Posted Tuesday,
September 28, 1999 | |||
Jeffrey Blankfort is the Editor of the Middle East Labor Bulletin. This item is from Vol. 4, No. 2 Spring 1993 (pages 1, 13-16) Published by the Labor Committee on the Middle East P.O. Box 421546 San Francisco, CA 94142-1546 THE INVESTIGATION of a San Francisco police
officer found to be in the possession of
computerized files on Arab-Americans, has led to
the door of the Anti-Defamation
League of B'Nai B'rith along with reports that
the self-styled 'civil rights' organization
operates a national network of informants who
gather 'intelligence' on 'pro-Palestinian'
individuals and groups.[1] Reports of such
activities by the ADL are not new, going back at
least to 1947, when it provided information on
'subversive' activities to the House Un-American
Activities Committee, or HUAC, as it came to be
known. The source of the present allegations,
identified by the San Francisco Examiner as an
unnamed "San Francisco law enforcement official,"
said that "the [ADL] operatives rely on
local police and sheriff's deputies to provide
access to confidential law enforcement and motor
vehicle information, in probable violation of
criminal law." Chronicle in mid-January, a San Francisco police
officer, Tom Gerard, apparently sold
information to Israeli as well as South African
intelligence agencies, some of which turned up in
ADL files in San Francisco and Los Angeles,
containing "information that had recently been
taken from a national police computer
network."[2] Evidently forewarned that he was under
surveillance, Gerard slipped away in November to
the Philippines, which has no extradition treaty
with the U.S. From there, in an interview by phone
with the Examiner, Gerard confirmed what Bay Area
Middle East activists had suspected for several
years, that his partner Roy Bullock, an
art-dealer and self-described "private
investigator," who apparently fed him information,
was an agent of the Anti-Defamation League, better
known and feared by its acronym,
ADL.[3] Bullock became a "member" of the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) in the mid-80s
and was frequently seen at Palestinian and
Arab-American gatherings and protests where, given
his large, beefy size, he occasionally served as
"security." "In this time," said the ADC's Maha
Jaber, "we must assume Bullock was furnishing
the ADL with information about the number and names
of our members and what local and national
activities we were planning or in which we were
involved."[4] A substantial number of ADC members, then as
well as at present, were non-Arabs, whose
activities, it appears, were also recorded. Bullock
also traveled around the country, showing up, by
co-incidence, at Arab-American conferences. In
1991, using the name Buchanan, he reportedly
attempted to join the ADC chapter in Seattle. Shortly after the Labor Committee on the Middle
East was organized in the summer of 1987, we
received information that one of our new members,
the same Mr. Bullock, had been an agent of the ADL
for the past 20 years. The source was the
newsletter of the Institute
for Historical Review, a crackpot group based
in Orange Co., whose raison d'etre is proving that
the Holocaust was a hoax. They were apparently right about Bullock,
however. According to the newsletter, Bullock had
admitted when quizzed by LCOME co-founder Steve
Zeltzer and myself in August, 1987. The reason
Bullock gave us for attending the IHR conferences
was to distribute ADC literature and recruit some
new members for the Arab-American organization. We
found it both strange and suspicious that it had
not occurred to him that the last type of
individual that the ADC would want as a member
would be someone with obviously anti-Jewish and
perhaps even pro-Nazi sentiments. A link between
neo-Nazis and Arab-Americans is, however, a
connection that the ADL would like to make.
Convinced that Bullock was indeed an ADL agent, we
let the Arab-American community know of our
conclusions. Bullock was later seen in March, 1988, notepad
in hand, at an anti-apartheid conference in
Berkeley that was attended by a number of South
African exiles. A conference organizer, when told
of Bullock's likely employer, did not think it
serious enough to ask him to leave. It subsequently
turned out that both Bullock and Gerard had links
to South African intelligence, according to (At
press time, the MELB learned that the names of
anti-apartheid activists, some of them native South
Africans, had been found in the ADL files). In April of that year, Bullock "volunteered" to
work in the office of the Mobilization for Peace
Jobs and Justice, which during the mid-80s
organized large marches against U.S. intervention
in Central America and against apartheid.
Mobilization Chair Carl Finamore, told the
MELB that Bullock "worked" there during the last
few weeks of the campaign where he would have had
access to the names, addresses and phone number of
thousands of activists throughout Northern
California. At this time, Bullock may also have been working
for the FBI, although according to the Examiner's
interview with Gerard, the ex-SF police officer
said Bullock had not started working for the
federal agency until 1991 when the San Francisco
Police Dept reportedly closed down its intelligence
section, the department to which Gerard was
assigned (and where he was at the same American
community!). Until then, Gerard apparently had also been
working for the FBI, evidently sharing intelligence
gathered by Bullock. With the SFPD intelligence
operation supposedly defunct, Gerard said that he
then took Bullock to the local FBI office. "We sat
down, I turned his file over to them, I introduced
them, I told (the FBI) the things we were working
on, the things we had going and so forth," he said.
"And they started using (Bullock) and were paying
him." [5] Some questions that are still unanswered: If
Bullock was not working for the FBI until 1991,
who[m] was he spying for, besides ADL, in
1988? Or was ADL providing the services of its
long-time agent to the FBI as well as to Mossad and
the South African intelligence service? Gerard had rejoined the SFPD in 1985 after a
stint with CIA in El Salvador, where he claims to
have given instructions in bomb-disposal
techniques. In his interview with the Examiner,
Gerard said that he had met Bullock, whom he
verified as being a paid investigator for the ADL,
during a visit to the local ADL office. The two
men, he said had a professional interest in
gathering information on right-wing extremists and
Arab-American groups, particularly those with ties
to Palestinian organizations in the Middle
East. "We sat down there one morning with everyone in
the (ADL) office, shook hands and made friends."
[6] Refusing to acknowledge its ties to Bullock, the
local ADL director put an Op-Ed piece in the
Examiner saying that "ADL will not confirm or deny
whether any individual or organization has been a
source of information." Incredibly, the next
sentence said that "ADL's policy is designed to
promote the free association of ideas and the
untrammeled dissemination of information."
[7] As the MELB went to press, lawyers for the ADL
were reportedly blocking efforts of the SFPD to let
local individuals know if their names were either
in the ADL's or Bullock's files. Gerard's files
which had been removed from his houseboat in
Sausalito, are expected to be made available to
individuals who believe they may have been spied
upon, according to the SF Police Department.
Subsequent press reports indicate, however, that
the bulk of the files were found in Bullock's San
Francisco residence.[8] They reportedly
contain some 12,000 names, including, it turns out,
that of Mohammed Jarad, one of three Palestinians
arrested in Israel in January and accused of
providing funds for Hamas.[9] This would seem to bear out the accusation that
the ADL functions as an intelligence conduit to the
Israeli Mossad, an accusation its officials are
quick to deny. Giving strength to this allegation and to the
San Francisco police official's report concerning
the ADL's ties to various police and sheriff's
departments were the revelations that not only had
Gerard been sent on an all-expenses paid trip to
Israel in 1991,[10] but that former San
Francisco Police Chief and currently Mayor Frank
Jordan[11] as well as San Francisco Sheriff
Mike Hennessy across the Bay, Alameda
Sheriff Charles Plummer had also received
free trips to Israel from the ADL over the past few
years.[12] On these trips, the law enforcement agents
reportedly were introduced to members of the
Israeli military from which, presumably,
intelligence officials were not excluded. It is
also reasonable to assume that what was being done
by the ADL in the Bay Area was being carried out
within other police jurisdictions by regional ADL
offices throughout the country. There are 32 such
offices in the U.S, with branches in Canada, Paris,
Rome and, of course, Jerusalem. The ADL attempts to portray these trips as "part
of its educational mandate," and resents
implications in the media that "the ADL, through
its missions program, has attempted to improperly
influence law enforcement officials."13 Richard
Hirschaut, the ADL's Northern California
Regional Director, in a letter to the SF Examiner,
wrote: "We cannot emphasize strongly enough that
the ADL is not affiliated with any governmental
organization (domestic or
foreign)."[14] In the above cited Op-Ed piece, co-authored with
Elliot Bien, a private attorney, Hirschaut
acknowledged that "Where appropriate, ADL shares
information on extremist groups with law
enforcement agencies, and has fostered good working
relationships with the law enforcement community."
Bien and Hirschaut expressed resentment at "recent
news reports [that] have implied that ADL's
fact-finding activities are in some way,
inappropriateI" or that it "is, in some way,
associated with foreign intelligence
agencies."15 Osama Doumani, who directed the Northern
California chapter of the American-Arab Anti-
Discrimination Committee (ADC) in the mid-80s when
Bullock "joined" the group, wasn't buying the ADL's
denials. "Of course, they are going to deny any
involvement in the matter," he wrote in a letter to
the Examiner.[16] "And we are assumed to be
simple-minded enough to believe that Israeli
intelligence, the Consulate of Israel and the ADL
are all tightly compartmentalized and their
personnel to not talk to each other." As writer Dorothy Thompson bitterly
pointed out in a letter to Paul Hoffman, on
April 27, 1953, 40 years ago: Under the pretext of fighting "anti-Semitism"
(more precisely anti-Jewish discrimination), a
problem that is dwarfed in the U.S. by the scale of
prejudice facing people of color and despite its
own padded statistics, the ADL has been allowed by
the media to project itself as the premiere "civil
rights," organization in the U.S. without suffering
the "leftist" smears that have been directed at the
ACLU. That it has led the court fight from the very
beginning against "affirmative action," and
provided the script for Pres. Reagan's
accusations that the Sandinistas were
"anti-Semitic,"[17] has not been without
its rewards. Somehow, even when it is revealed that
the ADL, a la Nixon, keeps its "enemies
list," such as happened in 1983, when it produced a
directory of individuals and organizations whom the
ADL claimed were "anti-Israel," the ADL's public
image remains intact. That list contained the names
of Arabs and non-Arabs, a number of Jews, and six
professors. Most recently, the ADL put out a
54-page booklet on "Black Extremists" in which it
identified the two leading African-American
newspapers in New York City as being
"anti-Semitic." (See MELB Vol. 4/1). While the existence of ties between the ADL and
the federal government has been confirmed by
documents obtained under the Freedom of Information
Act,[18], the most significant of what has
been publicized was the ADL's role in instigating
the arrest by the Immigration and Naturalization
Service of seven Palestinians and a Kenyan woman in
Los Angeles in 1987, on the charge of supporting
"world Communism."[19] Their "subversive
act," for which the government intended to deport
them, was the distribution of publications of the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine that
were in the country, legally, an action that would
have been entirely proper if done by U.S.
citizens. Even though the initial charge was thrown out,
the government is currently rehearing the case. In
what the Los Angeles Times describes as "the latest
twist," in the six-year old episode, it seems that
the presiding judge, Bruce Einhorn, is the
chair of the ADL's "civil rights" committee in Los
Angeles. When the defense asked the judge to remove
himself from the case because of the apparent
conflict of interest, he refused.[20] "He's
very active in an organization that has a vested
interest in having our clients deported," noted San
Francisco attorney and co-defense counsel Mark
Van Der Hout. The case before Einhorn involves the proposed
deportation of Michael Shehadeh and
Khader Hamide, both long-time legal
residents who live in Los Angeles. They are charged
with raising money and providing support for the
PFLP. No criminal charges have been filed. The
government is seeking to deport the other six,
among them Hamide's wife, on technical violations
of immigration law. Should either of the
government's prosecutions succeed, the message to
Arab- Americans as well as to political exiles from
other regions of the world is both obvious and
ominous. This was clearly spelled out by the
front-page headline and story in the March 12, New
York-based Jewish weekly, Forward. The headline
reads: "L.A. Case Tests Right to Hunt Terrorist
Cells." The case, the first paragraph tells us,
"may soon help define how far the government may go
to ferret out and deport suspected foreign
terrorists." While acknowledging that the "L.A.
Eight" are being charged with fund-raising for the
PFLP, the Forward's correspondent, in the same
paragraph reminds the paper's readers of the PFLP's
plane hijackings in 1970. David Lehrer, the ADL's executive
director in Los Angeles, who six years ago had
bragged about the league's participation in the
arrest of the Palestinians, now says, "We have
absolutely nothing to do with the prosecution of
this case, nothing to do with the formulation of
this case."[21] In a subsequent letter to
the Examiner, Kenneth Jacobsen, ADL's
Director of International Affairs, attempted to
clarify the league's role in the L.A.case. "The
'information' provided to the FBI," he wrote, "was
an ADL Special Report, publicly avaliable,
regarding activities of the Popular Front
for [line missing]
no reason to believe that providing its
report to the FBI or anyone else led to the arrest
of any individuals."[22] ADL, its critics maintain, has two main
functions. The first is to be an unofficial arm of
the Israeli propaganda ministry; the second, and,
perhaps, the most important, is to function as an
intelligence gathering agency for the Israeli
Mossad. The first charge is amply proved by the
statements and booklets issued by the organization
condemning the PLO, the intifada, etc., none of
which have anything to do with anti-Semitism; the
second charge is also obvious. While legal restrictions prevent the Mossad from
conducting intelligence monitoring in the U.S., it
is desperately in need of information on the
political activities of both Arab-Americans and
non- Arab-Americans who are engaged, totally within
the law, in the struggle for Palestinian
rights. That need, of course, is based on the fact that
Israel considers the U.S. to be its economic and
[line missing]
support Israel blindly, both here and there,
appear ready to go to any length to preserve that
relationship and to sabotage any individual or
organization they perceive as threatening it. If that means infiltrating American-based Middle
East organizations and violating the Constitutional
guarantees of their members and restricting,
through intimidation, their legitimate political
activities, the Anti-Defamation League has proved
itself over and over again, that it is quite
willing to do so. 1. SF Examiner 3/9 2. SF
Chronicle, 1/15 3. SF Ex., 1/22 4. SF Ex. 1/31 5.
SF Ex. 1/22. 6. Ibid. 7. SF Ex. 1/24 8. LA Times
2/26, SF Ex. 3/9 9. SFX 2/12 10. No. Cal. Jewish
Bulletin 1/22 11. NCJB 7/10/87 12. NCJB 4/7/89 13.
SFX 2/3 14. Ibid. 15. SFX 1/24 16. 1/21 17. NYT
3/20/86 18. SF Ex. 3/9 19. Wash. Rept. On ME Mar.
93 20. LA Times 2/24 21. Ibid. 22. SF Ex.
3/17 | |||
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Current ADL National Director Abraham H Foxman
(right)
write to David Irving