KLANDESTINE: The Untold Story of Delmar Dennis and His Role in the FBI's War Against the Ku Klux Klan

by ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1975

FBI informant Delmar Dennis is, like author McIlhany, a member of the John Birch Society, and both men share the conviction that slain civil rights worker Michael Schwerner and Sam Bowers, the leader of the Klan murder conspirators that Dennis helped convict, were communist inspired. This, in addition to their almost total lack of interest in the victims themselves or in reconstructing the facts of the triple murder, will soon lose them the sympathies of those who may have responded to either William Bradford Huie's Three Lives for Mississippi or the FBI side of the case as unfolded in Whitehead's Attack on Terror. Nevertheless, this conscientious if murkily written account (it was a Ph.D. thesis first) of Dennis' insecure life as an infiltrator within the White Knights has a predictably grim fascination as he reveals more and more of the lodge brother mumbo jumbo and internecine violence behind the crime its perpetrators code-named the ""big logging operation."" With appended copies of the White Knights' constitution and (scarifyingly explicit) bylaws, this account claims attention as a social document. But it is far from the double-identity detection saga it might have been.

Pub Date: April 1, 1975

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Arlington House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1975

Categories: NONFICTION