Just read GI Joe Cobra #5. It leaves you a little in the dark but it looks like Serpentor is the leader of The Coil, a group similar to Scientology. While weird, I like that Cobra isn’t an in your face, we are terrorists, like they were in the Sunbow and DIC cartoons and the old comics. This helps give it a modern vibe and helps it work in today’s society where we would just use drones and small assaults to systematically kill/destroy a terrorist organization.