Bob King - The Final Mission: Spooky 8

To those warrior spirits, forced to live with the demons of their secret past, with no one to comfort them but themselves.

To those I have known who, over the years, have shown me the strength of my own spirit and the true meaning of honor.

To those who have guided and watched over me and have given me the courage to share their lives in this book.

To the thousands of young men and women who left their simple and uncomplicated lives to become entangled in this countrys many hidden agendas.

To my friend Steve, who died in my arms one lonely Christmas day, and to the family of the MIA whose name is engraved on the bracelet given to me by Paco and team Spooky 4: SFC James D. Cohron, USA (SF), who became an MIA on 12 January 1968, a true American hero.

These are examples of pages taken from a codebook used to communicate on a mission. Often, when a new code was not available, we would use an existing code key and change it to meet our specific needs.

This is a letter addressed to me dated the 17th of August, 1989. It contains a coded message (the thin line in the lower left corner) that warns of a possible CIA trap, and was the first real warning we received from somebody on the inside of Black Intelligence.

This letter, from a Department of Energy official to a figure at the Environmental Protection Agency, appears to be a request to end a series of projects. In reality, it was a government intelligence directive ordering the termination of the remaining teams operating under project #W45B7. The S8 in the letter refers to Spooky 8.

These are locations of commercial and private airports used for cover operations in Texas. Big Sandy and LZ Spider are two that Ive used. It was believed that the Salvadorian Air Force used some of them to smuggle drugs into the United States for the CIA. There were also other locations in Oklahoma, Arkansas, New Mexico, Nevada, and Arizona. Outside the U.S. they used locations in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Honduras, and even the Falkland Islands were rumored to have suspicious activity.

This is the letter from a supposed Environmental Protection Agency official to our contact in the Colombian Government. The letter talks about project W202/CRP being terminated, but written in micro print in the thin black line under the heading was the sequence W 4 5 B 7 S 8. The way they knew the letter was authentic was by the split of the sentence and the misspellings of the word desided in the second paragraph. Often, sentence structure intentionally would be wrong, words misspelled, or dead peoples names would be used to authenticate correspondence.

I dont think Ive ever felt so alone as I did on the flight back home. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to be in the situation I was living in. My mind was exhausted and my spirit weak. I didnt care anymore what happened to me. If somebody was waiting for me when I got off the airplane, so be it. If I was being followed, it didnt matter anymore. I had done what I could to save myself and my team. If it didnt work, at least the truth would someday come out about Spooky 8 and the dark side of U.S. intelligence.

In a world inundated with deception, media disinformation, cover stories, and lies, its impossible to know exactly what the truth really means. To this day I still dont know who Ed Bates really works for or if, in fact, that was his real name. Was it the CIA, the NSA, the DIA or a combination of them all? I dont know. I have my beliefs, but theyre just my beliefs, and that, too, doesnt matter now. All I know for sure is a that very dark side of our government is in control.

When I got home, I didnt want to be around anyone. I didnt call my friends or listen to the few messages I had on my answering machine. I hid in my basement, wishing the world would just go away. I needed sleep more than anything else. I knew I would have to do battle with my mental demons, but I wasnt prepared for the war that was raging in my mind. For the first time in my life, I actually feared closing my eyes because of what I might see. The memories of years of life that, to most, didnt exist rose in my dreams as if I were there all over again. I relived the horror of feeling my friends die in my arms. I looked again into the eyes of the first man I ever killed. I saw again the men I had targeted in the scope of my sniper rifle. I saw the fear in the eyes of the three soldiers Paco and I had killed on Lago de Nicaragua.

I watched the defiance in Opeys face, not understanding why Opey had to do what he did. He felt no honor or loyalty. It was his job.

I had always told my men that they would have demons. Demons were a part of tragedy, a part of death that the living must deal with. I warned them never to give in, never surrender their will.

In time, my demons did retreat to the dark places of my mind. The sleep finally came, and peace now sometimes returns. I fought bravely against my fears and demons, and I wished my team courage in battling theirs.

Its now 1998, and weve gone through another national election. I cant help but wonder who was this time left in the jungles of deception as we brace ourselves for the final chapters of Bill Clintons presidency.

Except for me, whats left of Spooky 8 is living out of the country. I saw them a few months ago for the last time. They have chosen not to be part of my world. I, on the other hand, decided to try this civilian world. I still find myself looking over my shoulder or missing my team almost every day.

Easy Breather

1992, above the Colombian Jungle, South America

The lush green canopy of dense jungle stretches out below a sky beginning to boil with color as the sun gives birth to a new day. A heavy layer of gray fog blankets the surrounding mountaintops like a thick crown of wet concrete. Soon the sun will begin to bleed its heat into the valley below. The humidity will grow as suffocating as a hot, wet blanket wrapped around your head. Yet now it seems so peaceful beneath us, so serene, and beautiful.

The peace turns to thunder as the rotor blades of our UH-1 helicopter knifes through the mist at 120 miles per hour. The seven men and I sit in camouflaged BDUs (Battle Dress Uniforms), trying to ignore the deafening whine of the Hueys turbine engines. Lucky, the oldest team member and our language expert, sits next to me, his head resting on the butt of his HK (Heckler and Koch) MP5SD suppressed submachine gun. Mike, Dave, Santana, and T J sit across from me, trying to get as comfortable as possible on the helicopters webbed seats. Except for T J, they carry Colt M-4 (CAR-16) rifles. T J, our sniper, caresses his Robar 300 Winchester Magnum sniper rifle. Razz, the craziest one of us all, sits on the other side of me with an M203 (M-16 with a 40mm grenade launcher attached to it). Opey, the youngest member of the team and team medic, sits next to Razz. Everyone except Lucky and I is in his thirties. At forty and the team leader, Im the other senior member of the team. I hold my MP5SD as if it is a beautiful woman. Strapped between Lucky and me lie two heavily padded aluminum cases containing sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment that we are assigned to set up.

These are the men of a team known as Special Projects team W45B7S8 but to people in this line of work as Spooky 8. Spooky 8 is one of the few remaining TRTs (Tactical Reconnaissance Teams) made up of former military and other ex-government employees. Spooky teams have been tasked with the mission of securing intelligence to be used in the ongoing drug war between the United States and the many drug cartels of Central and South America. Spooky teams have been working in this part of the world for several years on a clandestine operation known as Dark Eagle.