
The reluctant yet determined Ryan administration emerges as Ryan slowly rebuilds the government. He is faced with Kealty's political trickery, as the former vice president disputes his legitimacy as the nation's chief executive by publicly stating that he never actually resigned, when in fact a member of his staff had secretly taken the resignation letter from the office of the now-dead Secretary of State and destroyed it. Initially the lone voice of opposition to Ryan's policies on live television, he later enlists disaffected CIA intelligence officials (affected by the reduction in force at the agency in favor of more field operatives) to procure classified information on Ryan from his time in the CIA. He then suborns NBC news anchor and fellow Ryan critic Tom Donner into ambushing him with questions about his CIA career in a televised interview. Donner's colleague John Plumber later realizes his mistake and publicly apologizes to President Ryan, while Kealty's challenge eventually fails in court.
Along the way, Ryan also has to deal with the dictator of the new United Islamic Republic (a coalition of Iran and Iraq), the Ayatollah Mahmoud Haji Daryaei. The ayatollah regards him as a weakling and seizes the opportunity to stage a multi-pronged attack on the country: a biological attack using a weaponized strain of the Ebola virus, a kidnapping attempt on his youngest daughter Katie, and an assassination attempt on himself through an Iranian sleeper agent disguised as a Secret Service bodyguard; with the U.S. overwhelmed by a multitude of crises, he believes that he can invade Saudi Arabia with little military opposition from the U.S. While the attempt on Katie was swiftly averted by the FBI and the Secret Service, the Ebola epidemic causes Ryan to declare martial law and enforce a travel ban that becomes instrumental in killing the virus, since it cannot survive in the American environment due to its fragile nature. He later deploys what is left of the American military to assist Saudi and Kuwaiti forces in repelling the UIR military, which also becomes successful. The would-be assassin is later arrested on the spot by the FBI after attempting to kill President Ryan inside the Oval Office.
Ryan Doctrine
At the end of Executive Orders, Ryan, in the tradition of Presidents Monroe, Truman, Carter and Reagan, issues a foreign policy doctrine which largely defines his administration's international perspective. The Ryan Doctrine states that the U.S. will no longer tolerate attacks on "our territory, our possessions, or our citizens," and will hold whoever orders such attacks accountable.
This statement comes soon after the Ebola attack on the U.S. ordered by Daryaei. Ryan announces the new doctrine on television, momentarily cutting away to show Daryaei and his UIR advisors being incinerated by laser-guided bombs launched from two F-117s, on Ryan's orders. Therefore, the Ryan doctrine supersedes the executive order put in place by President Ford, which forbids the assassination of foreign heads of state. Ryan, however, believes it is a more ethical alternative than total war, since it punishes the person responsible for the attack instead of the people he rules.
Within the books, the Ryan doctrine is not officially invoked after Daryaei's death (although Ryan threatens to use it on the Chinese leadership in The Bear and the Dragon, should anything happen to American citizens living in China as a consequence of the Siberian War).
Ryan has completed Durling's term as president and has campaigned for the next election, which he wins. He retains most of his emergency Cabinet and has Robby Jackson as vice president. He has to deal with the attempted assassination of Golovko, who is now head of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (formerly the KGB). This turns out to be an attempt to sow confusion in the Russian government because of China's designs to annexEastern Siberia, where geologists had recently discovered a large amount of oil and gold. These events lead to the inclusion of Russia into NATO and the assistance of U.S. forces in the Sino-Russian conflict (although attacks on NATO members outside the Atlantic should not trigger Article V).
When the Chinese begin losing the war, U.S. forces target their strategic assets. A U.S. submarine sinks a Chinese ballistic missile submarine, causing the Chinese Politburo to panic and increase the readiness of their 12 land-based ICBMs. U.S. forces do not have the ability to destroy the silos, as they could only use deep-penetrating bombs, which had all been used to destroy Chinese bridges to disrupt the People's Liberation Army's (PLA) logistical support. This causes the U.S. and Russia to send a joint RAINBOW-Spetsnaz team to destroy the silos. They destroy 11 of the 12 ICBMs, but one of them manages to launch and head towards Washington, DC, and with Ryan taking a command initiative at an Aegis missile cruiser, the ICBM is intercepted by ABMs from the USSGettysburg(CG-64).
With the PLA's looming defeat in Siberia, which they were about to learn about via live UAV broadcasts from the CIA through the Internet, student demonstrators in Beijing raid a Politburo meeting, causing reformist minister Fang Gan to take control and arrest the war's perpetrators, making peace negotiations with the U.S. and Russia, and beginning China's transition to democracy.
The Campus
Following this, Ryan apparently completes his term and refuses to run for a second elected term. Robby Jackson thus campaigns to become the first African American President, but he is assassinated by the Ku Klux Klan on a trip to the South, enabling Kealty, his opponent, to become the next President by default. Before Ryan leaves office, he creates The Campus, a covert counter-terrorism and intelligence organization that fronts as Hendley Associates, a financial trading firm. He also writes 100 presidential pardons for its members, with Attorney General Pat Martin's assistance.
In his retirement, Ryan is living easy with a net worth of over $80 million. He is working on two versions of his memoirs, one for immediate release, and another detailing his CIA career to be published twenty years after his death. While he is at first publicly silent about his opinion on President Kealty's policies, he becomes increasingly frustrated with the direction in which he is taking the country. Ultimately, he announces that he will come out of retirement to run for a second full term as a Republican presidential candidate. Despite not being originally involved in the Campus' activities due to his high-profile status, he gradually becomes more directly linked to the Campus' operations, aiding them from behind the scenes on occasion. Here, Ryan learns his son, Jack Jr., is a field operative of the Campus, a fact which he reluctantly accepts.
Ryan campaigns against Kealty, facing off against him in various televised debates. It becomes apparent that Ryan will win the election, as the majority of Americans had never entirely accepted Kealty. Despite the efforts of Paul Laska, a high-profile Czech billionaire and a devout enemy of Ryan, and key members of the Kealty administration who labelled Ryan's longtime friend John Clark a fugitive in an effort to expose the Campus (as well as tying Ryan to it by association), Ryan narrowly wins the election, overcoming all of Kealty's efforts to harm him.
Soon after returning to the presidency, Ryan deals with a developing crisis in China, where President Wei Zhen Lin has declared his intentions to annex Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan and expand his country's territory into the South China Sea in a desperate attempt to recoup his country's economic losses. In reality, PLA Chairman Su Ke Qiang has been manipulating President Wei for his expansionist policies, secretly sanctioning cyber attacks on America's infrastructure that compromises the nation's national security apparatus. President Ryan decides to take action by supporting Taiwan, along with India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines, which would also be affected by an expansion of China's territory.
The Campus later tracks down the nerve center of China's cyberattacks on the U.S. to an office building in Guangzhou. President Ryan orders the destruction of the building, decapitating China's cyberwarfare abilities. He makes contact with Wei and warns him that the cyber attacks are considered an act of war on China's part. After realizing that he has been used by Su for his own gain, Wei intentionally divulges information on Chairman Su's whereabouts, which Ryan interprets as a request from the Chinese president to assassinate the military leader. The Campus, with aid from a local rebel force and the FSB, later carry out a false flag attack on Chairman Su's motorcade outside Beijing. Ryan announces a blockade of China's oil supplies until the war effort is abandoned, calling upon Wei and the Politburo to accept defeat. A cornered Wei later commits suicide, eventually ending the conflict between the United States and China.
The Ryan administration then contends with newly elected Russian president Valeri Volodin, who is a dedicated communist seeking to restore Russia to its former glory. Volodin had merged the SVR and the FSB into one entity to be led by enigmatic FSB head Roman Talanov, and later decides to invade Ukraine all the way to the capital of Kyiv. President Ryan sends American military forces to counter Russia's advance into Kyiv.
Ryan later finds out that Talanov is Zenith, a KGB assassin from the Cold War. Volodin had been his control officer, and together they had been employed by rogue elements within the KGB, who had an exit strategy in mind with the imminent fall of communism in the late 1980s by siphoning off billions of dollars from Soviet programs. Volodin then double-crossed his co-conspirators by ordering Talanov as Zenith to kill them all, as well as the bankers involved in order to prevent exposure to the rest of the KGB. In addition, Talanov was planted by his boss into Russian crime organization Seven Strong Men, rising in ranks to become its eventual leader and turning it into a tool for Volodin's policies. Ryan uses this information to blackmail the Russian president into stopping the Russian Army's advance into Kyiv. Talanov resigns and is later murdered.
President Ryan deals with North Korean dictator Choi Ji-hoon, who attempts to start production of a rare earth mineral deposit found in their territory and then use the resulting billions of dollars in profit to purchase nuclear weapons technology. Choi decides to order the assassination of the American leader (with the aid of a Mexican drug cartel and an Arab bomb maker) in order to stop his persistent interference. During a state visit to Mexico City, Ryan barely survives the attempt on his life. The Campus later uncovers Choi's involvement in the incident, which leads to the dictator being deposed from power and later executed.
Ryan squares off with Volodin once again, as he observes that a series of seemingly isolated attacks in Europe correspond with an increase in Russia's oil profit. He tries to convince NATO, but they dispute his theory, fearing the consequences of an all-out war. Nevertheless, he sends the United States Navy to dispatch its Russian counterpart in the Baltic Sea. Volodin is later assassinated by the siloviki after his gambit of a covert violent offensive in an effort to recoup Russia's economic losses fails.
President Ryan faces a crisis where American military and intelligence personnel are being targeted by ISIS. The specificity of the target packages make it clear that a massive intelligence breach has occurred. President Ryan finds himself pressured by the media and some of his government advisers to send troops into the Middle East to fight the Islamic State terrorists, but he resists and gathers more intelligence. The culprit was later revealed to be a Romanian hacker, who had obtained an old copy of a database containing personal information on military and intelligence personnel. After footage of terrorist attacks released by ISIS inspires a wave of copycat attacks in the United States, President Ryan orders the bombing of the headquarters of Islamic State's propaganda wing.
Ryan then appears in Point of Contact (2017) as he attends a funeral for his son Jack Junior's colleague in Hendley Associates, Paul Brown, who was revealed as a former CIA officer who had helped avert a North Korean plot to crash the Asian stock market.
Ryan deals with the Chinese once again, as a series of seemingly unrelated attacks in Asia, Europe, and Africa show their involvement. The Campus later discovers that a secret cabal composed of hardliners within the Chinese government are plotting to depose current president Zhao Chengzhi for his moderate stance on several issues of importance. The cabal plans to make Zhao look reckless, provoking Ryan to invoke the Ryan Doctrine and have him killed. Jack Ryan Jr. later prevents an assassination attempt on his father and President Zhao in the G20 summit in Tokyo, and the conspirators are later arrested for treason.
Ryan briefly appears in the next released novel Line of Sight (2018), where he orders the destruction of a building in Bosnia containing stolen thermobaric warheads to be launched by Serb extremists on a Serbian Orthodox Church event nearby as a false flag attack to provoke war between NATO and the Russians in the Balkans.
President Ryan is faced with a multitude of crises. A flu epidemic as well as spring floods occur in the southeast United States, and Ryan has to deal with his political rival, senator Michelle Chadwick, who has been attacking him using bot-planted fake news stories. He sends the Secret Service to protect her from imminent assassination, and an attempt by Russian foreign intelligence is thwarted. President Ryan later delivers a presidential address showing the dangers of fake news. Overseas, Ryan has to deal with Russia plotting to invade Ukraine yet again disguised as a military exercise, as well as the siege of the United States embassy in Cameroon by the Cameroonian government eager on arresting its opposition leader.
President Ryan expresses caution over a series of protests in Iran, favorably dubbed the Persian Spring. His suspicion was proven true when it was revealed that the leader of the dissidents, Reza Kazem, was a proxy of the Iranian government acting on behalf of rogue elements in the Russian government, who have stolen nuclear weapons and are intent on launching them on American military bases in or near Iran. Kazem reneges on his deal and plots to launch the missiles into low Earth orbit, creating space junk that would destroy several satellites in its path. Ryan orders the destruction of the nuclear defense facility in Mashhad containing one of the missiles; the other is launched into space but fails to reach its destination at the last minute.
Ryan then appears in the next Jack Ryan Jr. novel Enemy Contact (2019). He deals with U.S. senator Deborah Dixon's stonewalling of his proposed foreign policy initiative, which includes building a U.S. military base in Poland to counter Russian aggression to the east. When it was revealed that Senator Dixon's son has unsavory connections to the Chinese, President Ryan blackmails her into passing an anticorruption bill.
President Ryan receives a cryptic text message from his friend and former CIA colleague Father Pat West. He warns him of a next-generation AI program named Calliope, which could be used by the Chinese military to start a conflict with the United States. The Jesuit priest had been imprisoned by Indonesian police for trumped-up charges of blasphemy against Islam, when in fact he had earlier witnessed the murder of an American software engineer who first told him about Calliope.
The chief executive discreetly orders the Campus to investigate Father West's text. Then he calls on the Indonesian president to release his friend, to no avail. Undeterred, he makes a state visit to Indonesia, eventually informing the Indonesian president of China's sinister plans. Father West is eventually released from prison.
Ryan appears in the next Jack Ryan Jr. novel Firing Point (2020). A series of container ships mysteriously disappear across the Pacific Ocean, and President Ryan tries to pinpoint whoever is responsible.
President Ryan tasks Director of National Intelligence Mary Pat Foley with finding a mole codenamed SURVEYOR within the CIA. He also discreetly orders the Campus to track down Medina Tohti, a Uyghur freedom fighter who worked with the missing Chinese engineering professor Liu Wangshu. The professor had been on board the Chinese nuclear ballistic missile submarine Long March #880 along the Arctic Ocean, which had suffered an engine fire that burned most of its crew. President Ryan eventually informs the Chinese president about the submarine, allowing him to rescue its crew.
President Ryan prepares a protectionist bill regulating the production of pharmaceutical drugs, which leads Indian billionaire Harjit Malhotra to plot to intimidate him into repealing it. This includes ransomware, cyberattacks, and deepfake videos of him circulating on the Internet, and culminates in the kidnapping of First Lady Cathy Ryan at the San Antonio River Walk and an American husband-and-wife team of doctors along the Wakhan Corridor. President Ryan invokes the 25th Amendment and temporarily steps down until the crises are resolved.
Ryan appears in the next Jack Ryan Jr. novel Flash Point. He deals with the abduction of Clark by Chinese mercenaries and a crisis at the South China Sea after an American reconnaissance aircraft collides with a Chinese fighter plane. President Ryan also integrates The Campus into the U.S. intelligence community to aid in locating Clark, who was later rescued by his son. He also appears in the next Jack Junior novel Weapons Grade, where he deals with the discovery of a secret uranium enrichment mine in Iran and tasks an experimental unmanned combat aerial vehicle to destroy the facility.
President Ryan accepts an invitation by Panamanian president Rafael Botero to visit his country in a show of support amidst a workers' strike. However, he finds himself in the middle of a coup orchestrated by Botero's economic adviser Felix Moncada with help from the Camarilla, which had kidnapped the First Lady in the previous novel. Trapped inside the presidential palace in Panama City, President Ryan and his Secret Service bodyguard eventually survive the coup.
President Ryan deals with a rogue Russian nuclear submarine called the Belgorod, forty years after he dealt with the Red October as a CIA analyst. His daughter Katie, now an Office of Naval Intelligence analyst, gathers intelligence about the submarine and its commander, Konstantin Gorov, who had a grievance against Ryan for indirectly causing the death of his father, an engineer who had worked on the Red October and had unsuccessfully tried to defect in 1984. After determining the Belgorod as being used as a pawn by military hardliners to overthrow Russian president Yermilov, President Ryan bargains with him in order to avert a nuclear war. Afterwards, he informs Katie about his involvement in the finding of the Red October.
Ryan appears in the Jack Junior novel Shadow State as he spearheads the development of an experimental stealth pod named UMBRA and deals with his son's disappearance in the Vietnamese highlands.
Defense Protocol (2024)
President Ryan is determined to protect Taiwan's independence, but he also knows that one misstep could lead to a devastating war that costs thousands of lives. Li's plan is his Minister of Defense, Admiral Qin Haiyu. Fearing for the lives of his countrymen and his family, Qin covertly contacts the CIA in Beijing, signaling his desire to defect to the West and ambushed the U.S. with the secret plans needed to stop the invasion. John Clark is called back into action to lead a covert international task force to extract Qin from mainland China. Katie Ryan, is deployed to the destroyer USS Jason Dunham in the Taiwan Strait. As an intelligence analyst, she is tasked with finding a flaw in the Chinese plan that her father can exploit. She is under immense pressure to succeed as she faces an encircling Chinese armada. President Ryan is caught between two realities. He must use all of the U.S. military's power to deter the Chinese invasion, while also relying on the intelligence from Minister Qin to prevent a full-blown war between his duties as a President and his concern for his daughter, who is at the tip of the spear.
Executive Power (2025)
President Ryan deals with the disappearance of his son, Kyle Ryan, who has always been a free-spirited interference. Kyle's decision to join the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) instead of the CIA and his political disagreements with his father have always set him apart. Kyle vanishes in an unstable African nation on the verge of a coup. His last communication is a troubling and blasts. President Ryan to confront an agonizing decision. He must choose between his duties as President of the United States, which require him to prioritize his country's interests, and his personal need to save his son.
Rules of Engagement (2026)
President Ryan suspects foul play when his Secretary of Commerce dies in a plane crash in Turkey, having been on a secret CIA mission. Katie Ryan leads the investigation, which important a missing body among the wreckage. This dispatch a hostile and theory, compelling President Ryan to confront a dangerous enemy from his past.
In the novels, Patriot Games occurs before The Hunt for Red October, though the order was reversed in the film versions. Additionally, The Sum of All Fears is not part of the Baldwin/Ford series, but rather an intended reboot of the franchise which departs significantly from the chronology of the novels. It takes place in 2002, whereas the novel takes place in 1991/1992. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is a second reboot of the franchise and departs from all previous films.
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