The Mike Stone Show; Music, Stories and Conversations
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The Mike Stone Show; Music, Stories and Conversations
The Real 007? Ed Koss Tells All”
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The Mike Stone Show – Conversations: Ed Koss, The Real James Bond
Step into a world of intrigue, intelligence, and real-life espionage in this captivating episode of The Mike Stone Show: Conversations. Mike sits down with Ed Koss—an intelligence specialist whose extraordinary career reads like something straight out of a spy novel.
But this isn’t fiction.
From his time in military intelligence to his work in high-level contract operations, Ed shares stories that are as fascinating as they are eye-opening. With decades of experience navigating the hidden world behind global events, he offers a rare glimpse into what it truly means to live a life of secrecy, strategy, and service.
Beyond his real-life adventures, Ed has also channeled his experiences into eleven works of fiction—blurring the line between reality and storytelling in a way that keeps readers guessing.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
- Behind-the-scenes insights from a life in intelligence
- The truth about what “real” spy work looks like
- Stories that sound unbelievable—because they almost are
- How Ed transformed real experiences into compelling fiction
Whether you’re a fan of spy thrillers, real-world history, or just love a great story, this conversation will keep you hooked from start to finish.
🎙️ Listen now and discover the man behind the mystery—Ed Koss.
Hello, this is Mark with the Mike Stone Show, Music, Stories, and Conversations. Today, Mike will be bringing you the first episode of his conversation with Ed Coss. Mike's guest today has lived a life that sounds like it came straight from the pages of a spy novel. Ed Coss is a global traveler who has visited 177 countries, a military intelligence specialist, aviation expert, and author of more than 87 professional publications. He has also written 11 works of fiction inspired by his real-life adventures in military intelligence and international contract work. Stories that echo the intrigue and excitement of the legendary spy James Bond. Today we'll hear about his remarkable career, his travels around the world, and the stories behind the stories. Just a quick heads-up before we start. Today's episode includes discussion of real intelligence operations and covert work. Some of the stories involve dangerous situations and mature themes. So listener discretion is advised. Let's go to Mike now for his conversation with Ed Coss.
SPEAKER_01Hey, welcome everybody to the Mike Stone Show. Today we have a guest whose life story reads like something straight out of a spy novel. Our guest today is Ed Coss, a man whose remarkable journey has taken him to 177 countries around the world. Over the course of his career, Ed has worked in military intelligence, military aviation, international finance, and space systems research. Now he's flown aircraft like the British Hawker Hunter and the Czech L-39 Jet. He's traveled extensively across Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe, and South America, and has experienced three war zones in a single year. How's that happened? Academically, his credentials are just as impressive. He's hold degrees in international affairs, mathematics, and MBA, and a PhD in finance. Along the way, he's published 87 professional works covering international affairs, finance, military systems development, and space software reliability, and several works of fiction. But the story doesn't begin in the war zones or global capitals. It began right here in North Louisiana, where a young man from Texas earned the nickname Tex and was a very good high school baseball player, by the way. And his father, a mathematics teacher at Louisiana Tech University, was also my little league baseball coach and a wonderful man. From those humble beginnings to a life of global adventure, Ed Coss has lived a life that many people say resembles a real life James Bond story. And today we're going to hear that story right here on the Mike Stone Show, Music, Stories, and Conversations. Ed, welcome to the show, my friend.
SPEAKER_02Well, thank you, Mike. Good to hear from you.
SPEAKER_01Yes, sir. I think you're in Florida right now as we speak, but we're going to talk about your early life. I knew you grew up there in Texas. I don't think you came here until you were in high school. Tell me about coming to Louisiana.
SPEAKER_02I came, uh I came at 11 years old. I was at the Cook grocery store on Cooktown Road, just sitting there having an RC Cola when this guy pulls up there in a Cushman motorbike. His name was Donnie Brown. And he said, Oh, you're new. And I said, Yeah. He said, Where are you from? I said, I'm from Texas. And that's where the name Tex came from. Donnie Brown, 1957. And tell you the truth, from that time until I met up with Donnie again about 2016. I really never got a chance to talk with Donnie much. We were always uh kind of like on the same plane, if you will. But it wasn't until I came back to Rustin in 2016. People would talk about Texan and he would always claim it. He says, You know where he got that nickname? And very few people did, but it was Donnie Brown.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think I'd heard once before that's how you got the nickname Tex. And of course, I didn't know you came here that quite that young. So you went to junior high here in Ruston.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I went to the old junior high, downtown Rustin, uh, which was a great experience. I I'm so happy I got to go to school in that old building. A new school just doesn't have any personalities like Kilchrest Elementary and some of those. Uh they're just uh square buildings with some glass in them. Uh the old Rustin Junior High, which was the old Rustin High School before, just was dripping with uh character and history, you know. So I'm really happy that I I was able to go to that school. I don't think it lasted, it probably was torn down by 1961 or something like that. It was soon after I I left there that they tore it down.
SPEAKER_01You're right, and now of course Ruston Civic Center is now located on that uh spot of land there.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I remember that.
SPEAKER_01But I know you went to high school because I know you played uh ball, baseball with my my older brother, George Stone, and uh you had a pretty doggone good team there, and you, of course, were the left-handed pitcher along with George. You had a pretty good team there, right?
SPEAKER_02We had some very good teams, and Mike, if you remember the Legion teams were quite lucky or good, I'm not sure which, but I did a little research between me and Reg and and George, just in Legion, three years in the Legion, we had won uh 70 games and lost 12. That's where we were really successful. But uh after I finished Rustin High School, you probably didn't know that. I started tech about a week after I graduated from Rustin. But then the first year I went, uh, I played baseball at Texas AM. And then the second year I played baseball at Mississippi State. And it was only the third year that I came back to Tech. That's the year that I played with George. That was his last year before he turned pro in 1966. I used to tease Jackson's big pen. I said if I'd had another year or so, I'd have gone I'd have transferred to Miss uh New Mexico State just to round out this, you know, round out the history.
SPEAKER_01I uh did not know that uh you played uh in those places uh on scholarship, I suppose, huh?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, part part scholarship. AM at that time was all Mayall military school, and so the military helped a little bit. I lived in the athletic dorm at AM, and we got some help from with the tuition and stuff, and then Mississippi State was kind of the same program, but I played behind some guy at Texas AM who was all Southeast, all Southwest Conference, and they went to the College World Series that year, so he wasn't going anywhere. I go to Mississippi State, and I played behind a guy named Dale Luncer. Now, George probably remembers Dale Luncer, who's a very successful uh ball player for the Philadelphia Phillies, all-star and all of that, you know. And so I had to play behind him. I wouldn't go anywhere there either, so I went came back to tech.
SPEAKER_01Well, that I was interested in uh maybe some of the early influences that shaped uh your career choice there, Ed. Uh so you you finished at Louisiana Tech, you got a you you finished college there. So so after that, uh sort of what were some of your influences that guided you in uh your career choice?
SPEAKER_02My father was a math professor at Texas AM for 20 years. So I grew up at Texas AM, and Texas AM was an all-male military school for the most part, and they always had these tremendous exhibits and they had this marching stuff. It was just a fantastic school. I remember when I was probably six or seven years old, I said, man, this would be a cool way to live your life, you know, as long as you can live. I mean, there's not a chance that you're gonna make it all the way. So I I would have to go all the way back to my boyhood days at Texas AM. And we left Texas AM in when I was 11, but I never forgot. And that's part of the reason I went back there after I finished high school, you know.
SPEAKER_01After your your college career, I know now you've got your degrees, so I know you didn't get those degrees at Louisiana Tech. You got a degree in international affairs and mathematics. I mean, that's a pretty unique combination.
SPEAKER_02I did get the degree in mathematics from Louisiana Tech, but I got the next year I got the degree in international affairs. I had a lot of time international school uh affairs and history at Louisiana Tech. So I graduated with God, I must have had 40 hours of that stuff, but it didn't count because I had mostly in mathematics. They sent me away to Air Force, they sent me to Boston doing military intelligence there, and then I told them, I said, Well, I I'm almost got my degree in international affairs. Would you want me to do that? And they said, Well, absolutely, you're you're already in intelligence, that'd be perfect, you know. So the second degree came from Northeastern University in Boston.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so you joined the uh the Air Force uh right after graduating from Tech?
SPEAKER_02No, I actually started in the military program at Texas AM and Mississippi State. That was Army for two years, and then when I came to Tech, I uh joined the Air Force ROTC. So I was I got commissioned at tech in in uh July of 67, and then I went straight into the military. I don't know what happened after that. My most of my life seems to be a mystery, but I went straight into intelligence and then uh they said me going off on all kinds of missions when I was 20, 21, or 22 years old. If you remember in in the write-up, I had gone to 57 countries by the age of 24. They just kept going after me. You know, you go here, you can go there. You know, that's how you get the three war zones in one year. And if you think about those three war zones, they were spread all over the world, you know.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no doubt. What year was the three war zones? What year was that?
SPEAKER_02Uh that was 1970. The first one was a Biafra in Nigeria Civil War in Nigeria, and then the second one was Lebanon and Syria in 1970, and the third one was all the way in Cambodia, Vietnam, also, where I flew. I was assigned, they put me on lung to an organization called Air America. That's a whole nother story, another history, another movie. In fact, there is a movie. If you ever want to watch that, Mike, and your son would probably be very interested in it. It's called Air America. It has Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr. in it, and it's quite a good movie. And it and it chronicles the life and times of Air America.
SPEAKER_01Man, that uh sounds fascinating. So later you completed an MBA, though, and a PhD in finance. This was all while you were still in the military.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. Probably the only way to explain all that is I never been married and never had any children. So you can't do all that stuff if you get married and have kids. It's just impossible. It barely was able to survive it with absolutely nobody in my life, you know.
SPEAKER_01I can imagine. Just uh curious there, so you're in military intelligence. You they let you go to school in Boston. So they must have uh seen or through your academic abilities, they must have seen something there. So when did you when did they first say, hey, we need you to do some of these missions? Was that were you brought into a committee? Were you brought in through one person, one man deal that they were sending you on?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I always that was part of my personality, and they must have profiled me. Uh I didn't hear this till later, but my dad said that Mr. Barham, you remember Curtis and and Cecil's father?
SPEAKER_01Sure, yeah, Curtis and Cecil Barum, yes.
SPEAKER_02Well, the Curtis's father had that knock on the door, and these two guys do you know, you know, Ed Coss, and Mr. Barham said, yeah, he plays baseball with my son, and so can you have a few minutes we can talk to you? And so there were in Rustin at that time, this is probably 67, 68, maybe. Uh there were people walking the streets of Rustin that may have been, who knows, I don't know, CIA or DIA or whatever. Because Mr. Barham told my dad about that. He said, Well, these guys showed up at my doorstep somewhere, and I don't know who else they talked to. They may have talked to Jackson's father also. That's an ongoing mystery after all these years, Michael. Well, there was a two-star general in the Pentagon, and I never met the guy, but he was in charge of my assignment. And so whenever there would be, and I had some orders early on in my career that were uh uh I don't know, unbelievable, if you will, because I they basically said you can go anywhere in the world anytime you want to with these orders and we'll tell you where to go. And it worked that way, it really did. Many times I'd be like a first attendant or second lieutenant run against some guy that says, No, you're not getting on my airplane because I need to go someplace, point A to point B. He said, No, no, he says, I'm the commander of this plane. He says, You're not getting on. And then about 10 minutes later, a guy would come to me and say, Okay, you can get on now. And the commander of the plane, he was upset with me just because uh somebody had over overridden his decision. And he would always say, and this happened many, many times. He said, Well, who exactly are you? And I said, I don't know. I said, I just a man from out of town, I guess, took me where I needed to go. It was a dirt strip on the island of Crete, and then he wanted to leave right away because he they were offloading some bulldozers, believe it or not. And my mission was completely different from his. I says, No, you have to stay here. So here I am, a lieutenant telling this major that you can't leave yet. And he was really upset with it. I gotta wait for a guy. And so a guy comes and he has a briefcase, gives it to me, and I told the uh commander aircraft commander, I said, Listen, when we take off from this dirt airstrip, within about three or four minutes, there's gonna be a uh jet fighter escort to Athens, Greece. I said, I just want you to be aware of that, otherwise you may freak out. He said, What? He said, Well, who does that? And I said, I don't know who does that. And I said, that's just what they told me it's gonna happen. And sure enough, five minutes after we took off, the jet came in front of him so I my guy could see him. There was a Navy A7 off of a carrier somewhere, and escorted us into Athens because I guess whatever they gave me was very, very special. They didn't tell me, but they they had the, you know, they had the old uh handcuffs to the wrist kind of thing. Whoever was gonna steal that briefcase would have to cut my arm off to get it. Yeah, it's it's a little dramatic, but anyway, that's what happened. By that time, the aircraft commander was saying, My God, who who is this guy? And can I join your group?
SPEAKER_01Well, it sounds almost like a mission impossible, dear, where that two-star general in the Pentagon would send out the send out the mission orders.
SPEAKER_02It was, yeah, it was even back then. I I I just got to the base. I was in the Air Force for like one month, and this whole thing came about. And then um a lot of times I would always get questioned about who do you think you are? You know, I'm a sec first lieutenant, second lieutenant, who do you think you are? You can't do that. And I said, Well, I got these orders and I'm just trying to do what they tell me to do. And a few times it got so bad, I said, Well, you need to call my boss, and my immediate boss is a two-star general in the Pentagon. I said, if you want to talk to him, you can do that. I wouldn't recommend it. I don't know who this guy is, but anyway, that's that's where it all starts. It's not like I'm running around the world dreaming of stuff all by myself. You know, this guy's behind it, and you call him. But most of the time the orders would do it. The orgs were so unusual that most of the time the guys would look at it and say, Well, you can't do that. I'd always tell them you need to look at this little box here. I says, That box has been checked, and that that explains everything. And they would look at it and says, Oh my god, I've never seen that in my whole career. And he said, Well, you're right. He says, You can go anywhere you want. If that's where you want to do, I'll put you on. And it was that one little box on the orders that had all the power in the world.
SPEAKER_01My goodness. So I would assume it was probably your some of your academic training, you know, that helped you in the intelligence work and your international work. Do you think that was part of the profile or just your personality?
SPEAKER_02They must have figured out that I was happy to operate alone. And that still remains one of the driving factors of the business that I was in. It's I was always alone and never lonely. And I had told them that some kind of a profile sheet, you know, they always asked you what you want to do and everything, which to me was worth about 10%. Somewhere they had done some profiles, they never talked to me about it, they never interviewed me or anything, but they had decided, well, this is our guy. My personality was perfectly synced with what they were looking for. I had a feeling that's the way it was after a year or two. I said, these guys are running me all over the world all the time, and I'm doing all these things by myself, and they must have already figured out that that's what I can do. It's not like I was a top gun guy, you know, he had the squadron and you know, you've seen the all the camaraderie. There was no camaraderie at all. It was just me and my orders, and and if I needed him, there was a two-star general in the Pentagon, which changed over time. That one two-star would disappear and no one would come in. But he had just enough clout makes things go away, if you will, you know.
SPEAKER_01These were pretty had to be pretty sensitive missions. I mean, specific to uh one person, that's very un well, I don't know how unusual that is in the military, but I would think this is a very specific mission that only one person can do, get in, get out, or whatever. Yeah. And uh that's how you were chosen because of your skills and your personality.
SPEAKER_02Sometimes I'd be I wouldn't even talk to people for three or four weeks because I was in some foreign country. I'm all by myself. I'm doing my mission, but there's nobody to sit and have a beer with or chit-chat or anything. That was me. I was fine with that. I'd do that. Well, I did. I did it for 20-something years, you know. Um, and then lots of times I'd be on a long mission that would go across many, many countries and many different time zones and everything. And I remember this goes way back to 73, 74 timeframe. I'd gone all the way through South America, which was very trying and difficult. And then I'd done that for a couple of months and I was in Rio, the Jennifer. And I said, Well, now maybe they'll send me home, you know. And they said, No, you stay right there for two or three days, relax, we'll let you know. And the next thing you know, I didn't go back to the U.S. I ended up in Mozambique, you know, in uh Africa. They had to realize that I would be able to handle that, you know.
SPEAKER_01Well, who would be your contact? Obviously, you had contact with an individual back in Washington or somewhere who would say, Okay, we want you to stay there a couple of days, and then we got this assignment for you. Would there be a specific contact or would it be many people?
SPEAKER_02There would be a guy that would come by most of the time, this guy at the hotel. He brought him out of the embassy somewhere, you know. Uh, I didn't know these guys, and they would just have a note that said, Well, you know, their plane's leaving at 3 p.m. tomorrow. Uh, you're first going to fly from Rio to Johannesburg, and then you're gonna go on to uh Mo Maputo, Mozambique, which at that time, 1973, that was a place called Lorenzo Marx. It was a Portuguese colony in 73. That happened all the time. That was another facet of your personality. It's okay, you've been on the road for three, four months, you've been to all these countries, you're just getting really twisted around with the cultures and the people and all these contacts and everything, and then you get a little lull and say, okay, now they'll call me home. And no, uh, you're not coming home, you're going on the other side of the world. And here's so I went from you know, South America, from Paraguay, Argentina, uh Brazil. And the next thing you know, I'm dealing with Mozambique, South Africa, and later on Angola. And then that mission continued on into Congo and Nigeria. And then I think, well, I surely they're gonna let me come home soon. I was a young guy at that time, but I says, I'll die on the road. It's you know, it'll give me some relief, you know. So the Congo left to Nigeria and then it went to Ghana, then went to Liberia, then it went to Senegal, then it went to Canary Islands, then went to Morocco, and then went to uh Portugal. And only when I got to Portugal, after they gave me three-day rest, they said, okay, you can go home now. Believe it or not, they said you can go anywhere you want to if you want to take a rest. So I I flew from uh Portugal all the way back to New Orleans and then up to Monroe, Louisiana, and visited my parents in 1973, you know, which after all of that, Rustin was about as foreign to me as all the places I'd been.
SPEAKER_01Well, yeah, you had traveled to 183 countries. I forgot how many you said you had traveled to by the time you were a certain age, but 183 countries, and it sounds like you did a lot of those when you were young.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, they continued on. I did 57 by the time I was like 25, but they just kept mounting up over the years. I would go into the Air Force and kind of, if you want to call it, I I was a front. I would go and do a regular Air Force job for a year or two just to s to get out of the routine of these missions. And then when I was supposed to leave that post, that's when I would go off on these other missions. They would say, well, he's got to leave here in June, but they never told anybody that I wasn't gonna show up to any other than my next Air Force assignment until January. So there's gonna be a seven-month period where it was a void, and then that's when I would go off on these things.
SPEAKER_01But we hadn't got into your your flights with your aircraft. I know you got a special affinity for certain aircraft. Tell us how you got into the role about flying some of this like the British Hawker Hunter in the Czech L 39 jet, and I guess many, many other. I've read some of your novels. We'll get into that later, but uh you uh you talk about lots of different aircraft.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and the only one that I flew for the Air Force really uh on missions, I really wasn't even flying for the Air Force. It's back to that nebulous world of Ed Coss, I guess. But they had trained me, customized. Uh they used to come to my base in Boston and I had a special I had a special flight instructor. He was a cool guy. He's a major, he's about 45 years old, and uh he was a bachelor and drove a Z 28. And he was my instructor. But he he flew other little missions at the base. But his primary thing was to come by and pick me up at about 4 p.m. from the intelligence offices, and we go down to the flight line, and he would teach me how to fly specifically the the A1E uh Skyraider, which is an old airplane, and they were prepping me for flights were to come in uh Cambodia and Vietnam. And I didn't even fly those for the Air Force. They assigned me, loaned me to Air America. And so I was flying those missions under the banner of Air America. And so they were responsible for getting me trained, but I never went to an Air Force flight school, which uh can go on for a couple of years. They said, no, you don't, we don't have time for you to be doing all of that. We just want you to fly this plane. We'll tell you, we'll get you trained, and then you're going if we you know decide to, you'll be off in uh Vietnam or Congo or somewhere, you know. You don't need to be known by the US military. And I never was. I give you a quick story. This is about three years ago. I was at the tech baseball uh game. That's Leon Stam. I said, Well, I know Leon. I he was in the Air Force program when I was at tech. He said, Well, let's go over and talk to him. And I said, hello. And I says, I my name's Ed Cosh, but you won't know me from anywhere, even though I sat by this guy in class all the time. And and I was right. He said, I can't place you. I said, Well, don't worry, nobody does. So uh I was served in the Air Force program at tech for two years, and this this guy didn't even know who I was. I said, Well, that's that's probably gonna be my life, even back then, and and it pretty much was.
SPEAKER_01You might call yourself a stealth bomber type of guy, really, you know.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I was always the guy from out of town. They said, Who are you? I said, I'm the guy from out of town because I would come and go from these organizations and poor guys in Vietnam. We I flew out of Tonsonute in uh in Saigon, and they were doing these, they were part of the regular Air Force program, they were flying regular missions, they were within the confines of the Air Force flight programs, and then I show up and they tell me that I don't even talk to these guys because I was still only a lieutenant, and they're just gonna beat me up and send me away. Somebody would prep them and say, this is gonna be a guy come, there's gonna be two guys. One's the old major, and then this lieutenant's coming, and they're gonna take over one of your planes for two weeks. No, no, you're not taking any of our planes. Oh, yeah, we will. We'll you guys can stomp and cry all you want to, but there'll be other people come and tell you what planes we're taking and how long we're gonna take them. And we would do that, and then I flew Air Recon over Cambodia in 70 and part of 71, and we'd fly back to Tonson Hood. And then they would sometimes they would catch me somewhere and say, Well, what who are you and what are you doing? I says, I don't know. I just trying to live day to day, you know. They would basically say, Well, what what kind of program is this? I said, I don't know. I said, I have no idea. I said, We'll give you your planes back whenever they tell me to give them back. I says, I'm just I'm just working here, you know. I'm the guy from out of town.
SPEAKER_01Well, listen, what kind of uh year, what kind of uh what what would you have on some of your missions? I guess it would to be depending on the mission, or what would you need to carry with you on one of these missions? And can you tell me about a mission that or location that stands out the most or a mission that stands out the most uh for you, Ed?
SPEAKER_02Well, there were so so many of them and it does get to be a blur because uh I you know I can get uh just in that one in one cycle, you can go through uh Peru and Bolivia and Argentina and Brazil, Mozambique, South Africa, Angola, Congo, Nigeria, uh, and this is how they would go in. That's one sequence, and then Ghana, and then uh um Liberia on to Senegal and the Canary Islands. So at the end of all that, there would be missions at each of those places. Each one of them would have a different profile. But um I uh whatever I was I I needed, somebody was gonna get to me. You know, uh if I needed certain weapons or I needed certain types of uh support, special clothes or something, there was always gonna be somebody that showed up. Um and and I got to where I was so dependent on that, you know. I I was in Saudi Arabia and they they had decided that I had snuck in the country and that they wanted to send me to prison, which I had snuck in the country. And I was leaving and they they got all upset because they didn't have an entry stamp. So I said, Well, I said that's sometimes that's just the way it goes, you know. They had armed guards there, but they didn't try to stop me from sitting down in the in the uh boarding area. And so I sat down there. I said, Well, I don't know what's all that's all about. I'm sure somebody's gonna be sorting it out. And sure enough, they were about 30 minutes later, this guy comes. I don't know if he's from the he's from the embassy. I don't know if he's CIA or if he's somebody else, but he he comes to me, he said, Well, he said, you uh you're fine now that we've talked to him about it. They want to see your passport one more time. So we went back over there. And then uh he said, if you could just, I was in uniform, he says, if you could just get some civilian clothes on because I was heading to Pakistan, and they said uh that'd be great. And I said, Yeah, I'll just change on the plane. So where whatever I needed, there was somebody, I started calling them my my people, you know, and they they would give me some kind of a lick about something, and I said, Well, my people will be along to explain it all later. I never got into any kind of confrontation with them.
SPEAKER_01Well, I don't know how much we can go into maybe a typical mission. If you had a mission, you had an assignment, you got it handed down to you, would you have to fly in and and maybe stay two or three days, or would it be in and out so quickly? Or who would you come into contact? Obviously, a contact person at uh one of the on the mission that you had to contact, or can you can you shed a little bit of light on on the kind of mission that you would have?
SPEAKER_02Well, I you what you say is pretty much it could be any combination of those, but most as time went on, particularly after I uh left the Air Force, and the Air Force, when I did these missions for the Air Force, then they had a little bit more control over me. But then when I retired, I started doing this stuff on contract, if you will. And part of my parameters was you tell me generally, I'm not gonna tell you when I go. I'm in country, and I'm not gonna tell you when I leave. You won't know anything. You'll just know that I've done the job and I've done. But when I was in the military, yeah, they would they would track me generally. They would lose track of me because I would go off on the grid. I'd go places in West Africa or East Africa where there's just dirt roads and there's no telephone or anything. They would just assume that he's still alive somewhere, but they knew in general what I was going to be doing. You know, they would they would meet me at the airport or meet me at the hotel when I first came into the country, and then that would be it. They wouldn't come back again.
SPEAKER_01Well, it would it be uh uh can I go this direction? Would it be a 007 license to kill type of mission?
SPEAKER_02I suppose so. I mean, you just you have the right of self-defense, so in that sense it would be, but there wasn't much targeting, if you will, of individuals uh other than just the intelligence part of it, uh, where they're going, what they're doing. That was dangerous enough because if they're onto you that way, then that they'll they'll come after you quicker than anything. But yeah, I would have whatever pistol or weapon they wanted me to have, they would have that wherever I was going. So if I left the United States and I went to uh Lieberville and Gabon in West Africa, I would just go through the customs and the immigration, and then I would I'd either be walking outside the airport or I would be uh getting a cab or something, or at the lobby of the hotel, there would be somebody that would come to me and whatever. If I needed a Walther PPK, then they'd give it to me, you know, and they'd tell me who need to watch out for and then who the targets were and all of that. Uh, but there was not a lot of hands-on, you know. Again, it was kind of like you kind of have to be able to ad-lib some of this. And it was, it came naturally to me. I really didn't have any problem with that from day one when I was like 21 or 22 years old. All I remember is when they they set me up in this intelligence right away. And then I saw the profile of it over the next two weeks, and I said, My God, I said, This is this is perfect. I says, All you have to do is don't screw it up, you know. I says that they blade everything out for you, and if you start messing it up, then that's it, because it's it's perfect, you know, and it was. You just have to not get uh too ahead of yourself, you know, just do your missions and behave.
SPEAKER_01Would uh your accommodations or your whatever you would go in any country, uh so many of them, would you have uh to be able to stay, or would you sort of just have to make your own way about where you stayed and where you ate and all that all those things?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I pretty much made my own way. Sometimes I would stay in very nice hotels like a James Bond would, and then other times I was just in stuff that you just hope you can last four or five days, you know, and the walls were uh terrible and the there was no mosquito nets. Toward the end, I mean, if you really think about it, people and I I never got sick all these years, you know. I used to tell people, I said, I'm not so afraid of the bullets, I'm afraid of the fevers. And I had gone to uh to get some shots for the next series of missions some years ago, and I was at an Air Force base and and the talking to the doctor, and the doctor said, Well, have you ever seen the list of things that we don't have shots for? Because I was getting shots for uh, you know, the usual diphtheria or a yellow fever, that kind of stuff. And anyway, he said, Well, he says, We're giving you what we what we know about. Yes, and then he gives me this little hand. He had a list of 40 fevers that they have no treatment for. He says, if you get any of this stuff, you're gonna be toast anyway. So give you some confidence. Well, you got your shots. Well, your shots are gonna cover about 5% of what's gonna be out there, you know, particularly in Africa, where yellow fever is still very prevalent in central parts of Africa, really not allowed in those countries unless you have a yellow fever. Well, yellow fever is a kind of like a biblical disease in in the West, you know. Nobody worries about yellow fever here, but they do places like uh South Sudan and Sudan and Central African Republic and places like that, you know.
SPEAKER_01Well, I can very much understand why their type of career, you know, family or or whatever, because you didn't know from each mission whether somebody would take you out or whether the fever would take you out.
SPEAKER_02Uh it was a very rewarding career only because I was never married. I never really had a relationship with anybody, and I had no children. Once you get into that, then it pretty much uh negates your ability to do what I was doing. And people have asked me how many people do you think were doing what you were doing? And I said, I uh I don't know, but I says they can't be more than 10 or 12, you know, of us that go out and do this stuff. It's very, very uh limited. But first and foremost, you just can't be worried about you know how how things at home and do you miss little Mary's birthday and all that stuff. Uh that's way too much stress on you. You can't you can't really do this job with any kind of worry about that kind of stuff. The stuff that you and George have lived through on the family side, I have no idea how you do it. I mean, that's just a whole different world for me.
SPEAKER_01Right. That was a path that uh you chose and went down that path and like you said, had a great career. Some of that you may have missed a few things. And on the other side, you had a career that maybe 10 people in the world have had.
SPEAKER_02It was a huge trade-off, but I have to tell you, Mike, there was not any period of time that I thought I should be married and have children. It never was my uh DNA, if you will.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_02And I thought when I was young, I said, well, maybe it'll come up when I'm 35 or 40. And I said, it was worse than 35 and 40 and 50 years old than it was when I was 25 and 30. Your DNA just is not cut out for that. And the key thing for me is I never tried it. I never tried to have a relationship, I never tried to have a girlfriend or a fiance or have children. A lot of guys in this kind of stuff, they will attempt to have the family and it'll just all disintegrate on them and then they're they're all crushed. But I never tried. There's not even a 5% chance that it will ever work out. So don't spend your time and energy on that. You're not cut out for that. This is what you're supposed to do. Let other people do that. And if you remember, I'll tell you a good uh role model uh for this uh was in the movie Apocalypse Now. If you remember Captain Willard, he was the main guy that was going after uh Kurt. He was the assassin going up the river to find Kurtz and eliminate him. His story was so well portrayed in that movie. He basically said at one point in there, he said, Well, when I was home with the wife and kids, I wanted to be in Vietnam. And he said, When I'm in Vietnam, I want to go home with the wife and the kids. So you you get torn like that. Didn't have one minute of saying, Well, I think I'll try to have a regular family, or no, never never came close.
SPEAKER_01I believe Martin Sheen played that character in the movie Apocalypse N. Not mistaken.
SPEAKER_02Exactly right. Yeah, exactly right. And he did a brilliant job of it. Probably the the number one movie of all time, the way they portrayed Martin Sheen and all the psychological dramas that he had to go through. And it weighed on him in the movie. They have said that what happened to his characters that he ended up in a mental institution. But I mean, if he carried the story forward, he would probably end up in a mental hospital. I never had those burden talk about PSTD or whatever, and all of that, and the traumas of coming back from Vietnam. And I I still admire it to this day. I don't know what they're talking about. For me, it was just what you got to do. It was, I says, if it wasn't for Vietnam, I wouldn't have had any adventure at all back in my early days, you know.
SPEAKER_01Just wired in a different manner, but in a manner that, hey, there was a slot, there was a place, there was a need for what you were able to do. So many countries. How did that change your view of the world?
SPEAKER_02Not really, not in a dramatic way. I mean, when I when I was 21, 22, I was off in the Caribbean, and then 23, I was in Africa and Vietnam and all of the Cambodia, all of that stuff. I never had one of those times when I was just shocked, you know, to my core psychologically, you know, all these different cultures and uh the dramas and the violence. And I uh absorbed it all, but I did not, didn't affect me. I just kept going, you know. I was just the same guy. It didn't affect me. Like so many people he'd heard in Vietnam that you know they were affected by Vietnam, came back as a different person and all that. I said, I don't know who they're talking about. I never had any of that problem.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you went to so many countries, so many cultures. I mean, it it had to be, man, what you know, wake up. What what culture am I in now?
SPEAKER_02And uh oh yeah, yeah, big time. And that was one of the most incredible things about it is that you could literally, like that time I went from uh Brazil to Mozambique, you know. I I was spent three or four days on the beach in Brazil relaxing. So, okay, we need I thought they were going to call me, so it's time to come home. And I said, No, you got to go to Mozambique. And literally the next day I'd wake up and I'm in Mozambique. And I'm thinking, this is a whole nother plane of uh of existence, but it never affected me except in a positive way. I was happy to be wherever I was.
SPEAKER_01And you would fly whatever you were assigned to fly from uh Brazil to Mozambique.
SPEAKER_02Well, most of the time I never flew transport, so I would either commercial or military. That's where these orders came in. If I needed to get from uh Honolulu to uh Christchurch New Zealand, I had the orders to do that. If they didn't have a military plane going, then I would go commercial. My orders allowed me to go anywhere at any time. And if they didn't have military transportation, I'd just go get commercials. I tell you, there was another problem with this. It wasn't really a problem, but I I had to file every six months or seven months, I'd have to file the expense report. Where have you been? What money did you spend, so forth. I would do that and I would be fairly honest about where I'd been. And this would go through the military system, the accountant and finance. And next thing you know, I got a call from the general wants to talk to you. And and I said, Oh, here we go again. It's a base the general on the base. He doesn't know the guy in in the Pentagon, the two-star. And so I go to his office, and the first thing he said to me said, Well, he says, You're trying to get yourself court-martialed. I said, No, sir. I says, I think I'm good. He said, Well, where's all this? What's all this about? I said, I I don't know. You might need to call Pentagon. And he said, Well, you you spent a lot of money here, you know, this kind of stuff. You can end up court-martialed. And I say, sir, that it's not your money. And he said, What? And so he would have he'd always come in the same routine every time that he'd bring in his captain, his his aide, run down this accounting code and see if it's our money. And then 10 minutes would pass and the captain came back, sir. Sir, he's right, it's not our money. And then the general would say, Well, if it's not our money, there's nothing I need to know about. And he says, I have a feeling I still don't want me to know about anything anyway. That's how it would go. It would always be, who in the hell are you? I they wouldn't even know. So the money would always come from a totally different place, you know.
SPEAKER_01Well, tell me about the transition from being in the military to being a contract, sort of a contract on your missions. Was that a big transition?
SPEAKER_02Not really. Once I had retired from the military, I had already had three homes at that time. So I just visited my homes that kept me busy for a year or so. I had one in Kawaii, island, Kauai, and then one in Las Vegas and one in Melbourne Beach. And so I just would kind of float around wherever I wanted to be. I went to came to I'd visit Rustin sometimes during that time. But then I'm thinking of it's about 1995, 96 time frame that I got on these contracts, which is basically the same thing I was doing when I was young in the military. And so it was actually a lot easier because uh I was in total control then. And then when I wasn't on contract with them, I would I would just disappear wherever I wanted to. So I still have a uh townhouse in Cape Town, and I still have my wife lives in a four-level townhouse in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. There's a place down in Key West and place in Melbourne Beach and Las Vegas. So I kind of replicated the military days with my own place because the military always had a place for me to stay. Sometimes very nice place. I had an apartment in London that was right across from Hyde Park, a beautiful place. It's mentioned in the books, actually. My apartment had this massive circular window. It was about probably six feet in diameter, and it was very prominent in the apartment, very cool, and it overlooked Hyde Park on Bayswater Road, which is a very expensive area of London. And I even when I was 21 or 22 or whatever, I said, What are you doing? This you couldn't afford to to buy the toothbrush in the toilet if it wasn't for the military giving you this place. I said, Yeah, just just enjoy it because it's it's part of the deal, I guess.
SPEAKER_01You know, one of your characters there in Hyde Park reading a newspaper, and I do remember remember that part of the city.
SPEAKER_02That whole sequence, uh, that that all came to me, but that that's a certain amount of truth to all that, because my apartment overlooked that bench. And so that uh you'll see a lot of there's a lot of scenes that come and go in London that were based on my actual being there, the times that I lived there. And that that's true of also in Cape Town, a lot of the other places that I describe in Doha, Qatar, and everything. It's there's a lot of places and a lot of stuff that's in the books is is historically accurate. Think in 001, I mentioned uh Christina Keeler, and she was in fact part of a big scandal back in the day. And so I I wove her brother, quote unquote, her brother, into the story in 001. If you look up the name Christine Keeler, you'll see that she was a very prominent party girl, if you will, that got involved with a Soviet uh military attache in London while she was also having an affair with the Minister of Defense, the British Minister of Defense. So they thought, well, she's the go-between between the Soviets and and the British. So that all came back came about in 1961, 62, 63. So that character, when I mentioned Christine Keeler, she is actually a person. And that that happens throughout the books. I'll mention people's names, and they will they were actual people.
SPEAKER_01We're on that topic. I mean, you published about 87 professional works, you know, ranging from international finance to space software reliability. That's sort of an anomaly. 87 professional, was that part of your education? Uh part of the things you had to write for your education, or you just did those as a you published those uh works?
SPEAKER_02Those those mostly came from uh my work with the military. They were um kind of an offshoot of the work I was doing for the military. So I take a technical subject, for instance, is software reliability. And and that's I if if you're going to talk about being a Renaissance man, there would be where it would come in because they gave me the paper of the year for uh a paper that was entitled Developing Space Flight Software, reliable space flight software. And so I'm doing that same time I'm walking through the jungles of uh Cameroon or Nigeria, or if I'm walking through the jungles of Burma, and then I'm writing this story. So there that that paper, I have a lot of technical. Papers, and yet I also did all this other intelligence work. So there's a bit of a renaissance in there. You know, it's it's hard to bridge that gap, you know.
SPEAKER_01Well, there's so many fields. I mean, your career involved across so many different fields, it's hard to even try to mesh some of those things together.
SPEAKER_02And then amongst all that, I'm sure you don't know it. I'll I'll try to bring some pictures, but all during these years, I'm still designing my my Road Warrior car. So my and my dad would build these beautiful wooden pieces to hold the gauges that I would dream up that had to go into my car. So I'm going from space software reliability to designing my cars to doing international affairs. It was quite a swirl. And I ran across um some pictures that of the Road Warrior. That's there's five of them. That's all you need to know about the Road Warrior because it's the ones you see will be the completed ones. And I it gets it got so bad uh that some years ago, probably 10 or 12 years ago, I was dreaming up so much stuff and nobody was stopping me. So I ended up putting on an air refueling kit on my on the Road Warrior. So it can be refueled by helicopter.
SPEAKER_01And my okay, by helicopter.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I actually hired a helicopter that had would be able to do the nozzle, and we we tested it out, got on a dirt dirt road out in Arizona, and I revealed the car three different times with this uh this helicopter. And I said, Well, that's good enough. I'd spent God knows how much money hiring the helicopter, but you'll see it in the pictures. So that's a whole nother life, you know. The life of the road warrior is kind of independent of everything else.
SPEAKER_01That's even wilder than a James Bond Ian Fleming novel.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, no, it yeah. I have two of them. There's one is a 1980 Corvette, which is so tricked out that you can hardly get into things with all the gauges and the switches. Uh, and the second one is the road warrior. Now, the road warrior is 59 years old, it'll be 60 years old next year. That one is also way, way off the chart. I got married very late in life, but my wife, I don't know, maybe a year into the marriage, and she's she's so sweet and quiet that she said, What is wrong with you? My mother asked that question pretty much every year since I was about 16. She was always disturbed about me, and my dad would just say, Just leave him be. He's fine. He's not being arrested or anything, so he's doing fine. And my mom would just say, Where did he come from?
SPEAKER_01Again, it suited what you had to do in life, and uh it fit right in like a hand and glove into what area you had to do. I mean, it was it just fit.
SPEAKER_02No, you're exactly right, Michael. You brought you you you broke the code on it, it was just what I was supposed to do, and then I did it. And nothing was going to keep me from doing it. You know, I knew I was passing up the a normal life, but I would say at age 12 or 13, I said that chances are I'm not going to live a normal life. I don't know what it's going to be, but it's probably not going to be normal. So I never tried. That was the strength. The only thing that I did that was somewhat smart is that I didn't try to mold myself into uh something else. You know, this is it, this is what I'm going to be. This is all natural. This is perfect for me. Uh, I don't, I'm missing a lot of squares in life that most people feel, you know, the wife, the children, the grandchildren, the birthdays and all. But there was something missing all along. I remember my mom asking, I was four or five years old. My mom asked, uh, well, it's going to be your birthday. You want me to bake you a cake? And I told her, I said, no, I don't want a cake. I don't want any any presents. I don't want anybody to even know it's my birthday. And so she was disturbed by that.
SPEAKER_01What kind of child have I got here? Don't want a birthday party.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and and I never liked birthdays. Uh any anything that celebrates, I don't really partake. But she asked my father, she was worried about me back then. He was the only guy in all of my life that always supported me. He would always tell my mom, he said, Well, just leave him alone. He'll be fine.
SPEAKER_01And I want to mention right here quickly, you talked about Ernie Stevens. That is the Louisiana Military Museum located right here in Ruston, Louisiana. And you have uh given quite a few things to that museum. But I wanted uh our listeners to know that's a very good museum, and it's very well done. If you ever want to come to see the a very great museum, has all the different wars uh represented there. So it's a very, very good museum ran by Ernie Stevens.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, a fantastic job. He probably has the best exhibits in the U.S. really nobody really knows about. I mean, he I know the mayor of Ruston's very impressed, and he hopefully he'll give Ernie some more space. But Ernie's got a whole nother warehouse he could uh expand two or three times what he has. You know, he's just got a magnificent collection. But thank God for him, I don't know what I would be doing with all this stuff I had. So I just keep giving it to him. I could start it five years ago, and then I said, Well, I gave him this, I gave him that. And then so now I told him, I said, I got my own wing to know about uh Jason Bourne, now meet Ed Coss.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Or James Bond, Jason Bourne.
SPEAKER_02I have a short uh video that's it's called The Last Mission, and I insert my videos with some other stuff, but I dedicate that video to four people. One is uh James Bond, Captain Willard, Maverick of Top Gun, and the Fourth Mercenary.
SPEAKER_00You've been listening to Mike's conversation with Ed Coss. Be sure to visit Mike's Facebook page for more details about this podcast, including replay dates and time so you can catch the program again or share it with a friend. From Mike and the entire crew here at the show, we really appreciate your support and for joining us today. Until next time, this is Mark saying, keep the music and the conversation going.