Authored by Ken Silva via Headline USA,
In 2007, Orlando residents were furious to discover that an FBI informant had organized a neo-Nazi rally through one of the city’s mostly black neighborhoods a year earlier.
“To come into a predominantly black community, which could have resulted in great harm to the black community? I would hate to be part of a game,” Orlando City Councilwoman Daisy Lynum said at the time, calling for a “full-scale investigation” into the matter.
However, an FBI agent testified that his informant participated in the event, but didn’t organize it. The city’s uproar passed without a public investigation, full-scale or otherwise—until now.
Thanks to a trove of previously unpublicized law enforcement records and interviews with several players involved, Headline USA can reveal that the Orlando neo-Nazi rally was indeed organized by the FBI. The Orlando event also seems to have been part of a larger program to hold Nazi rallies across the country. And according to FBI records, the bureau sponsored those events despite knowing they led to an increase in the number of card-carrying Nazis in America.
Moreover, the FBI’s Nazi rallies led to a much larger operation to target right-wing groups. Dubbed “Primitive Affliction,” the operation featured a motorcycle front group, rogue undercover agents, Outlaw bikers, Satanists, bomb-makers and a fugitive on the lam in Mexico.
To top it off, the FBI’s Nazi operation was briefed to the highest levels of the bureau, including to then-Director Robert Mueller, according to at least one record unearthed by this publication.
Little has been written about Primitive Affliction outside of the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center—biased groups that trained agents in the case, according to the newly revealed records.
But despite the lack of publicity, Primitive Affliction covers a crucial time in right-wing extremist history. It began where the FBI’s 1990s-era cases against the Aryan Nations trailed off, and it helped shape the neo-Nazi groups that would march at the 2017 deadly Charlottesville Unite the Right rally—an event that inspired Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential candidacy.
Along with big-picture history, the records from Primitive Affliction reveal malfeasance by FBI agents and officers who today hold higher positions at the bureau.
The FBI declined to comment. Mueller didn’t respond to an email about Primitive Affliction.
Fabricating Fascists
About a year after the 2006 Orlando neo-Nazi rally, the FBI source who organized the event, David Gletty, had his cover blown in open court. When the Orlando Sentinel reported that Gletty organized the march, his handler reportedly denied the accusation—saying that the informant marched, but didn’t lead the rally.
But Gletty told this publication a different story. He said the FBI instructed him to organize the rally for two main purposes: to raise Gletty’s profile in the neo-Nazi movement, and to allow the FBI to conduct surveillance of the Nazis who attended the rally.
In fact, Gletty told this publication the FBI was staging Nazi rallies across the country with the similar goals in mind: to raise the profiles of their own informants while building a database of Nazis to track.
“At the time, the FBI just before that was having me put on Nazi protests, and there were Nazi protests that were handled by the FBI, and operatives like myself,” he said.
Gletty’s statement is a bold one, and shouldn’t be taken at face value. An undercover operative and private investigator, he said the FBI trained him to lie professionally.
But in this case, Gletty’s allegation is borne out by the evidence.
For starters, there’s the fact that the group that Gletty marched with in Orlando, the National Socialist Movement, or NSM, was founded in the 1970s by an FBI informant—a fact revealed by Headline USA last September. That FBI informant, Robert Brannen, was active during the bureau’s COINTELPRO era, and he chaired the NSM for nearly a decade.
Other former NSM members have also accused the FBI of staging the mid-2000s rallies. For instance, according to former NSM member and current prison inmate Bill White, the FBI sponsored the 2005 Toledo rally, which would be one of the most violent racial protests until 2017 Charlottesville.
“In October 2005, FBI [confidential human source] Jeff Schoep asked me to go to Toledo, Ohio, to help organize a ‘March Against Black Crime’ by what were supposed to be ‘local residents,’ but were really federal CHSs,” White said in an October 2020 sworn declaration, referring to Schoep, who led the NSM from the 1990s until shortly after the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.
While there’s no smoking-gun evidence that Schoep was an FBI informant when he led the NSM, numerous other neo-Nazis have accused him of being one. There are also FBI records from the early 2000s showing he at least spoke to agents once, and perhaps the strongest evidence is that he now works openly as a “reformed Nazi” with groups sponsored by the DHS, FBI and other law enforcement organizations.
Along with his accusations that Schoep was a fed, White also described the Toledo rally as being similar to what would happen in Charlottesville 12 years later—with the local cops and FBI allowing the neo-Nazis to clash with the left-wing counter-protestors.
“On the day of the march, the Toledo Police and the FBI occupied [a nearby parking lot] and ordered myself and the NSM to use [another] parking lot. I and a small team from the NSM arrived before the Communists to secure the location; no police were present at this time …,” White said.
“About an hour later, police began to deploy, and, directed NSM members to enter [their parking lot] by driving through the mob. This started problems … After the police line formed, the mob then attacked the police, not us.”
A March 2006 FBI report about the Toledo rally largely matches White’s description of events—though it omitted the fact that law enforcement failed to keep the Nazis and counter-protestors separate.
“Before the NSM could begin their march, local residents and counter-demonstrators began throwing rocks and bricks at vehicles, local residences and businesses. Toledo police responded by firing tear gas into the gathered counter-demonstrators and local residents. Toledo police advised the NSM to leave the area for their own protection and the NSM complied,” the report said.
“Local residents and counter-demonstrators continued with the clash with the police, looting a store and setting fire to a local bar. This rally and riot, and the attendant media coverage for the NSM, was deemed a great success by the majority of the white supremacy movement,” the report added.
“NSM reported increased fundraising and increased applications for membership immediately following these events,” the report concluded.
That last sentence in the FBI report is particularly telling. It demonstrates that even if the FBI didn’t stage the Toledo event, it knew that neo-Nazi rallies increased the number of card-carrying Nazis in America—and it chose to stage one in Orlando via Gletty anyway.
If all that evidence—Gletty and White’s statements, the evidence that Schoep was an informant, and the smoking-gun evidence that NSM was founded by an informant—weren’t enough, Headline USA also unearthed a document showing that yet another NSM Nazi rally was organized by an informant.
That document, a 2006 FBI report, reveals that a November 2005 “rally against violence” in Kingston, New York was organized by the notorious white supremacist talk show host and former NSM affiliate Hal Turner (his name is redacted in the report, but his identity is corroborated by a separate ADL article).
The Kingston rally held by Turner—who outed himself as an informant in 2009 after he was charged with threatening public officials—was apparently uneventful. An ADL report from the event said it drew about 50 supporters and 100 counterprotestors. The low turnout may have been because Turner was already suspected in the neo-Nazi movement of being an informant due to his provocative calls for violence.
“He has alienated some fellow racists in the past by making threats against them and because others consider him a liability for having urged violence against public figures,” the ADL’s 2005 article noted. “In fact, some white supremacists have said that they would only attend the event if Turner were not the one in charge.”
Turner didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.
Setting the Stage
In a vacuum, the FBI’s mid-2000s neo-Nazi events had little impact on national politics. However, as this series will show, they set the stage for an even larger, and arguably more sinister, FBI operation to target right-wing groups.
Indeed, after Gletty staged the 2006 Orlando rally and had his cover blown nearly a year later, the FBI apparently decided to up the stakes by creating a neo-Nazi motorcycle FBI front group. That front group, the 1st SS Kavallerie Brigade Motorcycle Division—named after a horse-mounted unit of Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS—will be the subject of the next article in this series.
Also in the next article, Headline USA will reveal the document showing then-Director Mueller’s involvement in the operation, which was one of the first right-wing FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force operations in post-9/11 history.
Stay tuned…
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
