Hal Turner:
Portrait of a Fed Agent Provocateur

Hal Turner: All the warning signs were there.

Editor’s Note: It is rather astonishing that given the level of anti-white provocation in this country that the US government needs to manufacture acts of violent white resistance. But such has been the pattern from the beginning of the civil rights movement to the present day. Hal Turner’s open advocacy of violent acts perfectly fits the profile of a federal agent provocateur. The Turners of the world will continue to pick off those who are more macho than intelligent. This might even be good for the movement in the long run. Studying cases like Turner’s will help you fall into the latter rather than the former camp.

The common denominator of agents provocateurs seems to be that they advocate particular, concrete acts of lawbreaking, especially violence, and they do so in a way that is easily monitored and documented by the government. It is a mistake to think that all such people will be patently insincere, tepid, or uninformed advocates of white nationalism. Often informants are very sincere people who are ensnared through vanity or careless lawbreaking then held and squeezed by blackmail. As the Turner case shows, the FBI probably dropped him as an informant because, ironically, he was too sincere about his beliefs.

“Records show feds used ultra-right radio host for years”
NorthJersey.com, Sunday, November 29, 2009
by Mike Kelly and Peter J. Sampson

They called him “Valhalla.”

But it was more than a nickname.

For more than five years, Hal Turner of North Bergen lived a double life.

The public knew him as an ultra-right-wing radio talk show host and Internet blogger with an audience of neo-Nazis and white supremacists attracted to his scorched-earth racism and bare-knuckles bashing of public figures. But to the FBI, and its expanding domestic counter-terror intelligence operations in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Turner was “Valhalla” — his code name as an informant who spied on his own controversial followers.

Turner’s clandestine past was confirmed this past summer when he was jailed on charges that he made threats on his blog against three federal judges in Chicago. In court after his arrest, federal prosecutors acknowledged Turner’s FBI ties but downplayed his importance and even described him as “unproductive.”

But an investigation by The Record — based on government documents, e-mails, court records and almost 20 hours of jailhouse interviews with Turner — shows that federal authorities made frequent use of Turner in its battle against domestic terrorism.

As Turner took to his radio show and blog to say that those who opposed his extremist views deserve to die, he 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. Later, he was sent undercover to Brazil where he reported a plot to send non-military supplies to anti-American Iraqi resistance fighters. Sometimes he signed “Valhalla” on his FBI payment receipts instead of his own name.

His dual life of shock jock and informant offers a window into the murky realm of domestic intelligence in the years after the Sept. 11 terror attacks — in particular, the difficult choices for the FBI in penetrating controversial fringe groups with equally controversial informants.

In interviews, conducted before Turner was released on bail, he said the FBI coached him to make racist, anti-Semitic and other threatening statements and now he feels double-crossed by the bureau after his arrest. The documents reviewed by The Record, however, show repeated instances of federal agents admonishing Turner for his extremism. . . . Read the whole article.