The Sept. 29 letter to the editor headlined “Classifying secrets an inexact process” (Page A8) contains some errors and false assumptions.

The author, Dave Kidder, credits Tom Clancy as the publisher of “The Hunt for Red October.” Mr. Clancy indeed provided the manuscript; however, the book was published by the Naval Institute Press of Annapolis, Maryland, situated on the campus of the U.S. Naval Academy.

According to the publisher, a client of mine, the copy was passed through the Pentagon, the Department of Defense and the National Security Agency, all of whom checked it carefully and approved it for publication. It was the first fiction book that the Naval Institute Press ever published.

If, as the letter writer states, there were secrets that had passed, then they would undoubtedly have been caught in subsequent printings of “The Hunt for Red October,” and as far as I know there were none.

Gene Youtz

New Harbor