About the Book

In this section, I will explain how the book, "Spooky 8 The Final Mission" (starting with the hardback) came to be. I will discuss the motivating factors that brought me to write it, why it was written and what it is trying to say. I will give my opinion regarding why all of the events took place, and I will share with you my thoughts and the thoughts of others. Regardless of how this book is promoted by the publisher, or perceived by its readers, this is the real story behind the book.

First, let me say that Spooky 8 was never intended to be published, nonfiction or fiction. "Spooky 8 - The Final Mission" is a book that is based on actual events. What it is saying really did happen. Spooky 8 is the end product of a year of writing down our past, facing our demons and trying to bring closure to a part of our private lives. A life that was never any ones business but the team's and those involved with us. It was a means of therapy, suggested to me by my very good friend, Eric Bernt. It was never intended to prove anything, point a finger, accuse, admit or deny any wrongdoing or conspiracy by any specific government agency. It is not about the military. I've never proclaimed to be an agent of the CIA, NSA, DIA or any other string of letters that nobody really knows what they do. I've never been an "Operational" Intelligence Operative, or involved in any official military "SpecOps". Those people who are "Operational" are of a quality and dedication that are rare by most standards, and at no time have I intended to represent myself to be of those standards.

What I'm saying is this: Myself, the members of "Spooky 8" and probably hundreds of others were, and many probably still are, employed by certain rogue members or representatives of the United States Government's Intelligence Community to perform tasks OUTSIDE normal operating procedures, retained by those groups to do so as members of civilian, paramilitary teams.
I don't believe these people were acting under the authority or supervision of their host agency, but rather, acting on their own, outside their respective agency's charter.

Putting it simply: We believe that these Rogues had their own operational agenda going on the side. They were running their own operations without permission. These few believed they are so "Above The Law" that they could have their own unauthorized "sub-organizations" in place, and didn't have to account to anyone for them. Ideally, we would like to think that they had a task to perform but because of the political arena in which they were forced to function, they were so severely restricted that they had to revert to the use of civilian teams. More that likely, they were so motivated by a lust for power and overwhelming greed, that they used expendable, unaccountable civilians to do their dirty work for them.

There will be those that will take what I say and twist it to fit their narrow-minded, self-indulgent point of view. They will refuse to look at the "whole picture" but rather, take only part of my words and twist them to fit their pathetic little sense of what is real. To those I say you are a coward, afraid of the truth. Take your head out of your ass and start looking at what is going on around you. To those who read my words with an open mind I say don't take my word for anything other than what it is. Always seek the truth for yourself! Make up your own mind! Don't ever let anyone tell you what you have to believe! That choice is yours!

Now, with that said, I will tell you how "Spooky 8" came to be:

In August of 1993, I had just returned home from a job as a security consultant for a company based in Florida. A very good friend of mine named Laura, showed me an article in the local paper about a movie, "Surviving the Game," that was being filmed in the Wenatchee area. The article was explaining why local law enforcement was not going to provide any security for the movie because of one of the actors. The actors' name was "Ice-T." Ice-T was a rapper that had recently recorded a hit rap song titled "COP KILLER." Because of the song, the local authorities felt it wasn't appropriate to provide "on-duty" personnel. The article went on to say that the movie producers were forced to hire "Hells Angles" to provide security for the notorious singer.

Since one of my professions was that of an "Executive Protection Specialist," more commonly known as a "Bodyguard," I went down to the production office to offer my assistance. I met Mr. Fred Caruso, the producer. After introducing myself, I showed him my credentials, we talked for awhile and I was hired. It was agreed that the "Hells Angles" would not be appropriate security, so I was hired to handle it myself. The producer told me of a pre-production meeting that was going to take place in a few days and that I would be starting then.

The day of the pre-production meeting I was there, in the background. During that meeting, the director, Ernest Dickerson, the writer Eric Bernt, the Property Master and other production department heads were going over some of the "props" that would be used in the movie. As they were going over the weapons that were going to be used, the writer, Eric Bernt, noticed me quietly shaking my head and grinning. Eric soon came up to me and asked me if there was something I wanted to say. I explained to him that I was just there as security and I apologized for the interruption. He was very nice, and really wanted my opinion. I explained to them that if these "hunters" were spending $10,000 apiece to hunt, they weren't going to be using a $200 rifle from K-Mart. They would be using custom or more "high-tech" exotic weapons. Eric asked me if I could give him an example, so I did.

We went to the back of my Pathfinder, where I opened a rifle case revealing a Steyr Aug, semiautomatic rifle. I explained that weapons of this type would be more the weapons of choice. It wasn't long before my title was modified from Security to include "Technical Advisor" as I suggested several weapon changes, hunting tactics and other "technical" aspects to consider. I spent several days with actors Rutger Hauer, Charles "Roc" Dutton, John McGinley, Billy McNamara and F. Murray Abraham at the local shooting range showing them several exotic and unusual weapons. From a full automatic Mac-10's to a suppressed .308 sniper rifle, they were introduced to a world of weaponry they had not experienced before in an effort to enhance their ability to portray the characters in the movie.

It was summer in Washington, and I spent a lot of time wearing shorts, and Eric had noticed a circular scar on my right thigh. He recognized the scar as that of a bullet wound and it wasn't long before he asked me what had happened. At first, I sidestepped the question with vague stories which Eric didn't buy. It wasn't until we were on location at an emergency airstrip near Lake Wenatchee that I started to open up to Eric.

We had been at the airstrip for several days shooting when one day, Eric and I were walking back from the "mess hall" along the grass runway. Eric again questioned me about my scar and to shut him up, I told him that I had been wounded in South America the year before. Needless to say, this wasn't going to be enough of an answer for Eric, and he began to nag me about the rest of the story. Eric and I had become good friends by this time but not good enough for me to trust him with a part of my life that was very private. I didn't tell him the complete story then, in fact, it took a couple of years of his nagging before I opened up to him completely.

The following year, Eric was hired by Paramount Studios to write a movie screenplay he named "Patriots." The set was a closing of a military base and the disposal of its "highly trained and specialized" troops. I was hired as technical advisor for that script, so Eric and I spent a lot of time talking on the phone and corresponding. On several occasions, I had gone to Eric and his ex-wife Heather's house in Los Angels to work on the script. As we worked, Eric would make it a point to have plenty of cold Corona beer on hand, and in time, I opened up to him and told him some of my secret past. He could sense my anger and frustration and he knew that talking to him was doing me a lot of good. He could tell that I needed to get a lot of things off my chest and Eric gave me the opportunity to do so.

In November of 1994, Eric and I were preparing to give the final touches to the screenplay "Patriots." One day as I was sitting in my room at Eric's house, Eric brought in a Laptop computer and sat it down on the desk in front of me. He told me that he wasn't going to let me leave until I started writing down some of the stories I had told him over the past couple of years, specifically, about the events behind the bullet wound in my leg. I sat there looking at the compute for a very long time, then began typing. Ten pages turned into fifty and eventually into five hundred.

At first, I hadn't a clue where my writing was headed. Soon, almost magically, it started taking shape and I knew exactly what I wanted to say. The writing came easily but the feelings behind it were hell. Old wounds were reopened and the demons of my past once again showed their ugly heads. I met with the surviving members of Spooky 8 to get their opinions, their permission and their blessing. At first, not all were in favor of revealing our past to anyone, but in time, it was decided that the story needed to be told. It was decided that I would be the instrument of revelation and I alone would face the consequences. It was under the condition that all the "insurance" that I had in my possession would be divided among the team and only certain items and events could be used in the making of the book.

It took from November of 1994 to the end of November of 1995 to complete Spooky 8. At times, the emotions were so powerful, I seriously considered suicide. I met with my team on several occasions to make sure I wasn't over stepping their wishes. In the end, the manuscript I called "Spooky 8 The Final Mission" was a reality.

At first, only Eric, his wife and our friend and producer Kevin Messick had read the manuscript. I looked at it as what it was, a closure of my past. They, on the other hand, saw it as something much more. Immediately they asked me to consider turning the manuscript into a movie and book for publishing. I wasn't very comfortable with that idea and frankly, never thought anyone would want to read it anyway. Through Kevin and Eric's efforts, several people did read it and liked it. Before long, I was presented with an offer to make it into a major motion picture. Shortly after that, I was contacted by a New York Literary Agent wanting to represent me to the publishing industry, and the rest as they say, is history.

The following is an article that appeared in the Wenatchee World paper on Thursday, July 15, 1999, written by Wenatchee World staff writer, Scott Sandsberry:

MISSION IMPLAUSIBLE?

Wenatchee man tells a story of deception, betrayal and murder

By Scott Sandsberry
World staff writer

Perhaps the spookiest thing about "Spooky 8: The Final Mission," a soon-to-be-released book by Bob King of Wenatchee, is that he says everything in it - with the exception of names, dates and the tweaking of a few events - is true.

If "Spooky 8" is indeed true, so is this: There are covert operations teams, coordinated by branches of the United States government, that - once their superiors decide they know too much - become expendable. Must be eliminated. By brute force. Ambush. Assassination.

And King doesn't think that should surprise you.

"I think it's ironic that people think that the book is anything special," said King, 47, whose first-person account depicts a paramilitary team - Spooky 8 - which was slated for elimination. "It always amazes me when people read it and say, "What an amazing story.' No, it is not. Things like this have been going on for a long time."

For 17 years, King says, since being recruited for special operations while serving in the Army Airborne, he and the rest of Spooky 8 were involved in covert missions around the world. The assignments were tasks for which there were either no military units available or no official authorization for a military unit. According to King's book, published by St. Martin's Press and scheduled to hit store shelves in early August, Spooky 8 was sent in 1992 on what King calls "an easy breather" - a low-threat mission setting up surveillance equipment at a remote South American airport.

"It wasn't even run-of-the-mill. It was below that," King said. "We were going to set up equipment, calibrate it, make sure it was going to work and then hit the road." The only thing bothering King was how well the group was being paid - "ten for five," $10,000 for five days work, three or four times what they would normally be pad for such a routine assignment. "They paid us way too much up front in cash," King said.

As always, Spooky 8 came heavily armed. "That's how you survive in those situations, by your training and overwhelming firepower. Because there is no support," King said. "If you have to engage in direct action against an enemy, you want to pick the time and place. You don't want to be ambushed."

But Spooky 8 was ambushed, in such a manner that King - in the book, a team leader named David Chance - was convinced it had been a setup all the way. Three of the unit's eight men were killed. The others made their way back to the United States, not sure whom they could trust. One of the remaining five, it turned out, had been the inside man on the trap.

Why was Spooky 8 set up? "I don't think anybody will ever know for sure," King said. But he believes it had something to do with one of the team members, known in the book as Lucky, who had been involved in black operations since his days as an army intelligence officer in Vietnam.

"His involvement spanned over 30 years, and he was much more heavily involved in the very darkest side of covert operations than the regular Spooky 8 team," King said. "He was a loose end by himself; Spooky 8 was a loose end as a team. He wasn't playing both ends. I think he was just part of the equation."

By that, King meant that Lucky wasn't selling military or government secrets - but that he might simply know too many of them.

The surviving members of Spooky 8 put the word out that they had stockpiled evidence - incriminating those they believed responsible for the ambush - that they would release should anything happen to any of the team. The others then disappeared into different identities, presumable in different countries. King says he's the only Spooky 8 member still using his real name.

But if "Spooky 8" is true, shouldn't King feel vulnerable? Shouldn't covert operative or government agencies be ransacking his place looking for that incriminating evidence?

He no longer has it, he said. It's been parceled out to the other team members - reachable, King said, only through intermediaries or by clandestine arrangements straight out of "Mission Impossible.

"My 'insurance' that I used to have, I no longer have. It's been given out to other team members," King said. "I'm the one out in the open. If somebody comes after - if, in the worst-case scenario, I'm killed - people are going to go through my stuff, but nobody's going to find anything. If I'm hit by a search warrant, whatever, whey can search my computers. There is nothing. It's been painstakingly removed."

It was apparently no less painstaking a task to get King to reopen what part of his history. The guy with the emotional can-opener was "Surviving the Game" screenwriter Eric Bernt, who was largely responsible for King - then a reserve deputy with the Chelan County Sheriff's Department originally hired as a bodyguard for the movie's actors during filming in Chelan County - becoming a technical adviser on the movie.

Bernt was initially intrigued by the fact that King was all but chuckling at the weapons being used in the film. Bernt confronted him and was immediately impressed. "His incredible amount of knowledge about weapons, explosives and surveillance equipment," Bernt said, "revealed him to be somebody to be taken seriously."

Bernt was also intrigued by a circular scar on King's thigh that was, Bernt said, "unmistakably a bullet wound." The wound, King says was from the final Spooky 8 mission - but he wouldn't tell Bernt that until much later.

The two became friends and, with contacts made through Bernt and "Surviving the Game producer Kevin Messick, King began getting work as technical advisor on other actions films. That work and his writing - both "Spooky 8" and an unrelated script he and Bernt wrote and sold to Universals Pictures - are how King say he makes his living these days.

But King had a much scarier personal and professional history that he was letting on. Over the course of months and years, Bernt and Messick began to learn bits and pieces about that history.

"That's part of what made it believable," Messick said. "It wasn't like this guy just sat down and said, 'Listen to what happened to me.' It had to be pulled out of the guy, I think reluctantly, because it wasn't a period of his life he was comfortable with talking about."

Pulling it out of King took time, trust and, ultimately, lots of beer.

"I had to get him pretty drunk, really," Bernt said. "Considering what he's lived through and the betrayals he's lived through, he had to have a certain amount of trust. But one night over a bunch of Coronas, he started talking. It was like a boiling kettle that needed to vent."

The stories included the mission that ended Spooky 8's covert career, but that was just one small piece. According to King, he had remained in covert operations long after his three-year military career had ended. It was never a full-time thing, he says; he would occasionally be called away from his current job - police officer, professional bodyguard or entrepreneur, depending on the year - to travel with Spooky 8 on highly classified mission overseas. Bernt had a journalist's curiosity, having initially gone to college to become a reporter, but found his own skepticism about King's astonishing tales dissipate over time.

"I remember saying to my ex-wife, this guy is either so good that it would require a greater degree of insanity than I could imagine - because that would mean he has memorized all this stuff, and has an encyclopedic memory for these stories has created - or he lived them," Bernt said.

Still, it took another couple of years before Bernt was able to convince King to begin writing some of them down as a sort of therapy. Recalled King, "He started bugging me, telling me, 'You really need to write this down, get whatever is bothering you off your chest.' Once I started, it just flooded out. I couldn't stop. Emotionally, it was tearing me up."

It didn't take long before the pages King was churning out grabbed Bernt's imagination, and the screenwriter pressed King to turn it into a manuscript. King was initially opposed to the idea, but eventually got back in touch with the remaining Spooky 8 team members to see what they thought.

"It was kind of split between who said 'Why not,' and who said 'No way,' " King said.

The meeting, which took place out of the country, was rife with "lots of shouting and tears," he said, but in the end the team agreed to let him make their story public.

"He still isn't sure it's a good idea that he wrote about it," Bernt said. "But everybody I know that's read the first five pages pretty much puts the next three hours on hold and finishes the book. It's just a turner."

It looks promising for "Spooky 8: The Final Mission" to become a film as well; the movie rights, initially optioned to Universal Pictures, are about to be sold, Messick said. That will put King's painful past on an even more public forum.

And there are things he did in the past - including some detailed in the book - that he would rather forget.

"You can't help but feel guilt," King said, "but I think what you feel more is...what's the word... if you sit there and let yourself think about everything you did, you can't live with it. So you can't do that, because of the consequences."

Truth or fiction? Author leaves that one up to you -

Truth?: No holes in story, says screenwriter
By Scott Sandsberry, Wenatchee World staff reporter

Did Bob King really serve in covert operations for nearly two decades? Is his tale of a government double-cross the product of dark memory or fertile imagination?

That's part of the beauty of "Spooky 8: The Final Mission." If it's not true, who can disprove it? How do we know who or what to believe? If a government is capable of turning on its own, as King's book alleges, would it not seed to discredit anyone bringing such a story to light?

King keeps sufficient records - an impressive array of personnel files, official memos and certificates - to authenticate much of his professional background, which includes stints as a police officer in Oklahoma and as bomb technician in Wenatchee. Even the most stringent skeptic would have to admit that, if King is fabricating his history, he's doing a remarkable through job.

"I'm pretty much of a scrounge. I keep everything," said King, who was raised in Wenatchee and graduated in 1971 from Wenatchee High School. "I didn't think I'd ever need it, but thank God I did. They (government officials) had no idea that I kept all this crap. They probably don't even know it exists."

Chelan County sheriff's Sgt. Mitch Thompson, to whom King was assigned for several years as a reserve deputy, has seen a portion of that documentation and said he found it credible. "He appeared to have the original copies," Thompson said, "and they all seemed authentic and genuine."

As for King's background in covert operations, though, Thompson isn't sure what to believe.

"Yes, he is knowledgeable," Thompson said. "I've been around him, he's taught classes, bomb identification classes, and he has certainly articulated the things I would expect to see as a bomb scene. I find him very knowledgeable. I found no holes in anything he told us about bomb-making material, bomb creation, bomb detection, bomb-scene identification. I find him very credible, and I would recommend him to teach anybody.

"But some of the experiences in his past he has shared with me made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and I question his authenticity."

Thompson said that uncertainty was not the result of any digging into King's past, nor that he had evidence King fabricated any of that history. Seeing the film "A Clear and Present Danger," in which a covert operation team was set up in a similar fashion to "Spooky 8," provoked a similar response in Thompson.

"I'm going, how much of this is real?" Thompson said of the film. "How much of this really happened, and how much is fantasized in some writer's imagination? Are we really doing this? Did we really drop a bomb on some drug cartel leader's home and family? I don't know. As a police officer of 35 years, you question a lot of things because that's you nature.

"I don't want anybody to come back at me and say that I said he (King) lied. I just know that some of the things he told me about his past made me unsure about ... do these activities really happen?"

Hollywood producer Kevin Messick, who's working with King on the film version of the book, predicted that's how a lot of people will react - that any disbelief would come from refusal to believe "that our county works this way."

"And that's one of the reasons I think the book is an important document," Messick said. "As far as one guy's story, who worked in a lot of situations and under a lot of policies that don't show up on the news and aren't written about in the newspapers. If you believe covert operations exist, then it makes sense that if those guys come forward, they're going to have a story to tell.

"And it's not a finger-pointing book. He's not like a guy in some bad conspiracy movie trying to figure out, 'How far up does it go?' He doesn't know. He did his job - for better or worse, it seems."

"Surviving the Game" screenwriter Eric Bernt spent countless hours of pumping King about his secret past. And many of King's recollections, he said, were "so much wilder" than anything found in "Spooky 8."

"Part of my goading was to try to punch a hole in his story," Bernt said. "The more you get somebody to talk, the more the truth will be revealed. At some point, if he was fabricating the story, he would have run out of specifics and the story would begin to sound fishy. He never once ran out of specifics, in hundreds of hours of conversation and hundreds of stories."

Another believer is Tom McGuire, a Los Angeles attorney who served as mediator on the conference call linking Spooky 8 team members with publishing representatives seeking to verify their existence.

"That's one phone call I know I will never forget," McGuire said. I don't know the identity of the other people on the phone call, and obviously it could have been an unbelievable elaborate ruse of some sort.

"But it was one of those phone calls where the hair raised on the back of your neck and you just get the feeling you're involved in something that's much more complex and much more real than you could have imagined."

King said he doesn't care whether people believe the book or not.

"I don't have to prove this book to anybody, because I know what the truth is," he said. "I'm not here to prove or disprove anything.

"People make their own choices."

- Scott Sandsberry, World staff