After Years Undercover Among Neo-Nazis, He Is 'Haunted'

The retired FBI agent profiled in Rolling Stone is identified only as Scott B, for good reason: He spent 25 years undercover, infiltrating biker gangs and the like before moving to the agency's domestic terrorism division. That's when he started posing as a white supremacist to infiltrate gangs looking to foment a race war. It helps that Scott is 6-foot-4, heavily muscled and tattooed, and favors Harleys. The story by Paul Solotaroff is stocked with anecdotes: a botched goat ritual in the woods of Georgia by members of the group called the Base; the time suspicious gang members forced Scott to strip but failed to find his microcamera; the Klan cell meetings with men stunningly well-equipped for battle; the modern Hitler worship; the arrests he coordinated of young men vowing attacks on synagogues or churches, based on the models of "saints" such as Anders Behring Breivik.

But the main focus speaks to why Scott agreed to be featured in the first place. He says the fringe-right movement is growing, and he is "haunted" by what will happen if it isn't stopped, writes Solotaroff. "Over months of interviews with Scott and his former colleagues, hours-long conversations with domestic-terror experts, and wormhole dives down fascist portals on apps like Gab and Discord, a portrait emerged of a nation under threat from a thousand points of hate," he adds. Asked why he spent so many years in such a dangerous field—few agents rack up the number of undercover operations he did—Scott pulls up photos on his phone of Dylann Roof and Patrick Crusius, who killed more than 30 between them in race-motivated shootings. "Don’t think for a second you can read these boys by how they look on Twitter," he says. (Read the full story.)