An executive order signed by the President of the United States has deemed the assassination of America's enemies illegal for twenty years. Shortly after the order was signed, however, a CIA operation to assassinate a religious leader killed over one hundred people in a Beirut mosque. CIA director William Casey's "direct action" was undertaken in strict secrecy-even from the highest levels of government-as retaliation for the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut.

News of these direct actions has sporadically filtered out of the Middle East for many years, but the intelligence agencies of all the biggest players have always had plausible deniability and a veil of secrecy. Now for the first time, authors Robin Moore and Chuck Lightfoot have pieced together years of painstaking research and interviews to create a thriller that may be based more on fact than on fiction. In React: CIA Black Ops, a composite character named "Nimrod" relates his training in a mysterious section of the CIA's stand-alone Covert Action section that was directed by "the Council," a Star-Chamber organization that ignores the president's executive orders and has no congressional oversight. The Council gives Nimrod a target folder, an objective, and an order: to assassinate those whom the Council deems to be America's worst enemies. In chapter after exciting chapter, Nimrod describes the perilous operations undertaken to preemptively rub out members of terrorist cells, and gives a plausible explanation of how the terrorists who planned the Lockerbie disaster and the Beirut Marine Barracks bombing may have met their fate.