In September 2008, members of a Wayward, Fla., chapter of the Ku Klux Klan concocted an elaborate scheme to kill Barack Obama days before he was elected president.
They planned every detail, identifying the day, time, and location of the hit; obsessing over the senator’s motorcade alignments; securing .50-caliber rifles for the deed; and arranging for the assassins’ vehicles to be destroyed afterward.
There was only one scenario they hadn’t considered: that the intricate plan would be undone by one of their own.
Joe Moore had been initiated into the so-called Invisible Empire the year prior, impressing fellow Klansmen with an embellished military record and expert gunmanship.
Naturally, the honorably discharged army vet had been tapped to pull the trigger that would take out Obama.
Little did his “brothers” know he’d infiltrated America’s oldest hate group as a counterterrorism informant.
“I had to follow [my orders] and do whatever it took to prevent the assassination of Barack Obama,” Moore writes in his new memoir, “White Robes and Broken Badges” (Harper, out now). “Because I was the only one who could.”
Driven by a fervent patriotism and deep disdain for bullies, Moore conducted the FBI’s first-ever undercover operation targeting the KKK.
He attended cross burnings, witnessed savage acts of violence, and participated in eerie rituals — all while wearing a recording device.
Moore identified several cops and government officials who’d pledged allegiance to bigotry.
And by feeding misinformation to his Klan kinfolk, he potentially saved the life of the man who would become America’s first Black president.
The Jacksonville native describes with sharp detail his years of rubbing shoulders with devout racists.
One Klan member showed him bunkers loaded with firearms and tactical gear.
Another gave a tour of a backyard incinerator that he called “my own personal crematorium.”
Living a double life took its toll, though.
Moore would employ method acting practices to get into character, like listening to Guns N Roses’ disillusioned cover of “Ain’t It Fun” and wearing a particular American flag-embroidered cap.
He still had difficulty keeping his realities distinct.
“The deeper I became entrenched in the Klan, the more of a challenge it became to leave all that at the door when I went home to my wife and son,” writes Moore, who resorted to breathing techniques he picked up while in the armed forces to self-regulate. “All I could visualize were members kicking in the door to come get me after learning my true purpose.”
That paranoia didn’t stop Moore from embarking on a second espionage campaign in 2013, this time infiltrating a hood-and-robe-clad collective based 100 miles away, in Bronson, Fla.
His first go-round had ended four years earlier, after he was pulled out prematurely due to risk of exposure.
Turns out, Obama’s rise to prominence — and the political recoil following 18-year-old Michael Brown’s 2014 murder by police in Ferguson, Mo. — sharply boosted interest and enrollment in the KKK and other white supremacist groups.
But that all came crashing down after Moore implicated four prominent members in a conspiracy to murder a Black man named Warren Williams over a personal grudge.
Yet no good deed goes unpunished. After a dramatic, guns-drawn SWAT takedown of the perps in 2015 outside of a Home Depot in Alachua, Fla., Moore and his family were forced to assume new lives and abandon their old identities.
“I’d lie awake nights thinking that my payback for the most successful infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in FBI history was losing my house, almost all my possessions, my friends, and by all accounts, my future,” Moore recalls.
Justice was finally delivered in 2017, when all four Klan members charged received jail sentences.
The verdict sent shock waves through the KKK’s many chapters, inciting fear amongst members that similar moles were in place nationwide.
As a result, Klan numbers plummeted, with many former members aligning with alt-right groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.
“I take great pride in dealing a hateful organization a devastating near deathblow,” writes Moore, who now lives with his family in an undisclosed location. “The overall movement in general, though, was far, far from dead or even in decline.”
Moore warns that his time as an inside man illuminated his understanding of just how fractured America has become, identifying former President Donald Trump as a conduit for that division.
He draws a through line from the Ku Klux Klan to modern white nationalist groups to the Jan. 6 insurrection — a connection underscored by Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, who writes the book’s foreword.
“The Klan and the like-minded groups it has produced have learned to balance bullets with bluster and pistols with paper, both of which have the potential to do far more irrevocable damage on the state of our democracy than the former,” Moore writes. “With the 2024 election looming, and democracy itself on the ballot . . . we should be very afraid.”
Source Agencies
