About Tom Hutton

After a forty-year career, Thomas “Tom” Hutton retired in 2021 as Vice President of a Washington-area consulting firm supporting national security and crisis-contingency programs for all three branches of the federal government, state and local governments, and major corporations in high-risk industries. He grew up in Michigan and attended high school at Culver Military Academy in Indiana.

“Hutton’s writing is immersive…you can sense the ever-present paranoia of the era.”

Tom wrote An Unlikely Asset, inspired by his experience beginning as an 18-year-old college freshman working as a messenger in the White House, where he was sent on missions to deliver “red tag” designated messages to signify importance. Whether it was the CIA, Capitol Hill, or foreign embassies, the procedure was the same. He travelled in chauffeur-driven limousines and had unimpeded accessibility to Washington’s most influential places. This led to a position in the Situation Room, often described as the most Top-Secret room in the nation. Later, his life took an unlikely turn when he was approached by a foreign spy.

The Asset begins in 1972, when Matt Thomas leaves the comfort of his close-knit Midwestern family to attend American University in Washington, D.C., enticed to follow in the footsteps of Inspector Louis Erskine, Hollywood’s 1960s notion of an FBI agent. He quickly becomes ensconced in campus life, while a chance encounter leads to a part-time job in the White House.

Ironically, given his Hollywood-inspired aspirations, he is recruited by a foreign intelligence agent and becomes caught up in an unlikely espionage affair. As he struggles to maintain a normal existence, weaving back and forth between The White House, life as a spy, his fraternity brothers, and college life, he witnesses firsthand one of the most turbulent times in American history, the Watergate scandal, leading to the first resignation of a President, and the social upheaval of the Vietnam War.