After the brutal suppression by Japanese authorities of the pro-independence March 1st Movement of 1919, thousands of Koreans fled the peninsula.

The KLA carried out limited activities in Xi'an, but was severely restricted by internal conflict and disputes with the Kuomintang, who provided most of the KPG's funding.

[2] In fact, years before the Eagle Project, Donovan had planned to have the predecessor to the OSS, the Coordinator of Information (COI), work with the KPG.

On January 27, under orders from Donovan, Lt. Col. Morris DePass published a draft of a plan, code named "Olivia", on how to use the Koreans.

However, the scholar Robert S. Kim notes that the COI had limited access to reliable information about the KPG, and likely had inflated views of its capabilities.

After years of being mostly ignored by the major powers, they finally managed to convince the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) of the United States to cooperate with them.

[1] Beginning in late 1944, KLA officials began discussing cooperation with agents from the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

[4][5] In September 1944, Lee Beom-seok, then Chief of Staff of the KLA, met with Colonel Joseph Dickey of the US Military Intelligence Service in Chongqing.

[a] Lee then met with OSS Agent Captain Clyde Bailey Sargent, who was fluent in Chinese and a former professor at Chengdu University.

[5] On February 24, the OSS completed planning the Eagle Project, and received approval from US military headquarters in China on March 13.

In order to alleviate this, they created an English conversation class under instructor Robert Myers and dispatched more translators from Washington.

[9] Kim, Lee, and the OSS began retooling their plans, and decided to have a division of the KLA return to the peninsula to perform reconnaissance and intelligence gathering tasks for the US.

Upon hearing about the mission, General Wedemeyer was furious at how it had been organized (particularly at the lack of medical staff brought along to assist prisoners of war), and removed authority from the Eagle Project.