PDF Summary:Code Name: Pale Horse, by Scott Payne

Former FBI agent Scott Payne infiltrated The Base, a neo-Nazi group planning murders to trigger societal collapse and establish a white ethnostate. In Code Name: Pale Horse, he argues that these “accelerationist” extremists represent America’s most urgent terrorism threat. His account reveals why this evolving threat demands both the sophisticated infiltration techniques and the personal sacrifices that undercover work requires.

Payne details how undercover agents build authentic cover identities, how they document what criminals are saying and planning, and how they prevent violence by enabling prosecutions before attacks occur. His account also reveals the significant costs: psychological trauma, betrayed relationships, and the moral complexity the work demands.

Our guide examines what Payne’s prosecutions reveal about the effectiveness and limitations of undercover work. We also add context on radicalization, deradicalization, and the psychology of undercover work—and further explore how to address the threat Payne documents.

(continued)...

Even with improvements like the Safeguard unit, the problem hasn’t disappeared. Research shows that agents tend to hold themselves together while the work is ongoing, and fall apart afterward. Former undercover officers report higher rates of distress than officers still working undercover—and higher rates than colleagues who never did undercover work. Part of what makes this so hard to fix is that the psychological demands of undercover work and the demands of recovering from it pull in opposite directions. Staying effective in the field requires suppressing doubt, compartmentalizing stress, and projecting confidence, but those same habits make it harder to recognize that something has gone wrong.

Undercover agents experience what Payne describes as the “moral injury” of having to take part in actions that violate their ethical framework. For example, after participating in the Base’s rituals—where the group sacrificed a stolen goat, distributed LSD, and burned Bibles while chanting against America and Christianity—Payne felt spiritually contaminated and contacted his pastor for support. Throughout the book, Payne frames his work through a Christian lens, seeing it as spiritual warfare between light and darkness, good and evil. His faith provided both the moral framework that made the work feel meaningful and the anchor that prevented him from being pulled toward the criminals he befriended.

(Shortform note: Payne uses the term “moral injury” loosely, but researchers use it more precisely to describe the pain that comes not from what was done to you but from what you did—or watched happen, or failed to stop—that put you in conflict with your moral code. That’s categorically different from PTSD, which is a survival problem: The nervous system can’t stand down after a threat. Moral injury is an identity problem—the person who came home doesn’t recognize the moral compass of the person who left. For someone whose identity is organized around a strong religious faith, like Payne’s, that identity problem carries extra weight: A morally injurious event doesn’t just threaten their ethics, but also threatens their relationship with God.)

Agents also pay a cost for betraying genuine connections with the people they spend months or years with. Payne developed what he describes as a real friendship with an Outlaws associate, Scott Towne: They spent hundreds of hours together and believed each would take a bullet for the other. Payne writes that he genuinely loved Towne, illustrating the blurry line between calculated performance and authentic connection that defines undercover work—a psychological complexity that makes a betrayal more painful rather than less.

How the Brain Learns From the Relationships Built During Undercover Work

Payne describes his love for Scott Towne as genuine, and research suggests it probably was. Self-perception theory holds that humans are not always the best judges of their own inner states: We often work out what we feel by watching what we do, the same way we’d read a stranger. This means that how we behave toward someone over time doesn’t just reflect how we feel about them, but helps construct how we feel about them. An undercover agent who spends hundreds of hours listening attentively, sharing meals, watching someone’s back, and laughing at their jokes is doing everything a devoted friend does—and the brain takes notes.

The policing literature takes this risk seriously enough to have named it: The term “undercover Stockholm syndrome” refers to the documented pattern experienced by officers who, after sustained immersive operations, can’t maintain the emotional detachment the job requires. Researchers note that the distress officers experience when they have to betray a target tracks how close the bond became. Payne’s friendship with Towne wasn’t a failure of professionalism—it was a predictable outcome of what the human brain does when it spends long stretches of time behaving as if someone matters. What made Payne’s situation painful wasn’t that the friendship was fake, but that it was real.

The impacts of undercover work on agents’ families can also be severe. Payne writes that his wife, Kara, essentially married law enforcement rather than just marrying him. During undercover operations with the FBI, Payne would be away from home for weeks, and he’d return exhausted and unable to engage meaningfully with family life. He writes that Kara managed their household and two young daughters largely alone. She eventually told Payne that the only way she could endure his dangerous assignments was to surrender her worry to faith—that constantly fearing for his safety would destroy her, so she chose to trust that either Payne’s skills would protect him or, if not, that was in God’s hands rather than hers.

(Shortform note: Scholars have only recently paid attention to what law enforcement marriages cost the non-officer partner, but the costs show up clearly when studied. More than 86% of law enforcement officers in the US are male, which means the person managing the household alone is usually a woman. What Kara describes—surrendering her anxiety rather than trying to manage the threat—is what happens when people believe outcomes are determined less by their own actions than by outside forces. Research suggests that when a situation is genuinely uncontrollable, shifting from “how do I prevent this?” to “how do I live with it?” can be effective; Kara’s faith gave her a framework for making such a shift.)

After the mandatory break the FBI required him to take after the Outlaws investigation, Payne worked on setting better boundaries for himself. He set predetermined limits that forced him to take time off, gave his colleagues permission to alert supervisors when he overworked, and refused to accept every assignment. These strategies helped, but they didn’t eliminate the fundamental strain. Payne retired in 2021 at age 50, recognizing that undercover work grows harder with age, both physically and psychologically. But he contends that the career was worth its personal costs: Even though successful operations can’t eliminate the ideologies that drive criminal behavior, preventing specific acts of violence is a meaningful achievement.

Why There’s a Ceiling on Coping

Payne’s strategies—having accountability partners, setting limits, and resolving to refuse some assignments—represent an upgrade over willpower, and research on self-regulation explains why. The problem with relying on willpower alone is that the brain treats sustained demands on your willpower as a threat worth preempting, so it quietly pulls back on your self-regulatory capacity long before you reach a conscious breaking point. Tools that reduce the need for in-the-moment decisions help because they bypass that dynamic. But the deeper limitation of any intervention is that it addresses how people cope with the conditions of a demanding role—not the conditions that make the work depleting.

For someone in a role that combines danger and deception, there may be a natural limit to how long any set of strategies can hold. FBI agents like Payne become eligible to retire at 50 after 20 years of service, timing that also coincides with something researchers observe more broadly: What compels someone early in a career—the need to prove their abilities, to build a reputation, or to take on the hardest available assignment—tends to look different by midlife. Researchers studying what they call “encore career” transitions find that people who successfully make this kind of move typically begin the process around age 50, when a different set of questions starts to feel more pressing than the ones that drove them before.

Why Does Undercover Work Matter Now?

Though undercover work is harrowing, Payne contends it’s increasingly necessary to counter accelerationist white supremacy, which he sees as the most urgent domestic terrorism threat facing the US. He invokes the 9/11 Commission Report, which cited a “failure of imagination,” where officials didn’t anticipate that terrorists could hijack planes as weapons, as the reason for the government’s inability to prevent the attacks. Payne argues that a similar failure constrains Americans’ ability to envision the harm that accelerationist terrorism can inflict. But we don’t need to imagine what these extremists might do: He and other FBI agents have witnessed these groups’ planning firsthand and documented their preparations for mass violence.

What “Failure of Imagination” Really Meant

Payne borrows the “failure of imagination” concept from the 9/11 Commission, but the phrase is more contested than its canonical status suggests. The Commission’s report told a complex story, one in which agencies were poorly structured for the threats they faced, Congress failed in its oversight role, and officials couldn’t settle the question of whether Al Qaeda was truly unprecedented or just a more dangerous version of existing threats. But the phrase’s durability isn’t coincidental. A diagnosis of a collective failure of imagination lands on no one in particular—not on officials who dismissed warnings, agencies that hoarded intelligence, or congressional committees that looked the other way. That diffuseness was arguably the point.

The diagnosis also doesn’t quite fit the accelerationism case. The imagination is present in agents’ documentation, in congressional hearings, and in research on extremism. White supremacists were responsible for more than half of the 443 deaths caused by domestic extremists between 2012 and 2021, but a Senate investigation found that the agencies tracking this violence (the DHS and the FBI) hadn’t even complied with a 2019 law requiring them to report basic data on domestic terrorist attacks, nor had they reallocated resources toward the threat. The gap isn’t between what we can imagine and what’s happening, but between what we already know and what we’ve chosen to do about it.

Understanding what makes accelerationism distinct from other forms of extremism—and how it represents an evolution in domestic terrorism—is essential to grasping why Payne considers the undercover work it takes to expose these groups worthwhile despite its costs.

What Accelerationism Is, and Why It’s Different

Payne explains that accelerationist ideology holds that Western governments can’t be reformed through democratic politics because they’re irredeemably corrupt, weakened by multiculturalism and immigration. Accelerationists believe society will collapse under these internal contradictions, and their goal is to hasten this collapse through violence and chaos. They envision that during the collapse, violent conflict will erupt between racial groups—a race war they believe white people will win, enabling them to establish a white ethnostate: territories governed by and for white people, whether in the Pacific Northwest, Appalachia, or other regions. They use the term “Boogaloo” to refer to this collapse and subsequent race war.

Accelerationists organize in small cells that operate autonomously while maintaining loose connections to broader movements. They draw ideological inspiration from Siege by James Mason, a collection of essays originally written in the 1980s that gained influence after being rediscovered by neo-Nazi forums in 2015. The book advocates for what Mason calls a “leaderless resistance” of small groups conducting guerrilla attacks. It suggests tactics including derailing trains, poisoning water supplies, assassinating politicians, and conducting mass shootings targeting racial minorities—not to achieve specific policy outcomes, but to trigger the breakdown that could lead to race war and allow the establishment of white ethnostates.

This ideology differs from other forms of extremism in the US. According to Payne, groups like the Ku Klux Klan have sought social and political acceptance, operating within the system while advocating hateful positions. Militia groups and organizations like the Proud Boys see themselves as defending constitutional rights rather than destroying the system: They may prepare for societal collapse, but don’t work to cause it. Payne draws a parallel to international terror groups: The Base—founded in 2018 by Rinaldo Nazzaro, a former intelligence contractor—chose a name that means the same as Al Qaeda in English. Like Al Qaeda, the Base organizes in cells, uses encrypted communications, and plans attacks targeting civilians.

The Intellectual History of Accelerationism

White supremacist movements had spent decades nursing their fears about racial decline, demographic change, and a government they considered an enemy of white interests. What separated Mason from his contemporaries wasn’t his hatreds, but his ideas about what to do with them. While organizations like the KKK pursued legitimacy by getting their sympathizers into elected office, cultivating mainstream support, and working through legal and political channels, Mason thought this was delusional. Siege, the newsletter he published through the early 1980s, argued that society was so corrupt it couldn’t be remade to serve white supremacy—it had to be brought down. He called for “total war against the system.”

In his newsletter, Mason advocated for the leaderless, lone-wolf terrorist tactics Payne cites, drawing on a Cold War-era CIA strategy designed by intelligence officer Ulius Amoss to protect anti-Soviet underground networks from communist infiltrators. KKK leader Louis Beam adapted the concept for white supremacist groups in a 1983 essay, and Mason agreed that small, self-directed groups sharing an ideology, but no chain of command, would be hard for authorities to dismantle. After Mason stopped publishing his newsletter in 1986, his writing spent two decades in obscurity. The text’s second life began in 2015, when Iron March, a neo-Nazi online forum, republished it and built an ideological subculture around it.

The neo-Nazi terrorist group Atomwaffen Division, which formed on Iron March that same year, made Siege mandatory reading for its members. The Base and a wave of international groups—Sonnenkreig Division (UK), Feuerkrieg Division (Estonia), and Antipodean Resistance (Australia)—followed directly in its wake. A final irony worth noting: The word “accelerationism,” which was applied to Mason’s work retroactively, was borrowed from the academic left, where post-Marxist philosophers used it to describe the idea that intensifying the contradictions of capitalism would hasten its collapse toward revolution and open the door to something better. Extremists see the tactic as a way to achieve racial domination.

Payne notes that accelerationists support political outcomes they personally oppose if they think those outcomes might hasten societal decline. He describes Base members who voted for Democratic candidates, despite their own far-right views, reasoning that Democrats would weaken law enforcement and military institutions. Members similarly supported Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 because they hoped those protests would escalate into wider violence. Payne notes that by 2021, 90% of white nationalist groups had adopted accelerationist ideology, a dramatic shift from the 1980s through the early 2000s, when explicit calls for societal collapse would have been considered counterproductive within most extremist movements.

(Shortform note: The transplant of accelerationism from Marxist philosophy onto the ideology of white supremacy helps explain Payne’s observation that members of The Base were willing to support causes they despise and vote for candidates they hate. They welcome any disorder that might crack the foundations of what they call “the System,” a term they capitalize to signal that they see government, media, law enforcement, and democratic institutions not as separate things that can be fixed, but as a single corrupt structure that must come down entirely. They see every fracture in the social order as progress. But scholars say that what accelerationists want on the other side of collapse is far less developed than their vision of destruction.)

What’s Happened to The Base—and to Accelerationism More Broadly?

When The Base chose its name, it was announcing a structural ambition. “Al Qaeda” means “the base,” and it’s been difficult to dismantle because its organizing principle lives in its worldview—that secular governments need to be overthrown—not in a chain of command. The Base adopted the same structural logic, which is why a 2020 takedown of its US operations stemming from Paynes’s work had only a temporary effect. Nazzaro rebuilt the organization: The Base has been active in at least 18 countries since 2023, and in 2024 became the first far-right group ever added to the EU’s terrorist list. In June 2025, Nazzaro said he remained hostile toward the US government.

Accelerationism is a slippery target because it can be grafted onto any ideology. Three 2019 mass shootings (in Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton) were linked to accelerationist thinking, despite the fact that the Dayton shooter self-identified as a socialist. This agnosticism helps explain why Payne’s figure of 90% adoption among white nationalist groups is hard to verify: The claim tracks the spread of a tactic, not the membership of an organization. But a 2024 study that analyzed 66 million words posted on the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront over two decades found accelerationist sentiment woven through discussions across the entire period. The idea has spread—and proven more durable than any single group.

Why Traditional Law Enforcement Can’t Stop It

According to Payne, accelerationist groups pose significant investigative challenges that traditional law enforcement methods struggle to address, which makes the undercover techniques that Payne and other FBI agents have honed essential. These criminal groups recruit primarily online, enabling them to reach isolated people across vast geographic areas through social media, gaming communities, and encrypted chat apps. The Base recruited through posts on platforms like Gab that included QR codes leading to propaganda videos. This distributed model means that shutting down one physical location or arresting one organizer barely disrupts the broader network.

Members also employ what Payne sees as sophisticated operational security. They use encrypted applications to communicate, adopt pseudonyms to obscure their identities, and check for recording devices and tracking equipment (countermeasures that require sophisticated undercover work to overcome, though they didn’t discover Payne’s). The movement’s international reach further complicates investigation: The Base has cells in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and South Africa. Nazzaro, who’d worked for the FBI and the Pentagon, moved to Russia in 2017, around the time he founded The Base, apparently to avoid consequences in the US. He obtained Russian citizenship, placing him beyond the reach of US law enforcement.

A 40-Year-Old Playbook With New Technology

The cell structure, encrypted communications, and online recruiting that make accelerationist groups hard to monitor aren’t a unified strategy, but what happens when people who want to stay hidden adopt modern tools. The roots of this playbook go back to 1983, when Louis Beam popularized the idea of “leaderless resistance” that James Mason would adopt. Beam had watched federal prosecutions dismantle hierarchical white supremacist groups and realized a distributed structure needed a decentralized way to communicate. At an Aryan Nations Congress, Beam introduced a white supremacist computer bulletin board, a precursor to online forums, accessible only by dialing in directly over a phone line.

Encrypted apps are just the current version of this 1983 technology: What’s changed is the scale at which people who subscribe to extreme ideologies can make connections with one another. The spread of far-right radicalization behaves like a “complex contagion”—it doesn’t take hold from a single encounter but requires sustained contact with reinforcing material and people. Online communities are the machinery for producing that kind of sustained contact at scale. People who’ve experienced trauma or feel a deep sense of marginalization are more open to extremist narratives, but the men Payne describes aren’t a new type of person: They’re an old type of person with a new way of finding each other.

Payne’s months-long infiltration of The Base illustrates what undercover work can achieve against extremist networks. Nazzaro led the organization by using encrypted communications from Russia. Members underwent vetting, including encrypted phone interviews and in-person meetings. They developed concrete murder plots in Georgia and Delaware and conducted actual attacks, including synagogue vandalism in Michigan and Wisconsin in September 2019. Payne’s infiltration led to a coordinated law enforcement response in January 2020. The takedown prevented planned murders and disrupted the Base’s US operations, but as Payne notes, disrupting one organization doesn’t eliminate the broader threat.

Why Russia?

The vision of a racially homogeneous white homeland is more geographically agnostic than most Americans realize. In the 1890s, Australian settlers founded a whites-only colony in Paraguay. Since the 1980s, American white supremacists have promoted a plan to carve out an ethnostate in the Pacific Northwest. The Base has set its sights on Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains. The geography shifts, but the underlying fantasy does not. The movement has always been transnational, even when it presents itself as defending a particular national identity—which suggests Nazzaro’s relocation is about more than legal strategy.

Russia under Vladimir Putin has emerged as a hub for white nationalist networks: David Duke characterized Putin’s Russia as “the key to white survival” and Richard Spencer sees it as “the sole white power in the world.” Scholars see Putin’s approach to far-right white nationalist groups as strategic and opportunistic: Groups who could threaten his power in Russia get shut down, while those whose destabilizing influence lands elsewhere are allowed to operate freely. The Russian Imperial Movement runs paramilitary training camps near St. Petersburg for neo-Nazis, and philosopher Aleksandr Dugin’s view that liberalism, Marxism, and fascism have all failed has been adopted by far-right groups across Europe.

Whether Nazzaro is a true believer using Russia as a convenient sanctuary, a Russian intelligence asset (as some members of The Base have alleged) or something in between remains unproven—he denies any ties to Russian security services. But Nazzaro remains beyond the reach of American courts: Russia has no extradition arrangement with the US, and Putin shows no interest in creating one. In a significant escalation in 2025, The Base has started soliciting paid volunteers to conduct assassinations and sabotage operations inside Ukraine—the first time the group has made its alignment with Russian geopolitical objectives explicit rather than incidental.

What This Means for the Future

Despite successful prosecutions, the accelerationist threat persists. Payne notes that in August 2023, a white gunman inspired by accelerationist ideas entered a Jacksonville, Florida Dollar General store and killed three Black victims with weapons including a rifle decorated with swastikas. From Payne’s perspective, the persistence of accelerationist ideas illustrates several realities about domestic extremism. Organizations rebuild after disruptions. The ideology spreads online faster than arrests can contain it, particularly given the 90% of white nationalist groups that have adopted accelerationist thinking. Root causes including isolation, economic marginalization, and online radicalization remain largely unaddressed.

(Shortform note: Payne treats the internet as an accelerant—a tool that lets extremist groups recruit faster than law enforcement can respond. That’s well-supported by the evidence, but researchers who study radicalization caution against treating the internet as the root cause of the problem. The dominant view in the field is that the internet shapes and speeds up a journey that begins elsewhere: in experiences of social rejection, economic frustration, and a hunger for belonging and purpose. With the internet, these communities can find people who are already on the margins—not because the internet creates that marginality, but because isolation tends to redirect people online, where extremist communities reach them before anyone else does.)

The Threat Undercover Work Can’t Reach

Undercover agents infiltrate organized groups, but the most lethal domestic attacks are increasingly carried out by people who never join a formal group at all. Research on over a thousand people convicted of ideologically motivated crimes found that the more formally organized an extremist group becomes, the less likely its members are to perpetrate acts of mass violence. The reason is almost mundane: Groups with public profiles and recruiting infrastructure have strong incentives to avoid the scrutiny that follows violence. People who act alone tend to be those who couldn’t make it into a group or were pushed out of one.

Authorities found no evidence that the Jacksonville shooter belonged to The Base or any other organized group. What he shared with them was something harder to police: a violent worldview learned in the same online spaces. His manifesto expressed hope that his attack would inspire others to act, a pattern among white supremacist killers, where isolation doesn’t necessarily mean disconnection. Accelerationist communities have an elaborate apparatus for canonizing mass killers, which scholars call “Saints Culture”: Attackers are elevated to quasi-religious figures, commemorated on monthly calendars and in propaganda.

The point isn’t to belong during one’s life, but to be remembered as one of the movement’s martyrs. The Jacksonville shooter existed within this ecosystem: seeing its imagery, absorbing its logic, and hoping for a place in its canon. Even though they act alone, these attackers see themselves as part of a community, one that offers recognition without requiring anyone to attend a real-life meeting. That’s what makes them and the spread of their ideas so difficult to stop: There’s no gathering for an agent to join, no conspiracy to disrupt, and no singular group to take down—just a long lineage of accelerationist violence for attackers to seek to join.

Payne argues that undercover work achieves meaningful but limited outcomes. It prevents specific murders, incapacitates individuals who are known to be dangerous, and disrupts particular organizations and the crimes they plan, but it can’t eliminate the conditions that produce extremism, and it can’t prevent all future violence. This is why Payne emphasizes ongoing vigilance—to ensure Americans understand that domestic terrorism is a threat that requires sustained attention from law enforcement, policymakers, and the public, not a problem that can be solved through any single intervention.

Catching Terrorists versus Preventing Them

Payne makes a case for why undercover work matters, but he doesn’t explore what else needs to happen—and researchers who study radicalization have a lot to say about that gap. Research funded by the National Institute of Justice, including interviews with former white supremacists and their families, finds that what draws people into extremist movements looks less like ideological conviction than a personal crisis: a lost job, a social rupture, a trauma with no outlet, or a need for belonging that ordinary life has failed to meet. That finding matters for policy: If prosecution removes a dangerous individual without addressing the conditions that made radicalization appealing in the first place, the pipeline stays open.

Organizations like Life After Hate, which is staffed by former extremists, work to address this gap, but they point to a complication that Payne’s account omits: Putting someone in prison separates them from their extremist cell, but it doesn’t separate them from their beliefs. Researchers distinguish these two outcomes—physical exit from a group versus ideological change—and find they often diverge. Further, people trying to counteract the spread of extremist ideologies are largely operating without a map: There are no industry standards, rigorous studies are rare, and organizations have historically scraped by on minimal funding while trying to document what they’re learning as they go.

Moreover, the second Trump administration has largely moved in the opposite direction from what experts recommend. The FBI has transferred personnel out of its Domestic Terrorism Operations Section, the Department of Homeland Security has cut 30% of its terrorism prevention workforce, and the administration defunded a database for tracking domestic terrorism cases. At the same time, the FBI under Trump’s administration has effectively narrowed its working definition of domestic terrorism: The label has been applied to Tesla vandals and political protesters, while prosecutorial attention to the far-right networks Payne describes has diminished.