(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The first article of this series chronicled the FBI’s mid-2000s program to stage neo-Nazi rallies around the country as a means to conduct surveillance and recruit potential informants.
Those rallies were just the beginning of a sweeping multi-state investigation, Headline USA can reveal.
Indeed, after an FBI informant was exposed in 2007 for organizing a Nazi rally in Orlando the year before, the bureau launched another operation in the same area. Dubbed “Primitive Affliction,” the FBI set up a neo-Nazi motorcycle front group to infiltrate Florida’s right-wing underground.
Federal agencies are known to have used motorcycle front groups cases against targets such as the Hells Angels for drug- and gun-trafficking investigations. However, Headline USA is unaware of such a tactic being employed in a politically charged domestic terrorism case until Primitive Affliction.
This publication has also found that then-FBI Director Robert Mueller had a personal interest in Primitive Affliction, which ran from about 2007 to 2012. Indeed, Mueller was briefed daily on the operation during its final stages, according to a newly unearthed performance review of one undercover cop on the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Because Primitive Affliction collapsed with no terrorism convictions, the case never grabbed the national spotlight. However, a deeper look at the case reveals infiltration and entrapment techniques used by the FBI in 1990s investigations against the Aryan Nations, as well as more recent cases such as the 2020 militia conspiracy to kidnap Michigan’s governor.
Mueller did not respond to an email about Primitive Affliction. The FBI declined to comment.
Reviving the Aryan Nations
In the 1980s and 90s, the Aryan Nations rivaled the Ku Klux Klan as the face of “white hate” in America—and for good reason, having been linked to numerous bank robberies, the assassination of a Jewish radio host and the Oklahoma City bombing, along with other crimes.
But by the mid-2000s, the Aryan Nations was largely decimated by numerous arrests and civil litigation. The group had splintered into various factions around the country. One of its remaining leaders, August Kreis, was desperate to consolidate power.
Working out of a South Carolina mobile home with a man named Joshua Caleb Sutter—who was a known FBI informant since 2003—Kreis attempted several publicity stunts to put his name on the map.
For example, at one point Kreis pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and claimed to seek an alliance with Muslim jihadists. Sutter, who was Kreis’s “minister for Islamic liaison,” also reportedly posted a “message of solidarity and support” to Saddam Hussein on the Aryan Nations Web site. (If Sutter’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he made headlines in 2021, when it was revealed that he earned more than $100,000 from the FBI while running a Satanic publishing house.)
When that didn’t work in attracting new members or donations, Kreis began plotting with another Aryan Nations member, Robert Killian. Like Sutter, Killian turned out to be undercover law enforcement—Killian an undercover cop on the FBI’s JTTF.
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