British Security Service's Involvement In Combat 18
While the FBI's COINTELPRO program in the 1960s is well-documented, the British government has engaged in similar intelligence operations more recently.
When the British National Party (BNP), under the leadership of John Tyndall, began making inroads in local elections during the early 1990s, a parallel and initially friendly organization, Combat 18, emerged around the same time.
C18, as it came to be known, was founded by a man named Charlie Sargeant with help from American Harold Covington.
Initially, Tyndall enjoyed the enthusiasm of C18 members, who promised to help defend against "antifa" groups that were attacking BNP events.
The relationship quickly soured when C18 began attacking the BNP for its parliamentary approach, which they saw as inferior to C18's open avowal of terrorism -- "direct action" -- to achieve political ends. Later, C18 members launched a campaign of ruthless beatings of lone BNP members and became a source of gossip and slander against other nationalist leaders in the British scene.
In 1995, Tyndall wrote an editorial in the BNP's newspaper Spearhead outlining C18's irrational and violent war to destroy the BNP, despite both sharing similar goals and enemies. In it, he states his belief that C18 was being influenced by MI5 and the Special Branch, with help from the FBI in America, in a ploy to disrupt and discredit the British nationalist movement.
A year and a half later, C18 leader Charlie Sargeant murdered Christopher Castle during a power struggle for control of the group with Wilf Browning.
According to an investigative piece on the incident, Sargeant and Browning told police during their interrogations that they had friends in high places and wanted to speak to the Special Branch (a British counter-terrorism agency). They tried to use their service to the unit as a way to get out of trouble. Tyndall's suspicions were confirmed: Sargeant and Browning were indeed state assets and had special license to commit crimes.
A chapter in researcher Larry O'Hara's 1994 book Turning Up the Heat: Mi5 After the Cold War suggests that Combat 18 was partially organic, but then was taken over by MI5 agents and informants as both a counter-intelligence project to undermine and divide the BNP, as well as a honeypot to peel away the most violent outliers in the National Front and BNP with the intention of later entrapping them in bogus terror plots to justify their crackdowns.
As for C18's other "founder," Harold Covington, nationalists such as William Pierce have for decades suspected he was himself an FBI asset and agent provocateur. Covington was known for inventing lies from whole cloth about high profile nationalists in America and loudly broadcasting them, including that they were police informants, thieves, homosexuals, pedophiles, secret Jews, and other baseless gossip.
Left-wing activist Nick Martin filed a FOIA request to see the FBI's files on Covington in December 2018, but the government continues to drag its feet in providing them according to Martin's most recent update last month on MuckRock.
If Covington is confirmed to have been an intelligence operative, then MI5 and the FBI have recently collaborated in these nefarious conspiracies against nationalist dissidents.
