1989 – The Janus Directive
The Janus Directive Parts 1-4
Checkmate #15 (The Janus Directive Part 1)
Suicide Squad leader Amanda Waller began to send her agents on missions in the apparent pursuit of her own private agenda, the so-called Janus Directive, one that brought the Squad into conflict with other metahuman villains and government agencies. So, an all-out mayhem broke loose among these groups, involving various metahumans associated with the United States military and civilian agencies.
From Suicide Squad #27 (The Janus Directive Part 2)
From Checkmate #16 (The Janus Directive Part 3)
From Checkmate #16 (The Janus Directive Part 3)
From Checkmate #16 (The Janus Directive Part 3)
From Suicide Squad #28 (The Janus Directive Part 4)
From Suicide Squad #28 (The Janus Directive Part 4)
The Janus Directive Parts 5-8
Eventually, it came out that Waller had not gone rogue, but had been nearly assassinated by the cult leader Kobra. Kobra had tried to murder Waller and replace her with a subservient doppelgänger in order to then manipulate and mislead the various government agencies to keep them from stopping his own plan: to activate a massive space-based microwave pulse cannon that would fry all electronic systems (not to mention human nervous systems) in the eastern United States, unleashing the Kali Yuga, the age of chaos he thought it was his destiny to commence. Waller had gotten the drop on her double and murdered it instead, but decided to play the role of the double in order to ferret out the true mastermind behind the Janus Directive. Eventually, the truth was revealed, and the groups united and stormed Kobra’s space ark, capturing him and destroying his weapon.
From Checkmate #17 (The Janus Directive Part 5)
From Manhunter #14 (The Janus Directive Part 6)
From Firestorm #86 (The Janus Directive Part 7)
From Suicide Squad #29 (The Janus Directive Part 8)
The fallout of the Janus Directive saw a very irate President Bush reorganize the various agencies to bring them more tightly under executive control; he dissolved Task Force X, the umbrella organization under which both Checkmate and the Squad operated and the component agencies becoming autonomous, and made Sarge Steel a Cabinet-level official with overall control of all governmental metahuman activity on the civilian side. General Wade Eiling was made his equivalent in the Department of Defense. Waller was put on probation by Bush because of her “lone wolf” tactics, much to her displeasure.
From Checkmate #18 (The Janus Directive Part 9)
From Checkmate #18 (The Janus Directive Part 9)
From Checkmate #18 (The Janus Directive Part 9)
From Checkmate #18 (The Janus Directive Part 9)
From Suicide Squad #30 (The Janus Directive Part 10)
From Suicide Squad #30 (The Janus Directive Part 10)
From Suicide Squad #30 (The Janus Directive Part 10)
From Suicide Squad #30 (The Janus Directive Part 10)
From Suicide Squad #30 (The Janus Directive Part 10)
Waller would soon thereafter be imprisoned for taking matters into her own hands one time too many, after she led an assassination team to personally liquidate the Vodou-oriented drug ring called the Loa. This led to the shut-down of all Suicide Squad operations for one year.
(Part 11 of The Janus Directive was detailed in Captain Atom #30)
Firestorm #87 is not a direct tie-in with The Janus Directive, but does provide a brief epilogue.
From Firestorm #87
From Firestorm #87
From Firestorm #87
The Janus Directive Parts 9-11 & Firestorm #87
Splitting Atoms 