a story of a brave brave man

there were others before him and unfortunately we'll continue to need others like him in the future. i don't know if people understand what it must be like to go undercover. i'm sure itq's scary as all shite. (and i'm NOT talking about the government infiltrating the friends society-quakers and the like, here. i'm talking about the kkk and organizations who really DO mean harm)

What It's Like to Go Undercover and Infiltrate Some of America's Most Dangerous Hate Groups

By Sonia Scherr, SPLC Intelligence Report.

"White power!"

Nearly 200 racist skinheads, white-robed Klansmen, and other white supremacists chanted racist slogans as they marched through downtown Montgomery, Ala., on a sunny Saturday in March 1991. As they passed the headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mark Carpenter — the leader of a new hate group called the White Reich — yelled out, "[SPLC co-founder] Morris Dees is a racist Jew and a queer!"

He sounded like a bigot brimming with hatred. But Carpenter had a secret. His true identity was Special Agent Bart McEntire of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. For months, he'd been preparing to go undercover to investigate the skinhead underworld in Birmingham, Ala., which at the time was among the most active and violent in the country. To establish his credentials, McEntire had asked an ATF informant to drop his cover identity's name in white supremacist circles. He'd scoured newspaper articles for details about unsolved robberies and bombings he could claim to have committed. And he'd arranged for the Lexington County Sheriff's Department in South Carolina, where he'd begun his law enforcement career, to conjure a record showing that Mark Carpenter had been arrested for illegally possessing explosives.

Finally, he and the White Reich were making their public debut in Montgomery. It was the beginning of an 18-month undercover investigation that took McEntire and fellow ATF agents from Klan rallies throughout the Southeast, to skinhead gatherings deep in the woods of rural Alabama, to a military base in western Georgia...............