Prefabricated Fascists: The FBI's Assembly-Line Provocateurs

by William Norman Grigg
by William Norman Grigg
Recently by William Norman Grigg: Judicial Terrorism: The State vs. Robert and Danille Kahre

"Valhalla" at work: FBI undercover asset Hal Turner, who was tasked to infiltrate and radicalize the "far right," speaks at a rally sponsored by the FBI-controlled National Socialist Movement

We'll be fighting in the streets with our children at our feet
and the morals that they worship will be gone.
And the men who spurred us on sit in judgment of all wrong
they decide, and the shotgun sings the song.

~ Pete Townsend

It's difficult not to experience a faint pang of sympathy for Hal Turner, albeit an ephemeral one deeply buried beneath multiple layers of well-earned disgust.

For at least five years, and probably more, Turner was a paid informant and provocateur in the employ of the world's largest sponsor of terrorism, the Federal Government. His assignment was to bait easily influenced people with incendiary rhetoric about race and other resentments, and reel in anyone who bit a little too lustily on the bait. The Bureau credits Turner with personally bringing more than 100 "extremists" to their attention, many of whom (the Bureau won't specify how many) were arrested.

There's every likelihood that at least some of Turner's victims were offered the same deal offered to Randy Weaver after he was set up on trivial and spurious firearms charges by an undercover snitch for the ATF: Become an informant/provocateur, and you'll stay out of jail.

Weaver rejected the deal, and the FBI eventually retaliated by attacking his home and murdering his wife and son. José Padilla, a rougher customer than Weaver, rejected the same deal; he was declared an "enemy combatant," subjected to prolonged torture intended to destroy his mental equilibrium and break his will, and eventually convicted on exceptionally dubious terrorism-related charges.

Before he was outed as a stukach in early 2007, Turner was the host of a web-based talk radio program and a freelance speaker who specialized in "incitement-and-indictment" entrapment of "right-wing extremists." Hackers discovered a cache of e-mail correspondence between Turner and William Haug, an agent working for a Joint Terrorism Task Force who acted as the informant's handler. Turner closed down his radio program while emitting great gusts of affected outrage over what he insisted were spurious accusations that he had collaborated with the Feds.

In a message posted to Pro Libertate after he was identified as an agent provocateur — along with federal assets tasked to carry out similar missions within Muslim sub-populations in the U.S. — Turner insisted that only "PARANOID FREAKS (like this blog)" would suspect him of collaboration.

By way of establishing his neo-Nazi bona fides, Turner boasted that "my [white supremacist] rallies in Kingston NY and Kalamazoo, MI cost those cities $60,000 and $120,000 respectively in police overtime and that there's no way the FBI would have approved anything like that by an informant because the cities would have demanded the money back!"

Actually, as we'll see anon, the FBI has no problem staging white supremacist rallies and protest marches that help "local" police departments rack up overtime.

Certainly, the police don't mind making a little extra money by swanning about in riot gear. Events of the sort Turner organized are an intelligence bonanza for the Regime: They give the FBI (and, most likely, other Homeland Security assets) an opportunity to harvest detailed information for federal databases about both "right-wing extremists" and their opposition.

We know this is the case through first-person testimony from an FBI undercover asset who spent nearly a decade worming his way through the "radical right" — including the National Socialist Movement (NSM).

The NSM's adherents doubtless see themselves as the finely honed blade of a resurgent "white power" movement, a description promoted with similar zeal by professional hate-hucksters like Morris Dees' artfully misnamed Southern Poverty Law Center and the so-called Anti-Defamation League.

Actually, the NSM is "all show, no go" — it's more of a federally controlled traveling roadshow, sort of a Third Reich tribute band. Its cadres exude all of the raw menace of the hapless Illinois Nazis from The Blues Brothers, and possess all of the street-fighting chops of the bumbling Black Widow biker gang from Clinton Eastwood's Philo Beddoe films.

But I digress.

We were discussing Hal Turner's career as an FBI informant/provocateur code-named "Valhalla," details about which have been pried from the Bureau by reporters for the Bergen (New Jersey) Record.

Beginning in 2003 (or, as Turner claims, 2002), Turner was a paid informant "who spied on his own controversial followers," reports the Record, citing "government documents, e-mails, court records, and almost 20 hours of jailhouse interviews" with the snitch. Turner "received thousands of dollars from the FBI to report on such groups as the Aryan Nations and the white supremacist National Alliance, and even a member of the Blue Eyed Devils skinhead punk band."

"I was not some street snitch," insists Turner. "I was a deep undercover intelligence operative." He demands recognition of that distinction with the same desperate desire for dignity displayed by any other whore who seeks to upgrade his or her job description with a more refined title.

The FBI budgeted at least $100,000 to pay for Turner's performances, both on his radio program and in public speeches. He now insists that he was merely role-playing on behalf of his pimps — both the FBI's Special Agent Haug and New Jersey State Police Detective Leonard Nerbetski, who also served on the Newark Joint Terrorism Task Force.

As he tells the story, Turner was required to feign passion for various unsavory causes: In interviews with the Record, Turner maintained that "the FBI coached him to make racist, anti-Semitic and other threatening statements and he now feels double-crossed by the Bureau after his arrest."

"The audience loves the rip-roaring radio psycho," Turner boasted in an e-mail to the FBI. "They literally throw money at it. Just be confident that the personality you hear (or hear about) on radio is not real life. I have zero intention of doing anything stupid."

In the guise of the "radio psycho," Turner — with the FBI's help — was pulling down about $15,000 a month to express such edifying sentiments as the following: "A full day of violence against blacks would be a really nice thing.... [L]ynchings, church burnings, drive-by shootings and bombings [would] put these subhuman animals back in their place."

Turner materialized at various white power gatherings in several states. He also traveled to Brazil on the FBI's dime to spy on suspected white supremacists in that country, as well as to investigate an alleged plot by white supremacists and Brazilian Arabs to send "consumer goods" to resistance fighters in Iraq. It's difficult to believe that the CIA remained entirely aloof from that aspect of Turner's career.

While the FBI was willing to abet Turner's efforts to incite violence against innocent people, the Feds moved against him shortly after he published comments on his blog interpreted as death threats against three judges in Chicago. He was arrested shortly before the 2008 election and is scheduled to stand trial this week.

As the song says, "some men like the fishin', some men like the fowlin', and some men like to hear the cannonball a-roarin." Turner likes nothing more than hearing the sound of his own voice. Yet "here I am in prison, betrayed," he laments, arrested by the same FBI Special Agent who recruited him and — he plaintively maintains — fed him his lines.

"I was given specific instructions," Turner declares, and he played the role of racist agitator out of his duty as "a loyal, patriotic decent American citizen."

Turner may be telling the truth. His experiences are eerily similar to those recounted by former FBI "deep cover" operative (and one-time Roller Derby star — no, I'm not kidding) David Gletty in his ineptly written but highly useful memoir Undercover Nazi: The FBI Infiltration of Extremist Groups in America.

In what strikes me as a transparent effort to cultivate a marketable mystique, Gletty says that many details of his work as a paid FBI snitch remain "classified." He claims to have been recruited in 2000 when, as the leader of a constitutional militia, he came across a plot by an Appalachian white supremacist to set off a string of radiological bombs in collaboration with al-Qaeda.

Recruited as a "deep cover" operative, Gletty spent several years cultivating ties with "extremist" groups, including elements of the KKK, the Hammerskins, and eventually the National Socialist Movement. He was careful to get his "ticket punched" by working with legitimate dissident groups such as the League of the South, and various immigration reform groups, such as at least one element of the Minuteman volunteer border watch movement.

Gletty's most notable achievement was to infiltrate and become leader of a National Socialist Movement chapter in Florida and organize a 2006 NSM march in Orlando that was intended to sow fear and anger in a predominantly black neighborhood.

To prepare for that role, Gletty behaved much as Hal Turner had, fulminating in public about the supposed inferiority of non-white people and befouling the air with exhortations to collectivist violence. This not only legitimized Gletty in the eyes of his comrades in the NSM, it also helped to rile up the group's enemies, thereby ensuring a large turnout of counter-protesters for the February 2006 march in Orlando — which was exactly what the Bureau desired.

During his years as an informant/provocateur, Gletty was usually accompanied by a fellow asset he identifies only as "Joe." During the Orlando protest, Gletty recalls, Joe carried a concealed digital camera "for taking all the photos he could of protesters and counter-protesters. Then the images would be fed into the FBI face recognition computer. At least 1000 faces for the computer to digest."

In addition to producing a bounty of biometric intelligence for the FBI, the Orlando rally offered a good dry run for a future Homeland Security crack-down. Gletty points out that his FBI handler was "actually pumped up" about the Orlando march, "because the protest would be a great training exercise for the Orlando Police Department, Orange County Sheriff's Department, the FBI, and MBI [the Central Florida Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation] as they would all be in attendance."

As a leader in the white supremacist underground, Gletty held many "surveillance parties" — not only public events, but private functions used to gather intelligence and, where possible, set up various low-level thugs to become informant/provocateurs themselves.

For three years, "Joe and I ... traveled from state to state, rally to rally, and party to party, infiltrating the White Power Movement in America," Gletty recalls. "Thousands of miles, hundreds of photographed faces, and a myriad of tape recordings were contributing to the eradication of racial and religious prejudice in America."

Really? To judge from recent attention earned by the NSM, Gletty's mission was not to help "eradicate" prejudice (as if this could be accomplished through government intervention), but rather to bring the group more completely under the FBI's control.

The NSM is a remnant of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party (ANP). According to Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party, the ANP was thoroughly compromised through the FBI's notorious COINTELPRO operation; by the time of his murder in 1967, Rockwell was widely believed to be a "patsy" for the FBI or some other intelligence agency.

One objective of the anti-ANP COINTELPRO operation was to create a rift between Rockwell's Nazi outfit and the United Klans of America. By the late 1970s, the Klan was thoroughly honeycombed with FBI assets. In fact the Bureau boasted that it had enough Klansmen on its payroll in North Carolina to elect that state's Grand Dragon: At one point, 7 of the 8 members of a Charlotte Klan chapter reportedly were FBI assets informing on the klavern's sole non-federal employee.

A sitcom-worthy simulacrum of street-fighting: NSM members square off against the equally ludicrous "Brown Berets de Aztlan" in Riverside, California.

Edward Dawson, an informant/provocateur on the payroll of the Greensboro police department and under the supervision of the FBI, helped orchestrate a November 3, 1979 street clash between white supremacists and Communists that left five people dead. The "White Power" contingent included elements of both the Klan and the American Nazi Party, whose FBI-engineered rift had apparently healed sufficiently to permit joint action.

The National Socialist Movement's current strategy is to provoke tumult and violence, rather than participating in it directly. In recent weeks the group has achieved a relatively high profile by staging anti-immigration rallies in Riverside, California and Phoenix, Arizona.

In California, a small knot of NSM denizens faced off with members of "Los Brown Berets de Aztlan," a foundation-funded militant Chicano group, with riot police clad in body armor on hand to maintain "order." A few weeks later the group inflicted itself on an immigration-reform protest in Arizona during which the group's most visible spokesperson, J.T. Ready, unfurled a portrait of Adolf Hitler.

Ready — a dishonorably discharged ex-Marine — is a pretty good candidate to be the next NSM figure outed as an asset of the Feds. An ambulatory wad of cholesterol and bile, Ready looks like the unfortunate result of a genetic experiment combining the most unpleasant traits of Ernst Roehm and Chris Farley.

While certainly not telegenic, Ready has achieved a certain media prominence as a result of his candor in reciting the Nazi party line.

The sudden prominence of the NSM has been noted — with a detectable hint of gratitude — by left-collectivists eager to shoehorn resistance to the Obama Regime into a pre-determined narrative: Critics of the Blessed One and his administration are animated by concealed bigotry, according to this reading, whether they know it or not, and their rhetoric is creating an "atmosphere" of incipient violence that will engender domestic terrorism.

It should be remembered that the same tropes were put into play early in the last Democratic administration, just before the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing — a terrorist act for which disenchanted former federal employee Timothy McVeigh was executed, but was actually carried out with the help of "others unknown," including several federal assets connected to a bizarre little white supremacist commune known as Elohim City.

The Regime has gone to a great deal of trouble to keep the otherwise moribund White Power movement on life support. It's simply too useful as a political foil — and, occasionally, as an instrument of politically useful violence — for the Regime to let it die.

December 5, 2009