"DESPITE KENEDY’S best efforts to infiltrate, however, the author and activist was only going to get so far inside the Klan He needed help. By the spring of 1946, Kennedy had the help he needed to forge a direct pipeline into the deepest secrets of the Atlanta Klan. As part of his services to the ANL and ADL, Kennedy worked as the handler for a top-secret, deeply embedded mole who was operating under the alias John Brown. “This worker is joining the Klan for me,” Kennedy wrote in one memo to his employers in early 1946. “I am certain that he can be relied on.” Brown was a former Klansman who had committed himself to lifting the cover off its violent actions and conspiracies. He still had the complete trust of the KKK leadership, and he used it to burrow deep into the inner sanctum o the infamous Nathan Bedford Forrest Klavern No. 1, which met every Monday night at a cavernous union hall at 1981/2 Whitehall street. Brown’s reports detailed KKK plans for the major revival that took place a year later on Stone Mountain, attacks on Negroes moving into white neighborhoods, and the involvement of Atlanta police officers in KKK violence. By Brown’s own count, 83 of the 200 men in Klavern No. 1 were Atlanta police officers, many of who regularly directed traffic and provided security at cross burnings. Brown’s reports were chilling. In a dispatch dated April 29, 1946, he reported that Grand Dragon Samuel Green was advised to “write a letter of appreciation to a policeman named ‘Itchy Trigger Finger’ Nash … in connection with the slaying of a Negro he has killed in his line of duty. It seems that Dr. GGreen would like to decorate these policemen who kill Negroes with the Klan.” Brown even infiltrated the paramilitary flog squad that carried out midnight whippings, beatings, and murders of selected targets. Or, as handler Kennedy reported to the ANL on May 6, 1946, “our informant is now a member of the Klan’s inner circle, and Klavalier Klub.” Kennedy went on to note, “”[O]ur informant has learned that Green is an honorary members and bears card No. 000 … Obviously the Klavalier lub is the Storm Trooper arm of the Klan and there is some effort to divorce the regular Klan officials from responsibility of its actions.” Brown even got inside the secret subunit of the Klavalier Klub that called itself the Ass Tearers and printed on its calling card the image of a corkscrew-its implement of choice for torturing and disemboweling its victims. The infiltrators’ reports painted a haunting picture of KKK conspiracies and violence, as well as the paranoid mentality that pervaded the Klavern. The reports detail hit lists targeting anti-Klan journalists and even plots to steal weapons caches from government stockpiles to use in an all-out onslaught against African Americans. Even the mundane matters described in the reports are eye-opening, from membership drives and publicity campaigns to ham dinners put on by the ladies’ auxiliary to raise money for their husbands’ work. The moles centered much of their attention on Grand Dragon Green and his top henchmen of the Associated Klans of Georgia. An overseer of Klavern No. 1, Green had virtually invited the scrutiny of investigators with his militant call for white protestant men across the country to rise up and take the antion back from the Negroes, Jews, Catholics, and liberals. While Green insisted the Klan was breaking no laws, the undercover operatives knew that beyond the violent raids that the KKK was varying out, Green and company were also acting as the central players in a resurgent national KKK movement, coordinating with Klaverns in other states and even supplying them with membership forms and propaganda pamphlets printed in Atlanta. If the Klan busters could prove that the Atlanta Klavern was acting as the center of a national program, they could push Georgia to revoke the organization’s state charter, thus leaving Green and company open to federal income tax debt and possible prosecution in federal court. And to top it all off, a kids’ radio show was about to lift the mask off the KKK for a generation of children."
January 1, 1970