BlackStar Ops Group is a team of agents with the NSA.
It is usually abbreviated BSOG. To understand the nature of it, it is important to point out the reason for the name of this team; BlackStar, taken from the name of a project called Operation Black Star. We are told at one point, "The existence of Operation Black Star is one of the most secretive operations in this country involving the security of nuclear weapons ... Created in the mid-nineteen fifties by some of the founding members of the NSA, the original purpose was to provide cryptology services to government agencies and to protect highly-secure transmission capability. The agency knew we might have a problem communicating with highly-classified assets outside our perimeter of security, so a plan was developed to allow secure fully encrypted communications on a global scale."
So every long-range bomber carrying nuclear weapons was equipped with state-of-the-art communications gear to help ensure it was in constant contact with its headquarters. Therein lay a problem - planes do crash. For all sorts of reasons, be they mechanical or intentional, be they of friendly or adversarial origin. And if a plane should go down over an unfriendly territory and not get totally destroyed, all that hi-tech communication gear, capable of sorts of things, would be open to capture. Which leads to the need to have a very powerful destructive device installed on each platform able to totally destroy that equipment. That device is named BlackStar - and it is a small-yield nuclear device!
These devices have to be stored somewhere before they can be placed on new planes and after they are taken off old aircraft. What happens if someone should steal one?
The first recorded adventure deals with that actual frightening event and the ad hoc group of individuals thrown into the mess who work to stop an horrific event that comes as a result of that theft. And they are kept together because it is learned that more than one device has gone missing.
These individuals comprise the BSOG:
Bart Winfield, field operative formerly known as 'Tupelo', now a Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Air Force, Executive Officer of the Security Police Squadron based at Mather AFB in California. Described as being 6'6" with a 'rangy figure' and thick brown hair, has earned black belts in four different martial arts.
Nora Winfeild - operative with the ONI, a person with a good number of contacts in the other alphabet departments. She is also the wife of Bart for 23-years.
Mary Benson - operative originally with the NSA.
Joanna Davies - rank of Airman in the USAF, assigned as a security guard at a base and in the right place at the wrong time.
Jake Thomas, rank of Sergeant in the USAF, "trained in one martial art or another since childhood and been taught to rely on his abilities alone". He will rise in authority as the adventures continue.
Chief among those who must be fought by the BlackStar Ops people is the Consortium, "an intelligence organization born from the old Soviet system", said to be global in scope. They want very much to get their hands on anything BlackStar related.