Jack Ryan (full name John Patrick Ryan) was born and raised Towson, Maryland. His father, Emmet William Ryan, was a police homicide lieutenant and Vietnam War veteran; while his mother, Catherine Burke Ryan, was a nurse practitioner.
After graduating from Loyola Blakefield High School in Towson, Jack went on to Boston College on a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps scholarship. He attended NROTC classes on the Boston University campus. Jack graduated from Boston College with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps via the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps.
After The Basic School and the Infantry Officer Course at Quantico, he was assigned to 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines as a rifle platoon commander. Later, Jack was deployed to Afghanistan. Three months into his deployment, he was critically injured when a Black Hawk helicopter he was aboard crashed in a high mountain area of Afghanistan. The other eleven people aboard the helicopter died in the crash, which was caused by a malfunction onboard.
Jack was evacuated from the crash site to Bagram Air Base near the capital, Kabul, and then flown to another U.S. base by a C-130 transport plane. His back was badly injured in the crash and after surgery at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center and a lengthy recovery process at Bethesda Naval Hospital, he was given a medical discharge from the Marine Corps after just three years of service.
Jack then enrolled in the four-year doctoral finance program at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. After receiving his PhD in Finance from the Yale School of Management, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he found employment as a quantitative analyst and compliance officer in the global markets division of Mueller & Associates, an international investment banking and stockbrokerage firm.
Six months into his job with the firm, a high-ranking official with the Central Intelligence Agency named Tim O'Riley offered Jack a job as an outside analyst for the Agency. He accepted the job offer and was tasked with using his position at Mueller & Associates to look for suspicious financial transactions that would indicate terrorist funding. A year later, Jack was recruited in the CIA to work as a full-time economic analyst.
He subsequently resigned from Mueller & Associates and then went on to the Career Analyst Program at the Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis. After training, Jack was posted to the Terror Finance and Arms Division (T-FAD) in the Counterterrorism Center and assigned to analyze global markets and financial aberrations to uncover funding for terrorist groups. He was given the official cover of a State Department logistician who runs supply chain logistics for the Western Hemisphere.
A couple of years into his career with the CIA, Jack was assigned to T-FAD's Yemen desk. A little over a month in that capacity, he began monitoring SWIFT network transactions in and around Aden. Over a period of a few months, Jack red-flagged several transactions as potentially suspicious. He recognized it as anomalous to see large, one-off SWIFT transactions to individuals, especially in Yemen. And normal SWIFT transactions usually occurred in patterns. Jack developed a theory that the individual behind these transactions could be a high-level target.
He eventually convinced T-FAD's group chief, James Greer, that his theory was right. Greer was able to used T-FAD's resources to discover that the target's name was "Suleiman" and then had his bank account frozen. Greer also had Special Activities Division put a surveillance team on the bank. A couple of days later, the SAD officers in the detail and officers of the Yemeni Political Security Organization captured two men attempting to withdraw money from the account.
The Yemeni government believed the two men to be couriers. Jack and Greer flew to Yemen to assist in the interrogation of the them. The interrogation took place at a forward operating base in Yemen serving as a CIA black site. A few hours after Jack and Greer arrived, the site was attack by a terrorist militia. During the attack, Jack surmised that one of the captured men was Suleiman. After a tense battle that left many dead, Suleiman escaped.
Once Jack returned to CIA headquarters, he was able to use both confidential and open-source intellligence to find the Suleiman's real name is Mousa Bin Suleiman. Greer pulled Suleiman's phone records, which lead them to Paris. There, Jack and Greer worked with French DGSI agents and GIGN officers to track down Suleiman. Together, they raided an apartment that Jack's analysis indicated Suleiman had taken refuge in. In the raid, Suleiman was captured and taken into the custody of the French government.
As a commendation for his role in capturing Suleiman and defunding Suleiman's terrorist cell, Jack was elevated to senior analyst of T-FAD. Since then, because of his stellar reputation, he has often been sent into the field to serve as T-FAD's liaison in a CIA paramilitary team or as the CIA liaison in a U.S. military special operations team. Although his official cover is that he is a logistics manager in the Office of Acquisitions Management of the Office of Logistics Management in the United States Department of State, Dr. Jack Ryan is in fact one of the most exemplary members of the Central Intelligence Agency.