), nicknamed Jack, is a fictional character created by author Tom Clancy and featured in his Ryanverse novels, which have consistently topped the New York Times bestseller list over 30 years.

[3] The son of a Baltimore police detective and a nurse, Ryan is a former U.S. Marine and stockbroker who becomes a civilian history professor at the United States Naval Academy (USNA).

Ryan works with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) initially as a MITRE contractor before becoming an analyst and occasional field officer, eventually leading it as Deputy Director.

This led to a lengthy recovery process (during which he became addicted to pain medications) after which, complete with a permanent disability and wearing a back brace, he was discharged from the Marine Corps.

He did so well that one of Merrill Lynch's senior vice presidents, Joe Mueller, came to Baltimore to have dinner with him, with the objective of inviting him to the firm's New York City headquarters near Wall Street.

Initially called in to assess the Soviet government and economy, Ryan is later tasked to assist in the defection of a KGB communications officer who has discovered that his boss Yuri Andropov had ordered Pope John Paul II's assassination.

Although Ryan and a small team of British SIS agents helps the "Rabbit" and his family get to the West, they fail to prevent the attack on the Pope (which actually happened in real life in 1981).

Having briefly met Captain Ramius at an embassy function several years before, Ryan (portrayed by Alec Baldwin in the film) is asked by Admiral Greer to brief the President's National Security Adviser Jeffrey Pelt and his staff, in his first trip to the White House, on Ramius' background and the deadly new capabilities of Red October's secret revolutionary silent jet propulsion drive system.

His plan involves a disinformation campaign that shows himself under SEC investigation for insider trading, which provides an opening for Gerasimov to help Ryan defect to the Soviet Union and work for the KGB.

This operation targets Colombian drug lords in South America using light infantry troops of Hispanic descent and occasional precision air strikes with sophisticated "smartbombs", in what is usually considered a law enforcement area.

Ryan works with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to rescue a small group of American soldiers cut off in Colombia, forcing him to miss Greer's funeral.

The film again departs from the novel, by presenting a younger, unmarried Ryan, an intelligent mistress-free Fowler, a Greer-like Cabot, and the nuclear bomb is detonated over the city of Baltimore instead of Denver.

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.

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.

This turns out to be an attempt to sow confusion in the Russian government because of China's designs to annex Eastern Siberia, where geologists had recently discovered a large amount of oil and gold.

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.

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.

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.

President Ryan deals with North Korean dictator Choi Ji-hoon, who attempts to start production at a rare earth mineral deposit found in their territory and then use the resulting billions of dollars in profit to purchase nuclear weapons technology.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jack Ryan has been featured in 36 novels which have been written by Tom Clancy, Grant Blackwood, Mark Greaney, Mike Maden, Marc Cameron, Don Bentley, Brian Andrews, and Jeffrey Wilson.