No one meeting Immanuel Trujillo would have guessed he was a spy. A photograph included in Steven J. Ross’s new book, The Secret War Against Hate, shows a square-jawed young man with thick hair and a winning smile. Trujillo looks good in his uniform, even if it‘s a make-believe one, with its SS-style black tie and swastika armband. While the guy next to him, also in Nazi garb, looks down, Trujillo gives the camera his full attention, charming the viewer, making the best of an awkward situation. When you have to lie, at least do it well.
Bloomsbury 416 pp.
Trujillo’s companion in the picture was James Madole, founder of the far-right American Renaissance Party or ARP. (By “renaissance,” Madole meant not Michelangelo, but a jackbooted version of the United States inhabited by whites only.) Unlike the asthmatic Madole, Trujillo had worn a real uniform. Born in 1930 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to a teen mother and an Apache father, 15-year-old “Manny” ran off to Europe and enlisted in the Royal Navy to fight the Nazis. After the war, he was a U.S. Army paratrooper, rode motorcycles, and took classes at the communist-controlled Jefferson School for Social Science in New York. The latter experience might have strengthened his resolve that something must be done about America’s homegrown Nazi problem, too. Under the name “Mana Truhill,” he began showing up at gatherings of Madole’s party, sharing secret reports with the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League (ANL) in New York.
Non-government spies, like Trujillo, then and now, operate in a realm of moral and legal ambiguity: they inevitably break the law to uphold it. Just last month, Trump’s DOJ accused the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) of bank and wire fraud, singling out their use of paid undercover agents to infiltrate hate groups. Conservative broadcasters were delighted. Perhaps there weren’t any right-wing extremists out there, purred Glenn Beck, “just paid-off people from the SPLC.”
Steven Ross’s parents survived the Nazi death camps. The idea that racism doesn’t really exist would seem as ludicrous to him as it did to the men and women who, in the years following World War II, risked their lives going undercover for antifascist groups such as the ANL, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the American Jewish Committee (AJC). They weren’t in it for the money; some of them worked for expenses only. And they had very different reasons for signing up. A few had academic backgrounds—take the bespectacled William “Butch” Goring, also a plant in the ARP, recruited right out of the classrooms of Columbia University, or Stetson Kennedy, a pioneer in the study of folklore, who had spent a year at the Sorbonne. Kennedy used his family connections to gain access to the Klan, pretending to be “John S. Perkins,” the fictional nephew of his real-life uncle Brady, a KKK Grand Titan.
But there were also regular folks like burly Mario Buzzi, who, jokes Ross, looked like your average “bear-hugging Italian uncle.” Buzzi knew what it meant to tackle fascists: he’d been raised by two of them. In Atlanta, then the hub of far-right fearmongering, Buzzi bluffed his way into high-level meetings of the “Columbians,” which had the doubtful distinction of being the nation’s first Neo-Nazi organization. Their political platform? Kill the Jews and send “negroes” back to Africa. If Buzzi could have sprung from a mobster movie, his sidekick, Renee Fruchtbaum, would have given Mata Hari a run for her money. (Just think of Greta Garbo in the title role of the 1931 spy flic Mata Hara). A charismatic, cigarette-puffing Brooklyn Jew, Fruchtbaum wisely changed her name to the earthier “Renee Forrest.” Volunteering to take on the Columbians’ secretarial work, she used a mini camera hidden in her lighter to copy Burke’s personal correspondence.
It’s hard to imagine the effort Ross’s agents devoted to their disguises and to learning to speak and think the way their targets did. They also had to keep track of their lies. When Trujillo invited his Nazi cronies over to an evening of right-wing carousing, he made sure Hitler posters adorned the walls and Nazi songs were blaring from the phonograph. Because of Trujillo’s aptitude for languages, the ARP put him in charge of their vast correspondence with exiled German Nazis, including Johann von Leers, one of Hitler’s preferred race ideologues, who was now hiding out in Argentina, from where he continued his toxic work. Trujillo also published the ARP’s newsletter, a task he performed with such panache that Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler’s daughter Gudrun thanked him for his flattering tribute to her father.
From popular movies like Betrayed (1988), in which Debra Winger plays Catherine Weaver, an FBI agent getting entangled in a group of right-wing rural terrorists, we know about the tremendous psychological cost of such work, the fear of discovery that accompanied it. Ross tends to think of his spies as part of a collective effort, rather than as fully fleshed-out individuals. Occasionally, though, the sheer drama of their lives becomes visible. Trujillo, for one, ended up in quite the pickle when one of his new Nazi pals dropped by and saw Marx and Lenin where Hitler had been. Trujillo had forgotten to swap the wall decor. We don’t know how he was able to wiggle out of this situation, but Ross makes clear that Trujillo the spy was now damaged goods.
Unlike Catherine Weaver, Ross’s freelancing agents could not rely on law enforcement to help them out, although they certainly helped them. Georgia Assistant Attorney General Daniel Duke used spy reports to bring charges against the leaders of the Columbians, Emory Burke and Howard Loomis, Jr. (In court, Burke so exasperated Duke that he punched him. The judge pretended not to have noticed). Justice was slow to come to fascist agitators, but sometimes it eventually did. Jesse B. Stoner, the self-appointed “Arch leader” of the Christian Anti-Jewish Party, avoided prosecution until 1980, when a jury in Birmingham, Alabama, convicted him for his role in the 1958 bombing of the city’s Bethel Baptist Church.
As Ross notes, the FBI only devoted 15 percent of its efforts to investigating “White Hate”; the rest was spent on chasing after communists. George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party, cheerfully shared his appreciation for the man at the helm of the FBI: “Heil Hoover!” Donning tight-fitting shirts, his hair plastered so tightly to his skull that his head looked like the eraser top of a #2 pencil, Rockwell loved posing for the photographer. It’s exhilarating to think that somewhere in the background an AML spy was keeping tabs on him.
Yet despite his book’s stirring title, Ross doesn’t really chronicle a “war” but small battles—not so much against hate as against the haters. The hate itself lived on. It contributed, Ross reminds us, to the election of a president who allegedly kept a volume of Hitler’s speeches at his bedside. Not much indeed separates George Lincoln Rockwell’s worldview from some right-wingers in power today: resentment against immigrants, loathing for the United Nations, neonatalist worrying about white demographics. (Rockwell proposed government subsidies to enable women to stay home and raise Aryan babies.)
Quite a few of Ross’s ersatz-Hitlers ended ignominiously. In 1967, Rockwell was gunned down outside an Econ-O-Wash laundromat in Arlington, Virginia, by one of his own associates. Three years later, Madole had his head bashed in with a brick on Wall Street, also by a disgruntled disciple, after which he lost whatever grip he still had on reality. Trujillo, by contrast, continued to live a colorful life, in which he went from fighting neo-Nazis to fighting the U.S. government. He served time for marijuana trafficking and was twice tried and acquitted for possessing peyote, a drug that he insisted must be legalized. Timothy Leary became one of his followers. In the late 1970s, Trujillo founded the Peyote Way Church of God in Klondyke, Arizona, where he lived until his death in 2010, at age 82. The beaming face familiar from Ross’s book—the hair now long and the uniform replaced by a flowing tunic—reappears in a photograph on the Peyote Way Church’s website. There we also learn that Trujillo’s community is dedicated to what he likely didn’t find much of among the Nazis he spied on: “the Light within.”
