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How does the bureau use informants to bring dangerous criminals to justice? They have several top-secret strategies which we are about to reveal. FBI inspector Bob Garrity says the first step is to find a disgruntled member who is willing to betray his group and work as a spy. In the case of the oil refinery bombing, they enlisted an unlikely ally Bob Spence, one of the highest-ranking members of the KKK.
Our confidential source who was a member, in fact he was the grand wizard of the True Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, normally would not be the kind of person that we would be cooperating with. He came to us and told us about members of his Klansmen who were discussing a conspiracy, discussing a crime that he just could not tolerate.
Why would a lifelong member of the Klan turn against his friends? Garrity says people usually become FBI informants because they face criminal charges and have worked out a deal with the Feds. But Bob Spencer apparently had a different motive.
My incentive of going to the FBI was to save lives. To me, be an informant meant that I was doing something to help my country. And that's why, and I felt good about it.
Regardless of his good intentions, Spence couldn't possibly gather evidence against the Klan on his own. So the FBI assigns him a top-secret liaison called a handler to guide his every move.
Agents who are very good source handlers have, you know, very good interpersonal skills, and they're able to take the source's fears, take his concerns and try to reassure him that we are out there, he is safe, we're gonna do whatever we can to protect him.
In this case, Spence's handler is special agent Morgan Bodie.
I was his only go-between as far as between Mr. Spence and the FBI. So he had to trust me completely.
That trust is tested for agonizing 28 days as Spence leads a double life collecting information for the FBI. Spence knows he is risking his life as well as the safety of his family.
I know how paranoid the Klan is. And if they would suspect someone who to be an informant, they won't hesitate to deal with them, and the bad thing is they don't deal just with them, they deal with the family also, you know, try to arrest the family who run them out of the county. The informant, he is dead meat. They still are around willing to do it.
disgruntled: discontented, displeased
Klansman: member of the Ku Klux Klan (radical white-supremacist organization in the United States)
liaison: one that establishes and maintains communication for mutual understanding and cooperation
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