Code Name: Pale Horse

February 15, 2025
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.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 13, 2025
In this gripping debut memoir, former FBI agent Payne details how he took down members of the Base, a white supremacist group, in 2020. Payne grew up in South Carolina and joined the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office in 1993, when he was 22. He was swiftly promoted from patrol to the narcotics squad, where he became a star investigator before joining the Bureau in 1998. In 2016, Payne joined the Joint Terrorism Task Force and started targeting domestic terror groups. After his bosses learned about the Base, Payne was assigned to infiltrate it, and joined the group’s military-style training program as a new recruit. Eventually, he came to regard the group’s scheme to ignite an all-out race war through vandalism, propaganda, and terrorist attacks as “the most dangerous and overlooked threat facing us today.” His work paid off with the arrests of multiple group members on conspiracy charges. Payne nimbly juggles a pulse-pounding account of his undercover efforts with a poignant glimpse at the toll his work took on his wife and young daughter. Fans of Joseph Pistone’s Donnie Brasco should snap this up. Agent: Larry Weissman, Larry Weissman Literary.

March 1, 2025
Payne served as an undercover agent for the FBI for decades, assuming the identity of a variety of fringe players in both the crime underworld and the white supremacist movement. His affability won him the trust of everyone from members of the violent Outlaw Motorcycle Club to fearsome shot callers in the Aryan Nation prison gang. Often, Payne would be working multiple cases, requiring large amounts of time, resources, and compartmentalization. The cloak-and-dagger lifestyle was not always easy to shed in Payne's off-hours and took a psychological toll. Payne's memoir reveals the steel resolve that ran through him as he sought to undermine the efforts of domestic terrorist groups such as Neo-Nazi organization "The Base". The world of an undercover cop has never been more compelling. Payne's firsthand experience puts readers in the front row, observing the setbacks, triumphs, and inner workings of undercover operations. An enlightening, harrowing, and ultimately fulfilling read.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.