The Blood Flag

by James W. Huston

  He finally asked. “Is that it?”

  “No,” I answered. “Tell me whether this is a big problem or just a side show we don’t have to worry about.”

  “In Germany?”

  “No, everywhere. In the U.S., Germany, wherever.”

  He sat forward and leaned his elbows on the desk. “It’s a big problem and it’s getting bigger. Here and elsewhere. It’s like a poison. It infects almost every society that it touches.”

  “And that’s what you’re working on? That’s what you’re doing?”

  “Here in the U.S. Yeah. I’m trying. It’s a tough nut.”

  “What’s so tough about it?”

  “Well, mostly the First Amendment. In the U.S. these assholes can say anything they want as long as it doesn’t call for the violent overthrow of the United States, or incite riots or conspire to commit crimes. But what’s it to you? Just because you encountered these guys in Germany, now it’s your thing?”

  I stood up to leave. I shrugged. “It just got to me.”

  He sat back and scratched his gray hair. “We can do some things about it, but we can’t make them think differently.”

  “But you said it’s getting worse.”

  “It is.”

  I looked out into the hallway and thought. I looked back at him. “Then we’ve got to do more. This is bullshit.”

  He stood and tucked his shirt into his overly tight belt. “If you’re that interested, then you better come with me.”

  “For what?”

  “There’s somebody I want you to meet.”

  * * *

  We pulled out of the parking garage in his Honda Accord. “Where we going?”

  “To meet somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “You wondered what we were doing about all these neo-Nazis. Well, maybe you should meet one. He’s one of our best CIs.”

  This was unusual, to say the least. We didn’t get to meet other agents’ confidential informants unless we were working the program. But if he was going to let me meet him, I wasn’t about to let the opportunity pass.

  We drove away from D.C. down State Route 29 into rural Virginia and finally entered Warrenton. We parked on Main Street and went into the Southern Café. Karl picked a booth toward the back. He glanced at his watch and said, “He won’t be here for another fifteen minutes.”

  The waitress came over and brought us coffee, even though we hadn’t asked for any.

  “Who are we waiting for?”

  “You’ll know as soon as he steps into the restaurant. I promise,” he said cryptically as he sipped his black coffee.

  I took in everything in the café. It was right out of an American History magazine: red vinyl booths with hard white tables, and a long counter flanked by silver pedestal stools with red vinyl seats. It was mostly clean, but I noticed some dead flies in the corners of the large front windows. It was eleven o’clock. The place smelled of bacon and toast. We sat awkwardly on the same side of the booth facing the front door. The diner held about sixty people, but there were no more than fifteen people there at the time. The coffee was good and fresh. The waitress was quick to recognize we didn’t seem particularly hungry, but felt obligated to give us menus. We likewise felt obligated to order, but told her we would wait until our other friend arrived.

  Finally the door opened and a man walked in slowly. I felt Karl’s elbow touch mine as he looked at his coffee.

  I looked up and tried not to show my surprise. I’m not sure what I expected, but this wasn’t it. He was about my height, five foot ten inches, but had to outweigh me by fifty pounds. He was maybe two thirty or two forty. I’m told I can look intimidating. But this guy was in a different league.

  He was built like a weight lifter with the neck of a bull. His buzzed head accentuated his muscular build and ferocious look; yet nothing about his appearance had the impact of his tattoos: an iron cross on his throat and two tilted swastikas on either side of his neck. He was wearing a white T-shirt, just a plain white T-shirt with a round neck. The tattoos were dark and bold and incredibly aggressive. His shoulders had tattoos that you could see through the white material of his T-shirt but not enough to identify them.

  The tattoos extended down his arms, outside the sleeve of his T-shirt down to his wrists. As he walked with his hands in his pockets I couldn’t make out what the tattoos were on his arms. I tried not to stare. He was looking me right in the eye, which made it difficult to do much more surveying of him. He was the most intimidating person I had ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of intimidating people. He looked like he could kill you in one motion and would be more than happy to if you gave him a reason.

  He slid into the booth across from me. He glanced at Karl, and then looked back at me. The waitress put a mug of coffee in front of him, which he took in his hand. I noticed that there were letters tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand. On the third knuckle of his ring finger was the capital letter H, and on his middle finger knuckle was the letter I, and on his first finger was the letter T. When he made a fist you could see HIT on his right hand. Nice. It’s probably what people saw right before he smashed them in the face.

  He continued to look at me as I stared at his knuckles. “Who the hell are you?”

  Karl intervened. “This is Kyle Morrissey. He’s with the Bureau.”

  He nodded and said intensely, “I told you. I don’t want to talk to anybody except you.”

  “Anything you can say to me you can say to him.”

  The man looked at Karl. “Why him?”

  “He had a recent experience that was unsettling. He wants to know what can be done.”

  He looked back at me, bored. “What experience?”

  I extended my hand to shake his. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  He looked at my hand and did not shake it. “What experience?”

  I lowered my hand. “What’s your name?”

  He stared at me like he was trying to bore a hole through me. He had very dark blue eyes, the color of an ocean. His eyebrows were blonde. Finally, he said, “Jedediah.”

  “Nice to meet you, Jedediah. What’s your last name?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I just think it’s polite.”

  “What makes you think I’m polite?”

  I leaned forward slightly. “Nothing.”

  “Thom. And that’s spelled T-h-o-m. Pronounced ‘Tom.’”

  “Interesting. Where are you from, Jedediah?”

  “You’ve got a lot of questions. Where are you from?”

  “Midwest, originally.”

  “So. You’re a Yankee?” His southern accent was very noticeable. He truly seemed offended that I was from the North.

  “That bother you?”

  “Just means you couldn’t be a member.”

  “Of what?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I still would love to know where you’re from.”

  “Irmo.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “South Carolina.”

  He pronounced it Sath Kaylina. “What part of the state?”

  “Near Columbia.” Klumbya with a barely perceptible “ah” at the end of it. More implicit than overt. Klumb. He went on, “So what’s your story?”

  I began telling him about my experience in Recklinghausen. He watched me carefully, holding me in his stare. I told him about Normandy, about the Legion of Honor, and my father’s flag in the basement. And I told him about the neo-Nazi group marching in black hoods with white masks and Nazi armbands.

  He asked, “That bothered you?”

  “Yeah. Having just been to Normandy it stunned me that there are still neo-Nazis around ready to cause more problems.”

  He leaned back slightly and played with his coffee cup. I then could
see the tattoo marks on his first, second, and third knuckles of his left hand. L-E-R. Ah. When he put his two fists out together his hands spelled HITLER. He looked at me with a look that I couldn’t quite identify. Something between pity and disgust. He said, “So this was news to you? That there were still Nazis around?”

  “I was surprised that they were so overt about it.”

  He nodded slowly and stared down at his cup.

  I looked at him and looked back at Karl, then looked at him again. “So what can we do about it?”

  “Do about what?”

  “Nazism. Neo-Nazis. How do we shut them down?”

  Jedediah sat up taller and rested his massive arms on the table. He looked like an MMA fighter. I found myself studying the tattoos to try to make sense of them. I looked back at his face. He finally said, “You can’t. There are a million neo-Nazi groups in this country alone. Some of them are run by idiots. Some of them are run by men who are smarter than you are. I know you don’t think that’s true, but it is. Smart in a twisted genius sort of way. They don’t talk to each other that much, sometimes they hate each other, and there are rivalries, conflicts, and attempts to undermine each other. They think a lot of the same things, but they aren’t united. So even if you took out two or three groups, it wouldn’t have any effect on the others. They’d probably be glad. Like rival gangs. Everybody wants to be the big-ass neo-Nazi group in the country with a hundred thousand followers; the group that marches right down on the capital one day wearing black shirts and swastikas. But until somebody gets those numbers, until they can dwarf all the others, you can’t take them all out at once. You have to do it one at a time. And it’s not easy. You have to catch them committing a crime. First Amendment protects almost everything they say in the U.S., so it turns into criminal investigations, which is pretty tough because they don’t act like most gangs. They don’t sell crack or run prostitutes. They think that’s all evil. They are all about being tough, wearing steel-toe boots, strutting around, spouting slogans, and attacking people of other races and religions. And waiting for the great race war that is always in the future.”

  “We’ve got to be able to do something.”

  “We are doing something. That’s why I’m here. What I don’t get is why you’re here.”

  “Because I want to be a part of it. I want to help. I want to take them down.”

  “Who?”

  Karl interjected, “Look Kyle, Jedediah and I are here to talk about what he has learned. This is what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to take down some organizations inside the U.S., and he’s helping us. So why don’t we start talking about that and then maybe we can get back to some other ideas. Okay?”

  I nodded, sat back, and then drank my cooling coffee. I looked for the waitress to refill it. She saw me looking and came over with the pot.

  Karl said to Jedediah, “Tell Kyle about your group.”

  He nodded. “I am the Vice President of the Southern Volk. Spelled V-o-l-k, but pronounced “folk,” of course, because it’s a German word. So the Southern Volk is an openly neo-Nazi organization. We’re sort of new, but we’re trying to unify as many of the other neo-Nazi groups as we can in the South. We’re not just in the South, but we have Southern roots, and play on the Confederacy. A lot of Southern boys who spout phrases like, “The South shall rise again!” are pretty easy prey. It’s not hard to pull them over. They all want to belong to something. They all want to defend some right that they think is being trampled on by somebody. Then, once you get them in, getting them to buy off on even some of our crazier stuff isn’t that tough. A lot of them aren’t very well educated, and they want to be in a gang without being in a gang. They’re not intellectuals. They want to be tough guys, and be feared. And that requires a group.”

  “You’re pretty intimidating yourself.”

  “True.”

  “I wouldn’t want to mess with you, even if I had a gun.”

  “You do have a gun. And you still don’t want to mess with me. I can see it in your eyes.”

  “You sound like you still buy this stuff.”

  He looked at me with a gaze I hadn’t seen and said nothing.

  I continued. “Tell me how you got here today.”

  Karl intervened, “Another time. Jedediah has something he wants to tell me.”

  I nodded, sat back, and remained quiet.

  Karl said to Jedediah, “So what’s up?”

  Jedediah got an animated look on his face. He lowered his voice. “I still don’t know this guy,” he said pointing at me. “You I trust. Him, I don’t.”

  “Well, he can wait in the car if you want.”

  Jedediah considered.

  I didn’t want to miss this. I said, “I’ve run dozens of CIs. Never had a problem with any of them. You have my word I won’t do anything without Karl’s approval and involvement.”

  He sat silently, drank his coffee, and looked at Karl. “We got a visit.”

  Karl asked, “From who?”

  He moved his eyes from Karl to me and back. “We don’t want anything to do with other groups. You know that. If they screw up, we don’t want them to tar us. Nobody’s as pure as we are. But there’s been a movement over the past couple of years to unify. The world-wide black shirts of the twenty-first century.”

  “You mean brown shirts?” I said.

  Jedediah regarded me with disdain. “Not the SA, the SS.” He looked toward Karl, “Last week we got a visit from a German. Says he’s only visiting three groups. The Aryan Nation, the Southern Volk, and the National Socialist Movement.”

  Karl asked, “What did he want?”

  Jedediah shook his head. “One of the most amazing guys I’ve ever met. Speaks English perfectly, slight German accent, not the usual type. More like a politician. But man is he a true believer. And rich. Apparently, he’s well known in Germany. But this guy—”

  “Got a name?” Karl asked.

  “Yeah. Rolf Eidhalt. Says he owns a castle. And has one goal, the unification of all the neo-Nazi movements in the entire world. Not just about Germany, it’s about all of Western Europe and the British Commonwealth, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, everywhere the population is predominantly white. And establishing the Aryan world against the rise of Islam, brown people, immigrants, and Jews. This guy is as serious as a heart attack, but the thing is, he’s no muscle head. He’s not a stick swinging kind of a guy. He’s not out there just to break windows. He’s out there to make political change using us. He wants to unify us, get us all to sign off on his manifesto, all wearing the same things . . . and when the day comes, then the day really comes.”

  I sat forward slightly, fascinated. “Who is he? How does he have any authority to meet with groups in the United States? How does anybody know about him?”

  “Oh everybody knows about him in my world. Two years ago he bought that castle in southern Germany and had it refurbished. Been using it as a training base for neo-Nazi groups. Physical training, sure, but he’s really talking about dogma, getting people on the same page about what we think and what we want. And if he gets everybody to agree, he can theoretically unite all the neo-Nazi groups in the world under his direction. And he’s only talking to long-established people. Nobody who could rat him out.”

  I said, “Except for you.”

  “Except for me.”

  Karl asked, “How does he propose to do this? How does he propose to unite everybody?”

  Jedediah took a deep drink from his water glass. “First, he said ‘read Mein Kampf.’ Second, we have to read and agree to the manifesto. It’s—”

  Karl interjected, “Do you have a copy of the manifesto?”

  “No, not yet. He’s going to email it to us.”

  I was surprised. “Email? That’s pretty traceable.”

  “Not the way he does it.”

 
“Go on,” I said.

  “Okay, read Mein Kampf, sign off on the manifesto, and last is we have to authenticate.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He had a German word for it. I can’t remember what it was. I wrote it down because I’d never heard of it before.”

  “Do you speak German?”

  “Self-taught.”

  “How?”

  “When I first joined the Southern Volk, the leader said that the people who would rise to the top would be those who could read Mein Kampf in German. The hardest part of that is finding a copy in German. It has been illegal in Germany for decades. It’s difficult to find, but it can be done. Everything’s on the Internet, just a little pricey sometimes. Then you have to learn enough German to read it. The two of us who actually tried it, and found copies, basically just read through it with a German dictionary. And, of course, I had an English copy right next to it that I read at the same time so it wasn’t that tough. And copies in English are easy to come by. You can find them in any used bookstore for about two bucks.”

  Karl pushed, “So what was the German word?”

  “Can’t remember. I just remember that it basically meant we had to authenticate.”

  “What did he mean by it?”

  “Prove ourselves.”

  “How?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Well, what did you take it to mean?”

  “Something big, something dramatic. Something that will show him that we are the future of the movement in the United States.”

  Karl looked at me and thought for a moment. “So he wants you to do something that will show your movement is one of the future leaders.”

  “Yeah. And it’s not just do it ‘someday.’ Has to be before November. That’s when he’s having his meeting of all the world’s Nazi leaders. And those who are chosen, that have authenticated, will be there. In Germany, at his castle.”

  Karl and I noted the date and thought nothing of it. Karl asked, “So what’s your plan?”