The June issue of Searchlight had the American Nazi leader Harold Covington on the front and inside, a series of letters he had been writing to supporters while staying in the UK. I’d never heard of Covington, nor had I heard of the massacre of anti-Klan activists by supporters of his organisation some years before. Was this the man behind the book clubs Gerry Gable had asked about earlier? I didn’t bring Covington’s name up at the Irving seminar, nor, despite the notorious loose tongues of the far right, was he mentioned by anyone else.
Despite his excellent Nazi credentials for leading small handfuls of psychopathic thugs and killers into oblivion, Covington had one stumbling block: Irish Republicanism. Whoever Covington was meeting in the UK while he was studying here – which he was able to having married an Irish woman some years before – would have to be very careful not to get caught out. Covington was small fry compared to the rest of the American right. He certainly was not in the same league as Dr William Pierce, the leader of the National Alliance and author of The Turner Diaries but, like with most Nazis, size didn’t count. Covington was using the names of some of his more prestigious contacts back home to worm his way inside the fringes of the British far right. Among Covington’s friends back home in Dixie was Sean Maguire, a leading American Nazi and supporter of the IRA.
Covington was advocating a strategy of ‘leaderless resistance’. It seemed pretty daft to me and Eddie because, although the thought of things being blown up and people being murdered because of their colour or political beliefs struck a huge chord with a lot of people we knew, they also all wanted to be leaders.
‘Don’t worry about Covington, worry about shifting these,’ said Eddie as he dropped another half-dozen dirty videos in my lap. So it looked like I was not going to find anything out about Covington from Whicker. I was sure he knew something, but he wasn’t too sure what it was himself. An newspaper exposé of UDA activities in the Midlands was giving Frank a headache, as the local Commander had been shooting his mouth off to the local press about being well prepared for when the gloves came off.
The UDA had now been made illegal in Northern Ireland and perhaps were going to move more of their fundraising to the mainland, where they still remained legal. This would mean far more work and kudos for Frank and Eddie. In realisation of this, Frank had been preparing the London UDA group for over two years, encouraging low profiles and keeping his own near-invisible. The mainland UDA were about to play a huge part in the British far right.
The new Croydon BNP, under the leadership of the former Croydon NF, was not working out as well as they had hoped. Despite Edmonds rushing over to Croydon in his battle bus regularly, the Croydon members were being directed to spend more and more time elsewhere in south London. The autonomy they had experienced under the lacklustre NF leadership was gone. Also, much to the disappointment of former NF members in the BNP, Paul Ballard had been in contact with former NF Political Soldier leader Nick Griffin and asked him to address a few BNP meetings.