November 24, 2025 Show with Scott Payne on “How a Praying Wife & the Grace & Mercy of Jesus Christ Preserved the Life of an Undercover FBI Agent”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

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And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this Thanksgiving week, November 24th, 2025.

I was watching the Joe Rogan show not long ago, and I saw the brother in Christ who is going to be a guest today. I was so utterly blown away and fascinated by his life story, I said, I've got to get this brother on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and thanks be to God, after contacting him, he quickly accepted my invitation, and here we are today with Scott Payne on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio for the first time.

He's a retired undercover FBI agent who successfully infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups, and outlaw biker gangs, and today we are going to be addressing his book, Codename Pale Horse, How I Went Undercover to Expose America's Nazis.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Scott Payne.

Hey, hey, thanks for having me on, buddy.

Hey, man, it's great to have you on. And so I understand you were raised in South Carolina in the Bible Belt. You had a Christian upbringing that included as many other people who are Christians, ebbs and flows and so on in your life.

But when did you realize in your mind that you wanted to enter into the police force, which obviously predated your becoming an FBI agent?

Well, good question. I think, I mean, I really figured out I wanted to be a cop when I was in college. But once I was there and I was taking electives because I didn't know what I was going to do. I took, I went to college so I could have four more years to figure out what I was going to do with my life because I had no idea.

But I was taking a bunch of electives and probably about that second or third year, I had a criminal justice course and that was it, man. Not so much like business law and tort law and stuff like that, but just criminology, the Constitution, things like that.

And then I went on some ride alongs where you ride up, you know, you signed your waiver and you ride with a cop all night and or on the shift. And that was pretty much it for me. But if you look back, I mean, I've always been kind of a shepherd's mentality, a server's heart, bully of bullies, a fan of the underdogs, you know, that kind of thing.

And I was a bouncer. And when I was bouncing, that's, even though I'd found the class in college, at the clubs that I was bouncing at in Charleston, South Carolina, there were usually cops working the door.

So it might be Charleston County, it might be North Charleston Police Department. But I started getting to know cops and I was just, I was a sponge. I was just asking them all kinds of stuff. And then, and then it took off from there.

I got hired. I applied with four different departments in South Carolina and I got hired by Greenville County Sheriff's Office, which is actually where I was born and raised. So I moved back home and I was a cop there.

Now, how long were you on the police force before you entered into the FBI? And was that something that you were recruited for or was that something that you sought to join and that kind of a thing?

I was at the Sheriff's Office for five years. So I was uniformed patrol for three. So that's what you city, man. You're out there, you're seeing probably the worst of the worst on a daily, multiple times a day basis, because it's rare that you show up when everybody's happy to see you.

You usually show up when bad things are happening. And after three years in uniform, I made Vice and Narcotics Investigator. So my last two years at the Sheriff's Office, I was working Vice and Narcotics.

The vice part would be prostitution and illegal gambling. But of course, narcotics is drugs.

And then you entered into the FBI.

Right.

Not initially as undercover agents, right?

No, no, no, no, no. You don't I mean, there are there are ways like if I was a task force officer, I'd still have to be certified as an undercover or at a minimum, at least go through certain processes to be able to work on an FBI case.

FBI is a little different like that because we have our own school and stuff. But back to your recruitment question, I've never I mean, it might be somebody you'd run into who's an agent somewhere. They might be like, hey, man, have you ever thought about putting in?

But that that didn't happen to me. It was actually my sergeant at the time we were on a surveillance. And he told me he said, man, if I was your age and I was single and I had a four year degree, he said I would put in to the FBI and I would request New York as my first office.

And I was like, what is wrong with you? Because I didn't know what the FBI I didn't know what the FBI. I mean, at that point in time, I thought the FBI mainly just worked bank robbers and stuff, because that's the only time I saw.

But then he explained to me, no, man, they work everything. And I ended up applying with the FBI. And we'll say it's a year, a little bit more a year, a little bit more process because there's so many levels of tests.

And if you pass phase one and you got to do, you know, lie detectors and or polygraph, what do you want to call it? And then you've got to do the physical fitness test and all the medical. And then you get a phase two.

And then if you're lucky enough or blessed enough, you get you get selected for a slot as a new agent in training at Quantico.

Undercover Work in the FBI: From Drugs to Public Corruption

Now, I already mentioned at the outset of the interview when I announced you that you successfully infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups and outlaw biker gangs, which was the first of those areas where you entered into that criminal activity as an undercover.

Well, first, we've got to go back to the sheriff's office. I was working undercover at the sheriff's office. I was a narcotics investigator. We've had the state training facility was in Columbia, South Carolina, the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy.

And I went back and you go to like a week school for undercover techniques and you can get certified and start working. So I was already doing street level buys and things like that at the sheriff's office.

I already had the bug. I mean, the bug I was all for. I love undercover. And I dreamed of doing deep undercover and long-term stuff. So once I got in the FBI, I learned more about their program. I actually did a couple of cameos without being certified, which would be like me and another narcotics officer or another task force officer playing the truck drivers that deliver the dope load to the Jamaicans or whatever we were doing at the time.

And then I landed in undercover. Even without being certified at the school, I got a specific authority and I became the primary. So my first office was New York City. I didn't pick it. It was like 36 out of 56.

Yeah, that's what they make you do at the academy. They want you to take all 56 field offices and list them in the order you want them, which is painstaking. It's just like you sweat over it. You're like, man, should I work up the south and then go east coast?

At the end of the day, I said, look, man, just let me put down my top 10, and if you're not going to give them to me, send me wherever you're going to send me. But I got New York City. It was like 36 on my list.

Now, were they apprehensive at all that you have this obvious southern accent and you're up there?

No, no. No, man. New York's the biggest office the FBI has. It's a, yeah, I mean, I tell people, like, look, there's a guy in underwear in cowboy boots playing acoustic in Times Square. I can walk down the street, too.

It doesn't matter. It's a melting pot, you know?

And so how did it drift from there into the FBI?

Well, so I was, I got to the FBI, I got, in 98, I went into the FBI. And once I graduated Quantico, I went to New York City, and I worked for a good two years, but the whole third year, I'd landed that undercover I was talking about that I hadn't even been to the school and gotten certified yet, but based on my background and the things that I'd done before, I guess they approved it.

So I ended up going full-time in San Antonio, Texas, and then I got transferred. So I was out of New York in three years, and then once that undercover was over in San Antonio, I went down to the border, and I worked in McAllen for six and a half years.

Now, once I got to the border, I'd already applied to the school, and it's a long, drawn-out process, but let's just, to make it easy for the listeners, let's just say hundreds of people put in for the school.

You got to get it down to 20 slots, because that's all there are in the school. It's four groups of five. Every group has a counselor, and then you've got role players and instructors and everything else to help put that thing on.

It's two weeks, no days off, huge on sleep deprivation, and you're basically doing, you get training during the day, but you're doing live scenarios every night, and you're going to be the primary undercover probably twice a night.

So I went through that, and I was blessed enough, again, to get certified as an undercover, and then it was kind of off to the races. So to your question, which I'm going way back now, but your question about what was first, I was already doing, that case in San Antonio was a national security case.

Even though it's very close to being declassified, it's still classified, but everybody kind of knows about it, but I'm not going to say anything, but that was a foreign counterintelligence type case.

But like I said, I already done some drug stuff, and then I did other things. Like I tell a lot of people, you never know where an undercover is going to take you because as an agent, you're working stuff, and you're looking at things, and you've got sources and sources of information, and you're doing law enforcement investigations, but as an undercover, you can get on the inside.

Sometimes you find out a whole lot more. So let's say I was doing a case in Oklahoma, and it was just supposed to be a small case of interstate transportation of stolen goods, chop shops and stuff, and then I get in there, and then next thing you know, there's a sheriff involved, and now it's a full-blown public corruption investigation, and you never know.

So that's kind of how, in the FBI, I'd say that. It started with the drugs, and then drug type cases, that foreign counterintelligence case, and then I went into a public corruption, kind of stolen goods case.

From Street Crime to Domestic Terrorism Investigations

Now, which came first among the Klan, the Nazis, and the outlaw bikers as far as being an outlaw?

Yeah. I was pretty much a criminal guy my entire career, all 28. I mean, five at the sheriff's office, 23 in the FBI. Probably the last maybe six years of my career, I switched over to Joint Terrorism Task Force, and then I just took what I had learned being a case agent and an undercover, working all these criminal cases and prosecuting and arresting all kinds of people, numbers-wise and everything else.

I tried to take that knowledge and apply it to the domestic terrorism side, and that's when I really started landing more of the white supremacy, KKK, and then the crazy, like, base and exhilarationist groups.

And the base is a neo-Nazi group?

Yeah. They're trying to make a comeback. They were kind of defunct. We kind of wiped them out, but I've seen recently that they're trying to make a comeback, which doesn't make any sense to me because you've already got people in your group that have gone to prison for murder plots and everything else, but maybe that's attractive to somebody.

Maybe they're saying, hey, this is a legit group. I don't know. I mean, you look at bikers. I mean, the Outlaws, Hells Angels, all those groups, they are worldwide. Of course, tons of them have gone to jail.

People still join the Outlaws and the Hells Angels, so maybe that's what it is. I don't know.

Now, I'd love for you to share some of your perhaps more frightening moments, if you were frightened. I'm assuming that you would be, no matter how large you may be. When people have weapons and when you are outnumbered, that can always be a frightening thing.

But tell us, before we go into the white supremacist wing of your experience, tell us about some of your more harrowing experiences with the Outlaw biker gangs.

Well, so I've had a lot of harrowing incidents, whether it be back at the sheriff's office or just in cases in the FBI. But the biggest one, and they're all throughout the book. I mean, I go into pretty great detail in the book.

Only thing I didn't mention in the book was all the prostitution, like human trafficking stuff I did undercover. And I didn't mention any kind of malicious stuff because when I retired, it was kind of still active and I didn't want to, the bureau wouldn't let me do it anyway, but I didn't want to put any cases in jeopardy, you know, as far as talking about them and what I did as an undercover in the book.

But the Outlaws, well, you talk about harrowing incidents. I mean, there's been incidents to this where I've got some guy that talked me in a circle, backed me in a corner. You know, you're playing chess.

You're trying to stay five moves ahead of that person. And he caught me off guard. I guess I lowered my guard. I underestimated, which is against my rules. But this one guy, I mean, next thing you know, it's me, him, and his girlfriend.

There's a red-boned hound in my crotch, growling, mean, mean, mean. I could feel the heat of his breath in my crotch, growling. I'm leaning back as far as I can on a couch. He's got a double-barrel shotgun.

He's already told me multiple times if he finds out I'm the law, I'm a dead man. And he's got an open bag of cocaine in front of my face telling me to do it, you know, if I'm not a cop. And I'm like, you know, there's things like that.

There's things where you just go to make a buy at a house. And then another person walks in the room. And you're like, oh, I arrested that person when I was in uniform, you know? There's stuff like that.

But probably the biggest one that everybody talks about that I teach or speak about is the outlaws case. Because I did a two-year case. But at a year and a half in, after making and building numerous relationships, very close ones, we had been doing things like they would report vehicles stolen, sell them to me at a stolen price.

They would get their insurance kickback. And then they would get my money because I was buying them at a stolen price because they believed I was taking everything to Mexico, which truly happens. So it looks and smells and tastes real, you know?

But then they got to where they were just stealing vehicles. Then they got to where they were carjacking vehicles. And they were doing home invasions and physical assaults and all kinds of stuff like that.

There was murders in the case. We got to the point to where they had been asking to meet my contacts at the cartel since, I don't know, almost day one. And we upped the ante. After a year and a half in, the FBI and Department of Justice, DEA had a female agent attached to us, Nancy.

So it was DEA, OSFBI, and I'm sure there was task force and local. But the Department of Justice and the United States Attorney's Office said, hey, let's go ahead and let's do a dope deal. And we ended up doing a drug protection where they were going to help me and my crew deliver dope to another crew and basically secure the load.

Because in the dope game, you're always worried about getting ripped off, especially if you're sitting there with 40 kilos of cocaine and 1 ,000 pounds of weed. I know weed's not a big deal now, but 1 ,000 pounds is probably still a big deal.

But we're talking like 2007-ish. So it was still a pretty big deal. So we had 40 kilos of coke, 1 ,000 pounds of weed. And again, a year and a half inside with them. I've been in that clubhouse multiple, multiple times.

And for the listeners that don't know, if you're not a patch member, you're not allowed to touch the door. You're not allowed to touch the phone. So you go in the clubhouse, and it's a steel frame door, heavily fortified, dead bolts, all that good stuff.

But they had welded metal hooks on the steel frame and laid a metal bar, like a shipyard kind of metal steel beam across it. So from a breaching standpoint, a little tough. It's going to be not an easy breach.

So I'm in the clubhouse because that's my job, is to get the evidence as an undercover. And the night before we were doing the op, things went real bad. What we found out later is that it went all the way to the top of the outlaws, and that means the national president.

And it came back down in an order to really check. And it was said to me that they were told, hey, we've done like eight jobs with this guy. In other words, criminal activity, and we're not in handcuffs.

So we think he's okay. Said it didn't matter. So when I went in the clubhouse that night, I was thinking it was just another night, and it wasn't. They pulled me down into, I say a basement in the book.

That's being very generous. It's a northeast home. It's a crawl space, really. I'm 6 '4", but I couldn't stand up straight. Like, it was that tight down there. I could probably touch the wall on both sides.

Yeah. And, you know, one of my second closest relationships was the enforcer. Went by the road named Clothesline. And he said, hey, Tex. They called me Tex. He said, hey, Tex, you got a minute? And I said, yeah.

And there was only one door I'd never been in in that clubhouse, and that was the night I went in it. And it led down a really tight stairwell to, at least it felt tight. I mean, I'm freaking out. I'm having an adrenaline dump in an oh-crap moment, you know?

And we went down in there. And as soon as I turned behind him, another outlaw came in right behind me. And I was like, this isn't good. This is not good. And they pulled me down in the basement. They told me to, first they showed me their pistols.

I'm not free to leave. And even if I tried to fight my way out of that crawl space or whatever you want to call it, even if I tried to find my way out, and I made it without getting shot, when I get upstairs, they had just got through having their weekly mandatory meeting, which they refer to as church, oddly enough.

And it was probably another eight or 10 outlaws up there. So what are you going to do? So the clothesline pulls me down there. He says, hey, there's a lot of stuff going on. I'm cleaning up the language for your listeners, but he said there's a lot of stuff going on.

The recording will reflect a little different wordage, verbiage, I guess. But he said, there's a lot of stuff going on. It's my job to take care of my brothers. He said, I need you to write down your full name, date of birth, social security, your address, everything.

And then I need you to take all your clothes off, because I got to check you for a wire. Here's the problem, Chris. Had I just been me and not wired, it would have just been an embarrassing moment, getting stripped in front of two men in a crawl space at gunpoint.

But I was wired to the hill. I had multiple devices on me, because I always carry backups in case one fails or something like that. And plus, I knew this was an important night, so we didn't want to miss anything.

And yeah, man, it got so bad. And even though I go through training, I help put on training, the oh no moment, the this is not a good moment adrenaline dump, everything slows down in slow motion. I mean, I'm sure your listeners have been through some instance where they felt time slow down, whether it's a car wreck or whatever, or something that's kind of traumatic.

You know, it's like, that's usually when it kicks in. Like, oh no, but everything slows down. And in the tactical world, we call that your lizard brain, because you're going back to your basics. It's either fight, flight, or freeze.

That's why you don't have like fine motor skills. That's why when we're teaching firearms, if you have to do a tap rack ready or something like that with your gun, that's why we teach you to come over with a full hand grip and do it because if you try two fingers, that's a fine motor skill.

If you've ever worked out like hard, like lifting or whatever, and then tried to grab a pen and write something, that's a fine motor skill. That's why it's so hard. So with that being said, I'm trying to write down my stuff and I forgot my middle name.

So now I've got that. Everything is slow motion. Everything is, you get auditory exclusion. So in other words, everything sounds like you're underwater and it's going whoosh, but real slow, slows down.

Like what's 30 seconds feels like five minutes. And you can feel your heart beating through your whole body and you get time dilation. So what that means is, is when you're looking, it's almost like in screen grabs.

It's not like a smooth transition. It's like click, click, everything's so slow and your hamstrings will get rubbery and all that stuff. And then I'm going through this Rolodex in my head, trying to remember my middle name.

And I did what's kind of referred to as a distraction technique. I didn't even know I did it, but I asked him, hey man, what else do you need? He's like, what? I said, my name and what else? Now I didn't sound like that on the recording because I'm having a no-no moment.

If you listen to me on the recording, it sounds more like, what else do you need? My voice is a lot higher because my throat's tightening up. And then somewhere in there, in that time, I was able to number one, figure out that they were running me on the internet.

So by asking that question, they were yelling at me, what do you need for that website? So I'm like, okay, I'm getting some intelligence here. I see what they're doing. And then I remember my middle name and I wrote it down.

But once I was done with that, that was kind of the easy part. Now I got to take off all my clothes and I'm wired. And the way it worked is, I took all my upper body clothing off, jackets, shirts. It was like around Thanksgiving in Massachusetts, so it's cold.

And I took my boots off and I dropped my underwear and jeans down around my ankles. So from the ankles up, I was completely, pre-sinning in the Garden of Eden. Completely, completely naked. But then he checks me, doesn't find anything.

And now I'm coming out of that adrenaline dump. I think I'm doing okay. I'm like, all right, I passed that test. Okay, breathe boy, you're gonna be all right. And then he grabs a piece of clothing. And in that piece of clothing was a recording device.

And around 2007, of course, you can look at our phones in the last 10 years, like a thumb drive. Yeah, a thumb drive used to be what? Three, five gigs. And now you can get, I don't know, 100 on there.

But in 2007, let's just say that the device was big enough to where if he's grabbing that piece of clothing, which he did, and he's kneading it with his fingers and working his way up it, or through the piece of clothing, he would have felt it.

This is much more advanced stuff than we typically see in the movies.

Yeah, well, yeah, I guess. I'm dealing a lot with Hollywood right now. I'm hoping for some, it's very close. There should be some big news coming out soon. But if you have a good consultant or somebody that wants realism, I mean, there's plenty of us out there that have experienced some crazy things that they can put that in there.

But anyway, he's working his way up the clothing. And I don't even know I do it, Chris. You can hear me in the recording go, because I'm standing there, I'm watching him. And I'm like, what am I going to do?

And he's getting closer and closer. And basically he looks right at it and misses it. Wow, praise God. And I guess he died another day.

We got to pick up the story right where you left off there. And we're going to a commercial break. If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, send us an email to chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

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We are now back with Scott Payne, I believe one of the most fascinating guests I've had since 2005 on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We are discussing his new book, Codename Pale Horse, and we're going to find out eventually how he got that name.

And we were right in the middle of an edge-of-your-seat moment where Scott is in more like a crawl space than in a basement in Massachusetts being forced to strip with bikers surrounding him with guns trying to find if he is wired for sound.

And I can't even imagine what's going through your head. I mean, you said that everything was like in slow motion, but were you thinking in your mind, Lord, if I'm not saved, save me now, or things like that?

I mean, were you praying quietly in your mind? What's going through your head? Do you really think that this is it? I'm going to be in eternity any second now.

As things cross your mind, I really just went into kind of, I call it work mode. You know, you're sitting there trying to figure it out, trying to, what can I say? Your training comes into play. But like I said, you know, he misses it.

Clothesline misses it. And I go right into some jovial, I'm a jokester anyway, but you can also use it as a defense mechanism. And I do. Like, I was scared. Like, I was really scared. So, yeah, they missed it.

And it led to fight another day. Now, people always ask me, they're like, hey, man, what would you have done? What would you have said had he found or felt something? Well, when he picked up that piece of clothing, he said, hey, I'm not going to find anything in here I don't want.

Like some pictures of my old lady. And he kind of laughs. I kind of laugh. But my laugh, again, it's not like a laugh laugh. It's more like a, hey, hey. Like, no, that's not, you know? And he, so if he would have felt something and said, what is this?