Joshua Caleb Sutter infiltrated far-right extremist organizations as a confidential FBI informant, all while promoting hateful ideologies that influenced some of the internet’s most violent groups. THE FEDERAL BUREAU of Investigation has a long and checkered history of letting confidential informants run wild. Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger famously used his protected status to knock off New England underworld rivals. COINTELPRO-era provocateur Gary Thomas Rowe Jr. was involved in multiple civil rights atrocities. To catch criminals and extremists, you have to play dirty. Joshua Caleb Sutter firmly fits into this framework. A longtime occultist and neo-Nazi, Sutter became an FBI informant roughly 20 years ago after being sent to prison for trying to buy a silencer and a defaced Glock .40 pistol from an undercover fed in Philadelphia. At the time of his arrest, Sutter was living on an Aryan Nations compound in Pennsylvania. Since then, he’s earned at least $140,000 infiltrating a range of far-right organizations, most notoriously the Atomwaffen Division (AWD) starting in 2017. Details of Sutter’s involvement—which the government has yet to officially confirm—emerged in 2021 during the federal trial of AWD leader Kaleb Cole, information first revealed that August. Being outed as a federal informant did not force Sutter into the shadows. Sutter kept publishing extremist books through his Martinet Press imprint, which helped fuel the ascent of the Order of Nine Angles (O9A), a murderous blend of Satanism and neo-fascism that is now pervasive in the global far right and has inspired violence in Russia, Great Britain, the United States, Canada, and elsewhere, a WIRED investigation found. The consequences of Sutter’s virulent extreme right propaganda continue to unfold, spawning new varieties of ultraviolent terrorism and violence in the darkest corners of the internet that now involve systemic child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other forms of child abuse.
via wired: He Was an FBI Informant—and Inspired a Generation of Violent Extremists