Sila Kin Clan: Advisor
Jack is the son of Emmet William Ryan, a Baltimore Police Department homicide lieutenant, and World War II veteran. The elder Ryan had served with the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division at the Battle of the Bulge. His mother, Catherine Burke Ryan, was a nurse.
After graduating from Loyola Blakefield prep school in Towson, Maryland, Ryan attended Boston College, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics with a strong minor in history and a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps via NROTC. While waiting for the Corps to assign him, he passed the Certified Public Accountant exam.
After officer training at Marine Corps Base Quantico, he went on to serve as a platoon commander. However, his military career was cut short at the age of 23 when his platoon’s helicopter, a CH-46 Sea Knight, crashed during a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) exercise over the Greek island of Crete. The crash badly injured Ryan’s back. U.S. Navy surgeons, at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, inadequately repaired his back. This led to a lengthy recovery process, complete with a permanent disability and wearing a back brace, he left the Marines. He passed his stockbroker’s exam and took a position with Wall Street investment firm Merrill Lynch’s Baltimore office.
His parents died in a plane crash at Chicago Midway International Airport, 19 months after his crash in Crete. He developed a fear of flying that persisted for years.
While managing clients’ portfolios, he began to invest his own money, banking on a tip he had received from an uncle about the workers’ takeover of the Chicago and North Western Railway, making approximately $6 million off his $100,000 initial investment. He did so well that one of Merrill Lynch’s senior vice presidents, Joe Muller, came to Baltimore to have dinner with him, with the objective of inviting him to the firm’s New York City headquarters. Also present is Muller’s daughter Caroline, nicknamed Cathy, then a senior medical student at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. They immediately fall in love and get engaged. One night, while having dinner with his fiancé, Ryan throws out his back. Cathy takes him directly to Doctor Stanley Rabinowitz, professor of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, to be evaluated. Rabinowitz later operates on Ryan’s back and cures his chronic pain in relatively short order. Ryan subsequently persuades the government to terminate his disability checks. Cathy later becomes an ophthalmic surgeon at the Wilmer Eye Institute of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a Professor of Surgery at Johns Hopkins.
After creating a net worth of $8 million, Ryan left the firm after four years and enrolled at Georgetown University for doctorate courses in history. He does a brief stint at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, then accepts a position at the U.S. Naval Academy as a civilian professor of history.
Following a recommendation from Father Tim O’Riley, a Jesuit priest and Georgetown University professor, to a Central Intelligence Agency contact, Ryan is asked to work as a consultant for the Agency, although officially employed by MITRE Corporation. He agrees and spends several months at Langley, Virginia, where he writes a paper entitled “Agents and Agencies”, in which he maintains that state-sponsored terrorism is an act of war. He also invents the canary trap, a method for exposing an information leak, which involves giving different versions of a sensitive document to each of a group of suspects and seeing which version is leaked. By ensuring that each copy of the document differs slightly in its wording, if any copy is leaked then it’s possible to determine the informant’s identity.
These accomplishments come to the attention of U.S. Navy Vice Admiral James Greer, the CIA’s Deputy Director for Intelligence. The expertise of Ryan’s report, plus the application, persuades Greer to offer him a permanent job in the CIA, but Ryan declines. They soon convince him to join and his first assignment is to London as a member of a liaison group to the British Secret Intelligence Service.
It’s there he gets the information about the Red October and realizes that the captain is going to defect. He works himself onto the ship.
Little did he know how much his life would change.
While dealing with a Soviet Intelligent Agent on board, Jack is shot in the back. He laughed and cursed as he lay dying in a Russian submarine. Only to be offered another opportunity.
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