Hal Turner’s double life: ‘right wing’ talk radio host/Federal informant

How much those movie rights going for…?

For more than five years, Hal Turner of North Bergen lived a double life.

The public knew him as an ultra-right-wing radio talk show host and Internet blogger with an audience of neo-Nazis and white supremacists attracted to his scorched-earth racism and bare-knuckles bashing of public figures.

But to the FBI, and its expanding domestic counter-terror intelligence operations in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Turner was “Valhalla” — his code name as an informant who spied on his own controversial followers. (…)

In interviews, conducted before Turner was released on bail, he said the FBI coached him to make racist, anti-Semitic and other threatening statements and now he feels double-crossed by the bureau after his arrest. The documents reviewed by The Record, however, show repeated instances of federal agents admonishing Turner for his extremism. (…)

Rumors of Turner’s FBI work surfaced two years ago after unknown Internet hackers electronically broke into his Web site and found e-mails between Turner and an FBI agent. Turner never acknowledged his FBI role until after his arrest in June — and then with a mix of anger and chagrin.

“Imagine my surprise,” he wrote in one of several letters from jail to The Record, “when agents from the very FBI that trained and paid me came to my house to arrest me.”