The Hunt for Red October was Tom Clancy's 1984 debut novel. The story follows a CIA analyst who leads a group of US Naval officers to take possession of a cutting-edge Soviet nuclear submarine from 26 defecting Soviet officers, and the intertwined adventures of Soviet submarine captain Marko Aleksandrovich Ramius and Jack Ryan, a Marine turned CIA analyst. The novel was originally published by the U.S. Naval Institute Press—one of the first fictional works it ever published, and still its most successful.