After Spanish police and Europol’s counterterrorism unit arrested three suspected members of the base, a globally banned neo-Nazi terror group, in the eastern province of Castellon, the US leader of the base, which lives in Russia, appeared defiant and said further action would be taken.
In a text message to the Guardian, Rinaldo Nazzaro called the arrest “another example of political persecution” by governments around the world that “further justify our resistance to their hegemonic rule by any means necessary.”
The group’s presence in the Iberian Peninsula underscores how its American brand of extremism — which glorifies extreme violence and models anti-state armed insurgency as a model — continues to spread and be exported abroad. Nazzaro and the base are also suspected of having ties to the Kremlin’s spy agencies and assisting them in their wider sabotage operations.
Experts are shocked by the level of organization and arsenal the group has within Europe.
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“This group is particularly serious,” said Joshua Fisher-Birch, a terrorism researcher at the Counter Extremism Project who closely monitors the base’s digital accounts. “It should be noted that, unusually, the group’s group in Spain has its own public Telegram channel, where they repeatedly call on others to join the group, share photos of weapons training and urge radical action.”
The base has made headlines in recent months with claims of the assassination of a Ukrainian military officer in Kiev in July and other acts of terrorism in Ukraine. Then, last week, a Luxembourg court jailed a Swedish member of the base for orchestrating a mass casualty incident at a past Eurovision Song Contest.
Fischer-Birch said the Spanish branch openly supports the group’s actions in Ukraine and praises its efforts to establish a white ethnostate in the war-torn country’s Transcarpathian region. Likewise, the Spanish group argued online for “systematic cruelty” against its perceived enemies and “the acquisition of mountainous lands to form protected, self-sufficient and self-managing white communities.”
A data dump of the base’s Spanish Telegraph activity reviewed by the Guardian contained propaganda videos, photos and other posts that appeared to include automatic rifles and other firearms. Ted Kaczynski, the legal name of the college bomber who sent letter bombs and other explosives to U.S. corporate executives from his cabin in Colorado from the 1970s to the 1990s, also appears to be idolized by the group.
“Your freedoms are not disappearing,” read a message forwarded by the Spanish group, “they are being killed by those who know their names and addresses.”
Several other typical internal base propaganda photos show masked men holding black flags in the Spanish countryside, stylized images of armed members in forests, and posts touting the benefits of drone warfare and survivalism.
“It’s very simple,” one post read in April. “We live to fight and we sacrifice ourselves to win.”
A Europol news release about the arrests showed a cache of confiscated weapons – the contents of which were apparently used in the same propaganda released by the base – which appeared to include multiple firearms, a submachine gun, neo-Nazi paraphernalia, envelopes containing cash, ammunition, combat knives and shirts bearing the faces of Kaczynski and Adolf Hitler. European law enforcement agencies have made it clear that the group’s leaders have direct links to Nazzaro.
“The potential links to Russian sabotage activities in Europe, whether realized by the panelists or not, are also mind-boggling,” Fisher-Birch said. “The fact that the leader of the Spanish group was allegedly linked to Rinaldo Nazzaro also highlights his continued role and raises the possibility that he is directing some aspects of activity in Europe.”
Nazzaro, who is currently believed to live in St. Petersburg with his Russian wife and children, has long been accused of being a Russian intelligence operative. The accusations intensified this summer when his organization began financing assassinations of Ukrainian military and political figures in what many believed was direct collaboration with Kremlin targets.
The New Jersey native, who has worked for the Department of Homeland Security and as an analyst with U.S. Special Forces targeting jihadi terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, has always raised questions about his personal history. Nazzaro has denied any links to Russian intelligence services, even telling a Kremlin-controlled television channel that he had “never had any contact with any Russian security service.”
But the base’s presence on the continent has grown, at the same time that Kremlin operatives have been assigned to carry out sabotage missions across Europe with the goal of supporting Ukraine’s continuing resistance to invading allies. Russian spies are increasingly paying unsuspecting individuals in pre-established criminal networks or far-right activists to carry out these attacks.
Spanish police and Europol have both declined to comment on the group’s potential links to Russian intelligence operations in Europe.
But stateside, the base hasn’t lost its footprint either. Despite Nazzaro and the group’s propensity for global expansion, the group is still considered most active within the borders of its founding countries, even in the face of historical police scrutiny. The base was the subject of a relentless FBI counterterrorism investigation that resulted in the arrests of more than a dozen base members, including three who planned mass shootings and bombings in Virginia in 2020.
“What stands out about the Spanish case is that it is very close to patterns we have observed elsewhere,” said Steven Rai, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) who has closely studied al Qaeda’s global developments in recent years. “Including in the United States, al Qaeda members have combined their ideological beliefs with offline operations, including paramilitary-style training, tactical exercises and shooting exercises.”
In order to support investigations targeting political opponents of the Trump administration and anti-fascist activists and to provide resources for ICE raids across the country, the FBI has turned its back on groups like al-Qaeda. Multiple sources said the bureau, at the behest of the White House and under the leadership of its director, Kash Patel, has diverted resources from pursuing cases involving various right-wing extremists.
“These actions echo earlier aspects of the group in 2019 and 2020, when multiple members planned serious acts of violence before being arrested,” Rai warned.
“It is important that law enforcement agencies, platforms and other stakeholders remain vigilant to the broader threat posed by al-Qaeda’s underlying ideology and the online ecosystem around which it materializes.”