Thomas Reed was first in his class at Cornell University where he received his mechanical engineering degree. While studying at Cornell, he rose to the top of the ranks of the university?s Air Force Reserve Training program. During his time as an Air Force officer, he got his Masters in electrical engineering at the University of Southern California and after joining the Department of Defense, he rose to be Secretary of the Air Force under two presidents. While in Washington, he played a significant role in the strategy that ended the Cold War.
Tom Reed of Healdsburg is a former Secretary of the Air Force, directed the National Reconnaissance Office and was a Special Assistant to President Reagan for National Security Policy. Reed has written a new book, "The Tehran Triangle," with Sandy Baker. (Christopher Chung / PD)
A sought-after consultant and speaker, Reed co-founded Clos Du Bois Winery with Frank Woods and has even written respected books on the Cold War and Nuclear proliferation.
Over the years, the sectarian Reed, who is known as Tom, has been pretty good at pretty much everything.
So it was with some degree of humbleness that at this stage of his life, he found something that stumped him.
?I couldn?t write worth squat,? he says recalling the reaction of his agent and his wife to the first draft of a novel he was writing. Reed had written two non-fiction books but this storytelling was a whole different ballgame.??A friend in Hollywood told me there?s a saying about writing there: Wimbledon is next week and I need a lesson. I knew I had to find someone to help.?
The Healdsburg resident found that someone in Santa Rosa writer Sandy Baker and the collaboration turned into the recently released novel ?The Tehran Triangle?.
The political thriller focuses on what Reed believes is the real possibility that terrorists could set off a ?low-tech? nuclear device in the United States. In the novel, an Iran is behind a plot, imagining the worst scenario of a topic that has been front page news in recent months.
?There?s a lot of talk about whether Iran will get a nuke,? he says. ?That question has two dimensions ? one is time and it takes time to construct a sophisticated nuclear weapon and the means to deploy it across the world. But anyone could build another Little Boy ? the kind of bomb we dropped on Hiroshima ? you can find the instructions on the Internet. All you would need is a 140 pounds of enriched uranium.?
Reed was speaking at a conference in New Mexico three years ago when he hatched what became the plot of the novel. On the drive to the airport, he realized that the Santa Fe railroad ran past Trinity, the first nuclear test site. It struck him that an organized terrorist organization could ship the ungainly Hiroshima-type A-bomb by rail and use Mexican drug gangs and unsavory transnational corporations to smuggle in the uranium.
Reed tapped into his careers in politics, engineering and business to construct the rest of the story. He also drew from his nonfiction books ?At the Abyss: An Insider?s History of the Cold War? and ?The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation.? ?His wife Kay knew Baker as a fellow master gardener and, Reed says, originally sought her out because of her experience writing fiction.
Baker is the author of ?Mrs. Feeby and the Grubby Garden Gang? and ?Zack?s Zany Zucchiniland? and she writes and lectures about gardening. ? Going from writing childrens? gardening fiction to fashioning a plot about a nuclear bomb threat might seem like a big jump but for Baker it was natural.
? When I started to write fiction what drove me was my experience with gardening,? says Baker who has been a Master Gardener since 2000. ?I?d take gardening facts just like I?ve taken facts about nuclear science.?
Baker?s background included a stint as a technical writer which she said was also helpful. And she had the best resource.
?Working with Tom was a very natural process,? she says. ?It was serendipitous.?
Reed, agrees, says she won him over with her ideas on how to turn his tech know-how into a cogent story.
?She had some very sensible advice,? he says. ?I felt I could trust her and as it turned out, we worked very well together.?
Reed said they would often meet at a breakfast spot in Windsor to hammer at the details.
Together, they turned Reed?s wild idea into a fascinating yarn which Reed calls ?a cautionary tale?.
And in a life filled with seriously impressive accomplishments, the former Washington insider counts it among his most cherished.
?I knew the technical part but Sandy brought the characters to life,? he says. ?I?m thrilled with how it turned out.?
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