Walking a Pitch-Dark Road

In his 1991 autobiography, A Season for Justice, the celebrated civil rights lawyer Morris Dees recounted the courtroom battles and close escapes of his career, with a particular focus on his creative legal strategy to bankrupt the Ku Klux Klan. (Full disclosure: I was one of the book’s editors.) As Dees urged in his introduction, his family and colleagues — and by extension, his readers — should know him by his cases; chapter by chapter, decade by decade, he ticked them off, bringing us into a rancid cesspool of racism.

Scott Payne organizes his own riveting story, Code Name: Pale Horse, in a similar vein, bolstered by the gifts of his talented co-writer, Michelle Shephard. The memoir recreates his assignments as an FBI undercover operative, opening with a harrowing scene set in Rome, Georgia, in 2019, as he meets a cell of white supremacists he found online. He’d reached out to them as “Scott Anderson,” a South Carolina biker and former skinhead, now auditioning for “the Base.” The nearest FBI backup is miles away. His initial contacts go by digital noms de guerre, “Militant Buddhist” and “Pestilence,” underscoring the quasi-religious nature of underground right-wing brotherhoods. Code Name: Pale Horse is nothing if not a spiritual quest.

After launching his narrative, Payne circles back to his childhood and adolescence in Greenville, South Carolina, in the 1980s, caught in the tides of his parents’ stormy relationship. An aspiring musician, he was prone to partying and toying with occultist ideas. He transformed his body with tattoos and piercings. A notion of good versus evil, then, emerges from the page, both raw and elliptical. A conversion to Christianity steered him onto a path of righteousness and a college degree in criminal justice. In a job interview with the Greenville sheriff’s office, he impressed the officer with a list of minor crimes, from petty larceny to driving under the influence; each time he’d eluded detection and gotten away scot-free. The law saw his potential as a skulker, someone who could talk the talk and walk the walk, a perfect candidate to infiltrate white supremacist groups. A star was born.

Payne quickly picked up on the rhythms and lingo of the racists he was investigating. Code Name: Pale Horse evokes the blurry line between calculated performance and real feeling, with Shephard’s crisp prose conveying, in Payne’s rich conversational voice, how and why these hideous networks attract broken souls. More than once Payne feels the tug of community and connection. During an investigation dubbed Operation Roadkill, his relationship with a man identified here as Scott T became more than a performance. “It was about as close a friendship as was possible under the circumstances. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I was going to the dark side, but I loved that guy.”

After joining the FBI in 1998, with stints in New York and Texas, Payne and his young family moved to Knoxville, where he worked the rugged mountains and valleys north of the city and later throughout the South. He signed onto a case involving the Ku Klux Klan — even he can’t quite believe it — by pitching his guitar skills for a gig. They agreed to take him on, and he planned accordingly. “Once I started running through my set list, I had to eliminate some of my favorite songs from some of my favorite artists, including Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Bill Withers, Prince, Hootie,” he recalls. “Heck, even if there was a Black musician in the band, I took them out of the lineup. Then just when I thought I had my tabs ready to go, I saw I still had Jimi in there. … So out went Mr. Hendrix.” He kept his cool and never blew his cover.

Payne mastered the tools of his trade, which positioned him beautifully for his confrontation with the Base and their apocalyptic mindscape. “In twenty-five years of undercover work that I have done, I have never had to burn Bibles, or to set fire to an American flag,” he observes. “I’ve damn sure never been with a group of people who stole a goat and sacrificed it at a pagan ritual, then drank its blood. I did all that over just three days with ‘The Base.’” He keeps us in his grip through the final pages, with allusions to dystopia and the pale horse from Revelation. The memoir itself is a kind of revelation, a glimmering light on our nation’s underbelly and the pitch-dark road ahead as forces of fascism spread amid the land.