OBI’s President, Bruce Kittleson, is the son of a distinguished soldier who served in combat from WWII through Vietnam and who is the only service-member in American history to participate in three prisoner-of-war rescue missions. Bruce first traveled to Russia in 1992, just months after the fall of the Iron Curtain. A year later, he was back in Russia, conducting a conference attended by over five-hundred former political officers. The theme for that conference was “The Religious and Moral Education of the USA and Russian Armies.” Throughout that conference, Bruce posed himself two questions: Could anything be done to open the hearts and minds of the attendees to matters of the human spirit? If so, what could be done?

He concluded that the best and only clear avenue for maintaining access to the Eastern Bloc countries was simply and truly to meet the human needs of those who were there, as they expressed them. Emerging from that experience, he and wife Judy, Dr. Jeff Jernigan; Colonel Rick and Carolyn Grube, General and Mrs. Paul Cerjan, and General and Mrs. Hugh Smith, formed Olive Branch International (OBI). The immediate focus of OBI was to provide humanitarian assistance to the international military with the goal of facilitating the later establishment of chaplaincies, in order to meet the spiritual needs of the local military and their families, as conditions allowed and in God’s timing.