Harold Covington

Harold Armstead Covington (born Burlington, North Carolina, 14 September 1953) is an American neo-nazi and occasional novelist.

Covington first emerged on the neo-nazi scene as a member of the National Socialist Party of America (NSPA) under Frank Collin in 1979 when, along with Glenn Miller's White Patriot Party and the Ku Klux Klan, it was involved in the Greensboro massacre, in which five members of a demonstration against the Klan were killed. The day before the massacre, Mordechai Levy of the Jewish Defense Organization had told the FBI: "I have information that Harold Covington of the National Socialist Party of America is up to heavy illegal activity. Covington has been training in the Jefferson County area with illegal weapons. He and his group have plans to attack and possibly kill people at an anti-Klan gathering this week in North Carolina." Nevertheless, Covington was not among the four Klansmen and two neo-nazis who were later prosecuted for the Greensboro murders and found not guilty.

In 1979, Covington claims to have found, at the NSPA offices, "films, pictures and addresses of some little boys", as a result of which "we handed Frank Collin to the cops on a silver platter," and by the time of the trial Covington had replaced Collin as the head of the NSPA. Events during the trial, including the fact that he was not prosecuted despite Levy's advance advance warning of his involvement, led to suspicion among NSPA members that Covington was a state informer, and he came under considerable pressure within the organisation. In March 1981 he went underground, appointing the St Louis NSPA leader Michael Allen as leader in his place. Allen himself subsequently turned out to be an informer for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Covington spent time in South Africa before settling in the United Kingdom for several years, where he made contact with far-right groups and was involved in setting up the neo-nazi terror group Combat 18 (C18). His Dixie Press was the given address on the first issues of C18's hitlist publication Redwatch.. In June 1992 Searchlight exposed his presence in Britain, after which he returned to the United States. Larry O'Hara's 1994 book Turning Up the Heat: MI5 after the cold war claimed that Covington was a "state asset", who was instrumental in state infiltration of C18.

Upon his return to the US, Covington set up his own National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP), which he ran from various locations until settling in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He launched its website (archive.org) in 1996 and for some time the NSWPP was one of the more active neo-nazi presences on the web; it now appears to be defunct.

Covington is the author of a number of novels [1] and maintains at least two blogs, one of which is devoted to the "Northwest Migration", a project among American neo-nazis to set up a white separatist "Aryan Homeland" in the states of Idaho, Oregon and Washington.[2]

Covington has sometimes gone by the alias Winston Smith, particularly in his role as head of the NSWPP.

External links

• Northwest Homeland, a blog by Covington
• Thoughtcrime, a blog by Covington