CIA helped shape 'Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan' series into bigoted Venezuela regime change fantasy

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"They were the most generous, unbelievably giving people," Krasinski said of the CIA officers he met in Langley.

Tom Clancy, the late bestselling author of the Jack Ryan series, sold tens of millions of books to a massive fanbase of Cold War-crazed readers during the Reagan era. His pulp novels depicted galavanting US spooks and soldiers playing unheralded roles in undermining the Soviet Union and its proxies on foreign frontiers while keeping the homeland safe.

A lifelong right-wing Republican, he dedicated his book, "Executive Orders," to then-President Ronald Reagan. Clancy was subsequently invited to speak at the NSA, FBI and Pentagon.

During an appearance at the NSA, Clancy boasted of being taken on a US Navy frigate, then of trundling around in an M1A1 Abrams tank during a tour of an Army base.

The author even volunteered his work to be reviewed by the CIA's office of public affairs, requesting secrecy in a missive to the agency on the grounds that that his publisher would be displeased if it found out about the exchange.

One of Clancy's most popular books, "The Hunt for Red October," was edited by the Pentagon when it was adapted to film.

The Clancy film, "Patriot Games," was supported by the CIA, which volunteered its Langley headquarters as a shooting location to enhance the public relations value of the film.

His next jingoistic action flick, "A Clear and Present Danger," was carefully reviewed during an advance screening at Washington DC's Kennedy Center by a CIA officer.

Jack Ryan: Season One was launched in 2018, five years after Clancy died as a multi-millionaire part-owner of the Baltimore Orioles MLB club.

The show was filmed in Morocco, and was set in the paranoid environment of the so-called war on terror. The Pentagon rejected the show, probably because it depicted the US military guarding CIA black sites and paying off local jihadis in Yemen. But it received support from the US Coast Guard, which offered the producers free usage of its ships and helicopters.

Jack Ryan executive producer Carlton Cuse claimed that the show presented a nuanced perspective on Muslims and Islam. However, as Secker explained, the show's Muslim characters consisted of desperate refugees and irrational evildoers - terrorists, rapist terrorists, child molester terrorists, and child terrorists.

The viewer learns in Jack Ryan: Season Two that Ryan was a former Marine who became the lone survivor when a child suicide bomber killed his entire unit in Afghanistan. The child's motives are left unexplained.

The second season of Jack Ryan takes place in Venezuela, the current target of a real-life Trump administration coup attempt and crushing US economic sanctions.

The plot centers around a barely coherent international conspiracy led by Nicolas Reyes, a cartoonishly evil Venezuelan dictator obviously based on Nicolas Maduro, the country's elected leftist president.

But the Jack Ryan producers stand reality on its head by depicting Reyes as a deeply unpopular right-wing kleptocrat with close ties to the oligarchy. Meanwhile, the CIA's white knight, Ryan, enters the country to help Gloria Bonalde, a left-wing feminist depicted as a warrior for "social justice."

As anyone with a basic knowledge of the CIA's history of subversion knows, Reyes is exactly the kind of character the Agency has supported and propped up across the world in form of right-wing dictators like Augusto Pinochet, Ephraim Rios-Montt, and Shah Reza Pahlavi. Today in Venezuela, the CIA and its cut-outs are supporting Juan Guaido, a figure supported by his country's upper classes and right-wing governments in the region.

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