Rome, Georgia
July–August 2019

My path to becoming an undercover Nazi began online.

I was in Phoenix, Arizona, helping instruct a Federal Bureau of Investigation course at a time when violent far-right white supremacist groups were proliferating across the US and were on everyone’s mind. Not only was the FBI worried about these organizations but our international partners had been contacting us each time they started investigating these groups in their own countries.

One of the most active organizations at the time was an accelerationist group that called itself Attomwaffen Division. AWD’s mission was to bring about the collapse of society, in the hopes it would spark a race war. Members had initially found each other on an online fascist forum named Iron March, which began in 2011 and was active until it closed down in the fall of 2017. Attomwaffen, which is the German word for atomic weapons, wanted to create small, terroristic cells and were among the first new wave of accelerationists. The Base, which aimed to be a type of umbrella group under which accelerationists, including AWD, could come together, came next. Some members said they belonged to both groups.

I think accelerationism is the most dangerous and overlooked threat facing us today. Although, as a concept, it has been around since the late 1980s, it has never had such a widespread following in the white supremacist community. Those who adhere to it don’t believe there’s a political solution to anything and that Western governments are irrevocably corrupt. What they do believe is society will eventually collapse, either on its own or from a man-made event, and their goal is to speed that up by sowing chaos and political tensions. To accelerate it. After they help spark a race war, they will move in and create a white ethno-state.

The training I was doing in Phoenix was with a good friend of mine from Ohio. He was especially skilled at online undercover investigations into radical extremists, and I remember saying to him, “What are your plans tonight?” and he replied with something like “I was going to get dinner with everyone.”

“How about this,” I said. “Let’s hit the liquor store, swing through a drive-thru, grab our laptops and phones, and meet up by the firepit at the hotel. If you’re good with it, I need you to coach me and help me create a persona online.”

We stayed up drinking until the late evening, bringing my online undercover persona to life. I was posing as a national socialist looking for a white ethno-state and posting horrific Holocaust images, among other memes and photos. A national socialist is what neo-Nazis call themselves. When I teach courses on domestic terrorism, and white supremacism in particular, this is the definition I give: since Hitler believed that ethnic and linguistic diversity had weakened the fortunes of Germany, he saw democracy as a corrosive force, because it placed power in the hands of ethnic minorities, who he claimed had further “weakened and destabilized” the success of his people. Simply put, in order for Germany to be “strong again,” it needed to be made up of a master race, a pure Aryan people who had not been polluted by outside forces and insidious immigrants.

Well, national socialists don’t last long on Facebook, which they refer to as “Jewbook.” Getting kicked off can be a badge of honour. But no matter how hard I tried at first with my racist and horrific posts, I wasn’t getting cancelled. I confess I was not a Facebook guy before this case, so I asked for help from one of my amazing undercover colleagues, who was also an instructor. She nicely pointed out, “Scott . . . you don’t have any friends.” So I added some friends from “People You May Know.” Click click click . . . and I was banned.

Next, I joined the social media app Gab and started reaching out on chat groups such as “Whites Only” or “14 Words” (which is a reference to the white supremacist slogan coined by David Lane).

I also created an email account under an alias and reached out directly to the Base, which had provided an email address on their Gab account. The Ku Klux Klan used to have a phone hotline, so I guess it made sense that the next generation of white supremacists were trying to recruit by email.

My first email, on July 15, 2019, was short and direct: “I’ve been seeing your stuff and I’m definitely interested,” I wrote. “Survival and self-defense . . . I like it.”

Things moved relatively quickly after that. The next day, I got a reply: Ping.

“I’m liking the scrutiny,” I wrote back a day later. “That shows you have a standard. Here’s my info.” I told them I was in my forties and didn’t have military experience but my fitness level was high. For past affiliations, I listed the Hammerskins, a white supremacist group that started in the late ’80s in Texas and were big into white power rock music. I also wrote that I hung with some members of the White Knights, the Klan group from South Carolina, and other motorcycle clubs.

By our third or fourth email that week, they were asking if I was willing to travel as far as Rome, Georgia, for meetups, noting that they had a cell there. “Also, I want you to know that the age range of members is heavily skewed to 18−25. There are a couple members your age. Will this be an issue?” I told them both factors were fine. I’d be happy to travel, and in some groups, “I’m the old man, in others, I’m the young one.”

I was actually forty-eight years old at the time, although I would later tell them “Scott Anderson,” which was my undercover name for this investigation, was forty-four. I had made sure to memorize everything I needed to know about my legend, including the dates I might be asked to cite—such as date of birth or graduation from high school (which would be four years later than my actual dates).

I also knew there were a few older members in the group. One in particular: the elusive founder of the Base, who went by the online names Norman Spear and Roman Wolf. He was actually the first member I talked to. I found out later Roman Wolf was the one answering my email.

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T he public became aware of the Base after Vice published an exposé by journalists Ben Makuch and Mack Lamoureux on November 20, 2018. The headline read “Neo-Nazis Are Organizing Secretive Paramilitary Training Across America.”

“A Neo-Nazi who goes by the alias Norman Spear has launched a project to unify online fascists and link that vast coalition of individuals into a network training new soldiers for a so-called forthcoming ‘race war,’” the story stated. “Spear, who claims to be an Iraq and Afghan war veteran, is a self-proclaimed white nationalist with a significant online following. His latest act involves bringing Neo-Nazis together, regardless of affiliation and ideology, into a militant fascist umbrella organization. His tool for doing this? A social network he calls ‘The Base,’ which is already organizing across the U.S and abroad, specifically geared toward partaking in terrorism.”

The FBI had been investigating the group, and Norman Spear / Roman Wolf in particular, around that time. Especially concerning was a ten-acre block of undeveloped land that he bought in December 2018 near Spokane, Washington, where he was allegedly going to hold a training camp for the Base. But his plans were exposed by an Oregon-based antifascist group known as “Eugene Antifa,” which alerted the local media and law enforcement.

We knew Roman Wolf’s real identity. He was an American citizen, born in New Jersey, in his mid-forties, and as the Vice story noted, he had done time in Iraq as a contractor for the US Department of Justice. His real name was Rinaldo Nazzaro, but that would not be publicly known until the Guardian and BBC outed him in January 2020.

I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for my first call with the Base—the invite to talk came after less than a week of emailing. One of the questions they had asked was whether I knew Siege, which is basically a bible / how-to book for these groups. “I ask because the general philosophy and outlook in Siege underlies The Base and our mission,” the email stated.

James Mason, the book’s author, is still alive, living out his neo-Nazi retirement in northern Colorado, denying any connection to the violence his book has sown but defending what is essentially a call for far-right violent groups to stoke a race war. I hit up my buddy from Ohio to get a copy of the book and made sure to thumb through it before I got on the call, getting a fast education in the group’s hateful verbiage. I was specifically looking for parts in the book I could easily remember and then portray as things I really admired from Mason’s teachings.

I was at home in Tennessee on the sweltering hot and humid Friday in July when I was supposed to accept the call on an encrypted app called Wire, which the email had instructed me to download. I was worried they might ask me to put my camera on and do a 360 of my surroundings, so I decided to walk a little distance from my house into the woods.

With about fifteen minutes to go before the designated time, I was already sweating like crazy and second-guessing my decision to be outside in the woods. Then I looked down at my arm, and it was completely black. It took me a second to realize it was covered in mosquitoes. Screw this, I thought, and ran back to my driveway and climbed into my old truck. I quickly cleared out anything personal, making it as sterile as possible, and drove to an empty movie theatre parking lot. Then I waited.

N azzaro a.k.a. Roman Wolf, started the call saying it would last thirty minutes. But in the end, we talked for about an hour. There’s no script for this type of work—you just have to believe you are who you say you are and then figure out how that person would answer.

As always, I tried to stay as close as possible to who I am. I described my work as a bouncer, gave them my physical appearance, and said I’d hung around with bikers and the Klan (just omitted the essential fact that I did so as an undercover FBI agent). I told Nazzaro that a buddy had suggested I check out Gab after I “kept getting banned from freaking Jewbook.”

“I’m always looking for like-minded brothers, comrades, whatever you want to call it,” I said. “Anything to further the white race and furthering that kind of brotherhood, but real.” Then I mentioned that I had been around Klan groups I’d known were “just posers.”

When Nazzaro asked me what I was looking for in the Base, I answered, “I’m looking for the fourteen words. I’m looking to secure the race, but I don’t think you can do that by yourself.”

A lot of the call was Nazzaro talking, trying to describe the organization—both what they supposedly were and what they weren’t. He stressed more than once that it wasn’t a political organization but more of a pragmatic, “down-to-earth” survivalist group and what they were doing wasn’t illegal.

“They may not like what we’re doing,” he said about law enforcement and the media, which he called “the enemy press.” “They may not like what we stand for, but at the end of the day, everything we’re doing is within the laws.”

Just as the call was wrapping up, he asked the others on the line if they had any other questions. I could detect three other voices, but there may have been more.

“If you were going to develop leadership qualities in somebody, how would you do it?” asked one member, going by the name Landser. It sounded like something you would get in an interview for a corporate position.

“First thing I’m gonna do is lead by example,” I told them and then described two ways of mentoring. You could tear someone down and build them back up. Or you could instill a little confidence and support them.

Next from Landser: “Anything you’re not willing to give up in the pursuit of victory?”

I described my “warrior mentality” and how I would set my mind to something and not stop until it was accomplished. If only they knew how I was applying that right then in my role as an undercover agent.

One of the last questions, again from Landser, was: “Do you think we should make use of useful idiots—i.e., like sending in the stupid ones for suicide missions?”

This time, I couldn’t contain my laugh. “Well, hopefully, you don’t have a lot of idiots in the group.” I wasn’t sure what type of answer he was fishing for, so I opted for being a good team player and added, “If everybody decided that it was a good idea to send the idiot in, and we got one, well, you know . . .”

Nazzaro ended the call saying he liked to give everyone a twenty-four-hour grace period to think things over. It would give me time to think about the Base and whether I wanted to join, and give members the time to discuss what they thought of me.

True to his word, less than twenty-four hours later, I got a text on Wire from him.

Ping.

“We’d like to officially invite you to participate in The Base network. Let me know if you accept.”

I replied quickly. “I consider it an honor and I’m looking forward to it.”

Then I sent a screenshot of that message to all the case teams involved and FBI headquarters.

Excerpted from Code Name: Pale Horse: How I Went Undercover to Expose America’s Nazis by Scott Payne with Michelle Shephard. Copyright © 2025 by Scott Payne. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

Scott Payne

Scott Payne is a retired Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent who spent twenty-eight years in law enforcement. He was also a SWAT team operator and instructor for undercover operations.

Michelle Shephard

Michelle Shephard is an award-winning journalist, author, filmmaker, and podcast host and producer and has covered issues of terrorism and civil rights since the 9/11 attacks.