This weekend we remember the victims of the Greensboro massacre in 1979, when Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Party gunmen attacked an anti-Klan demonstration in Greensboro, North Carolina, leaving five anti-racist demonstrators shot dead.
The main character behind this attack was Harold ‘Chubby’ Covington, the Nazi Party leader. Some of his gunmen involved were arrested and tried, but acquitted by an all-white jury.
Later, having escaped the USA, Covington travelled to Ireland and ended up in London in the early 1990s. Always the man encouraging violence, but never having the guts or nerve to do more than hide behind a typewriter, Covington was ever the advocate for terrorism.
Turner Diaries
The early 1990s was a time when some fascists were moving towards the electoral road. Others wanted violence. This was the Turner Diaries generation.
Covington, for his part, thought he could get away with creating a neo nazi network without anyone finding out.
However, not one, not two, but three deep cover operatives within British fascism were working for Searchlight at the time.
Covington made the mistake of mailing out his newsletter from London under the pseudonym Winston Smith.
Defence force
Within hours of these arriving at various fascist headquarters, copies were being forwarded to Searchlight. One of our insiders recognised the Covington style and modus operandi immediately.
“You’ll never guess what I’ve got here,” he told Gerry Gable at a hastily arranged meeting the same evening the Covington material arrived.
Gerry was very interested indeed, as he’d heard whispers about a new neo-nazi defence force being set up, ostensibly to guard BNP and associated fascist events.
This was Combat 18.
Not long after it became clear that C18 leaders had much bigger plans. So called self-defence was to become outright murder and terrorism. And it would have been considerably worse had we not had our men and women in place.
Violent thugs
Covington fled the country but within short order we were able to pin down the major players, many of whom were football hooligans, ex-British Movement neo-nazis and a panoply of violent thugs too extreme for either the BNP or NF. Sargent was not as clever as he thought.
He soon had World In Action television cameras following him, working with Searchlight to expose his wicked plans and violent intentions.
His close confidants weren’t too bright either, handing copies of his first newsletter around at Brick Lane during the regular Sunday fascist paper sales, at BNP headquarters in Welling, and at BNP branch meetings in the weeks after Covington’s association with Sergeant became common knowledge.
Close watch
Even then, the numbers of fascist activists numbered a few hundred, if that, and everyone talked to each other. Searchlight had ears to the ground and very well placed people in place. And, today in 2024, we still have people in place and we’re still keeping the closest possible watch on today’s Covingtons and Sargents…
You can watch the World In Action investigations here:
And here:
And former Searchlight editor Andy Bell, who produced the World In Action programmes, has written about how the investigations were carried out here:
https://andybell2000.com/2023/05/16/confronting-the-combat-18-terror-squad/
and here:
