Did you know the CIA has a secret paramilitary army?

Some might say this is a book about assassination, but really it is a book about covert action, Tertia Optio, the president’s third option when the first option, diplomacy, is inadequate and the second, war, is a terrible idea. All covert action is classified, designed to be plausibly denied, and because of this it is sometimes called the president’s hidden hand. The most extreme of all hidden-hand operations involves killing a leader or prominent person, and this book focuses on that act.

The president’s third option was born in the wake of World War II, and those who created it did so to avert World War III. With its ethos in unconventional warfare, the Central Intelligence Agency officers and operators who conduct covert action were originally called the president’s guerrilla warfare corps.

The same legal construct that allowed national-security advisors for Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy to plot to kill foreign leaders like Fidel Castro also allowed Presidents Bush and Obama to create a system in which prominent people can be placed on a kill-or-capture list, to be targeted and killed. This authority remains in effect today. Targeted killing is not limited to high-technology drone strikes. The president’s guerrilla warfare corps kills enemies mano a mano, in close-quarters combat when necessary. The group that has the authority to conduct these lethal operations outside a war zone, on the ground, is the CIA’s Special Activities Division. One of its most lethal components is called Ground Branch.

The origins of the Special Activities Division, including its Ground Branch, lie in the CIA’s precursor agency, the Office of Strategic Services, and specifically its Special Operations (SO) Branch, a guerrilla warfare corps whose goal was to kill Nazis—to sabotage and subvert the Third Reich. The motto of one unit, the OSS Jedburghs, was “Surprise, Kill, Vanish.”

ANNIE JACOBSEN is the New York Times bestselling author of AREA 51, OPERATION PAPERCLIP, THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN, PHENOMENA, and SURPRISE, KILL VANISH (publishes May 14, 2019). Her work has been translated into nine languages.

She is a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist in history, for THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN. The book was also chosen as one of the Wall Street Journal’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2015; one of The Boston Globe’s Best Books of 2015; and one of Amazon’s Top 100 Books of 2015.

OPERATION PAPERCLIP was chosen as one of the best non-fiction books of 2014 by The Boston Globe, Apple iBooks, and Publishers Weekly.

AREA 51 won a Goodreads Choice Award, Best History and Biography.

She also writes and produces TV (Tom Clancy’s JACK RYAN) and the forthcoming PHENOMENA (Amblin/Blumhouse).

Jacobsen graduated from St. Paul’s School and Princeton University where she served as Captain of the Princeton Women’s Varsity Ice Hockey Team. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband Kevin and their two sons.