CODE NAME: PALE HORSE

An FBI agent recounts his years infiltrating white supremacist groups.

Being an undercover agent, writes Payne, isn’t much like the Hollywood depiction, though there’s truth in the method-actor part of the gig: the need to become someone else. The agent/actor is out there mostly alone, without day-to-day support. “Undercover work,” he writes, “can get pretty lonely at times. You never really get used to it.” Joining the FBI after working as a vice and narcotics investigator for a South Carolina county sheriff, Payne, brawny and tough, was put to work infiltrating biker groups in the Northeast, busting corrupt cops caught up in the drug trade and the like before going deep undercover to track down violent supremacists. This wasn’t the Ku Klux Klan, Payne writes, who are “basically your grandpa’s white supremacists,” but groups such as the Base, modeled after Al Qaeda (which means “the base” in Arabic), whose members are committed to the violent overthrow of the government. Largely disaffected rural people who are lightly educated and heavily armed, they call themselves “accelerationists,” buying into the theory that once the U.S. is overrun by lawless immigrants and the feckless Democrats do nothing about it, “society will decline, and the country will burn,” and the (white) nation will clamor for deliverance. Dubbed “the Hillbilly Donnie Brasco” and trained by the real “Brasco” himself (Joe Pistone), Payne runs with some ugly types to do his job—for one, a woman who takes him on to do home invasions and tells him, “If you need someone tortured, I like torture.” The work, he writes in his tough-as-nails account, became even more pressing after the deadly 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Now retired, he intimates that there’s plenty more to be done to curb supremacist radicalism, now in the ascendant.

An eye-opening look at the small but eminently dangerous radical right-wing fringe out there in the shadows.