Operation King Cobra…How it started

It all started in September of 1995, when an military veteran of World War Two from Columbus, contacted me. For anonymity sake, let’s call him Jonathan Preston. Jonathan had found out from a friend that I was a writer and history buff. He wanted to meet with me and tell me about his experiences in World War Two. It was now fifty years after the war ended, everything was declassified and he could finally talk about it. The term “declassified” caught my interest. When I asked him to tell me a little about it over the phone, he said, “No, but trust me, you’ll want to hear what I have to say.”

As it turned out, Jonathan had been a covert operative with the US Army’s counter-intelligence corps, fighting behind Japanese lines in the China, Burma and India Theater.

Jonathan and I met twice a week for six months. He told me stories about the highly classified and dangerous covert military missions that he and his team of two other special mission agents were asked to execute. Many of the mission were extraordinary, to say the least. Even more extraordinary, he was part of an elite force of intelligence agents and all his tasking came directly from the US Army chief of staff and the President of the United States. As it turns out, only a small cadre of intelligence agents had knowledge of this elite group; and from what Jonathan told me, as far as history is concerned, the special missions force never existed. After I finished taping his stories, I promised that I would write a book about his experiences.