The
ADL Snoops Were
the Spies "Journalists"? THE organization's main
"fact-finder" was doubling as a spy for
the white South African government while
his buddy, a San Francisco cop who had
tutored El Salvadoran death squads on the
finer aspects of torture, was providing
its officials with personal information on
the organization's putative enemies when
the story broke in San Francisco in
December, 1992. The organization was the
Anti-Defamation
League.  The
ADL claims to be the nation's leading
defender against prejudice and bigotry but
in this instance its targets were members
of the African National Congress and its
supporters, and apparently everyone, Arab
and non-Arab, who had the temerity to
criticize Israel. This included some who
drove to Arab community events where the
ADL's "fact-finder," Roy Bullock,
and the cop, Tom Gerard, took turns
writing down their license plate numbers,
which Gerard turned into addresses thanks
to his access to California motor vehicle
records.
Their spying efforts proved to be part
of a much larger intelligence gathering
operation that targeted some 12,000
individuals and more than 600
left-of-center organizations in northern
California. After the first flurry of publicity,
the ADL's spin doctors successfully kept
the story from receiving the national
coverage that the situation warranted. But
the story hasn't gone away. Last November the California Court of
Appeals handed down a decision that paves
the way for a major test later this year
of the ADL's penchant for spying on its
enemies. It was the most significant
episode in a slow-moving class-action case
filed in 1993 by 19 pro-Palestinian and
anti-apartheid activists who claim to be
victims of the ADL's snooping
operations. The plaintiffs say they were illegally
spied on by Bullock, then considered the
ADL's top "fact-finder" by his now
deceased chief, Irwin Suall, and
that such spying constituted an invasion
of privacy under the provisions of the
California Constitution. The ADL's
defense, accepted by the court in 1994,
is that the Jewish defense organization
is, collectively, a "journalist" and,
therefore, can legally engage in
information-gathering activities
regardless of the source. At question
was access by the plaintiffs to
information contained in 10 boxes of
files seized by the San Francisco
police from the ADL's San Francisco
office in April, 1993, and placed under
court seal where the ADL has fought
fiercely to keep them. In the years
since then, efforts by the court to
settle the case have foundered on the
ADL's refusal to allow potentially
embarrassing depositions taken by
plaintiffs' lawyer ex-Congressman
Paul (Pete) McCloskey of
Bullock, ADL officials and police
officers to be be made public and its
files opened. The plaintiffs have been
unwilling to compromise on either of
these issues. Then, in September, 1997, Judge Alex
Saldamondo ruled that McCloskey's
clients were entitled to see what the ADL
had on them in its files. Two plaintiffs,
Jeffrey Blankfort and Steve
Zeltzer, co-founders of the Labor
Committee on the Middle East, who had
"outed" Bullock as an ADL spy after he
infiltrated their group in 1987, received
an extract of their files from the DA's
office the day before they were ordered
sealed. Both contain illegally obtained
information, much of which, say Blankfort
and Zeltzer, is erroneous. When ADL's appeal of that decision was
rejected by Court of Appeals Judge
Anthony Kline, the ADL persuaded the
State Supreme Court to return the case to
the full court for a hearing. On November
15, 1998, the court reaffirmed ADL's
status as a journalist and acknowledged
its right to maintain files and obtain
information on all but two of the
remaining plaintiffs on the basis that
they are "limited-purpose public figures",
which it defined as having been publicly
engaged and identified in activities
around a particular issue, in this
instance opposition to Israeli occupation
and/or South African apartheid. There is
no protection, said the court, for
obtaining information illegally on
non-public figures. The court made an important
qualification, however, ruling that for
"limited purpose" figures, the
journalist's shield only applies if the
information obtained is to be used for
journalistic purposes. It does not protect
the ADL from charges that it passed
information about the plaintiffs to
"foreign governments (in this instance,
Israel or South Africa) or to others",
which is what the plaintiffs claim the ADL
has done. Although the Court of Appeals vacated
Judge Saldamando's decision, it did state
that representatives of the plaintiffs had
the right to request a review of ADL's
files to discover possible constitutional
violations, each of which would be worth
$2,500. While this may seem a small sum,
there are hundreds of Arab-Americans and
anti-apartheid activists whose names
appear in the ADL's files who potentially
could collect if the ADL loses in court or
is forced to settle the case. THE origins of the story are murky.
What the press reported was that the SFPD
acted on a tip from the FBI, which was
supposedly concerned about files on the
Nation of Islam that were stolen from its
local office, and arrested Gerard, who
allegedly had done the pilfering. In
Gerard's computer they found files
on more than 7,000 individuals, many
of them Arab-Americans, as well as
information on hundreds of left-to-liberal
organizations filed by Gerard as
"pinko". In his locker,
they found a black executioner's hood,
a number of photos of dark-skinned men
bound and blindfolded, CIA manuals, a
secret document on interrogation
techniques, stamped "secret" and
referring to El Salvador, and numerous
passports and IDs in a variety of
names, all with his picture. This splendid fellow began meeting with
Richard Hirschhaut, chief of the
ADL's San Francisco office in 1986, during
which, according to a "confidential"
Hirschhaut memo to the aforementioned ADL
chief "fact-finder" Suall, he provided "a
significant amount of information" on "the
activities of specific Arab organizations
and individuals in the Bay Area". That
memo hasn't been made public but what was
reported created a nightmare for the ADL
when it turned out that Gerard had been
exchanging non-public, personal
information from government files with
Bullock, a paid informant for the ADL
since 1954 and whose own computerized
"pinko" files on leftish and liberal
folks, when seized by the police, proved
to be a third again as large as Gerard's.
According to police, his computer
contained the names of nearly 12,000
individuals, 77 Arab-American
organizations, 29 anti-apartheid
organizations, and more than 600 "pinko"
groups which included such revolutionary
outfits as the NAACP, Asian Law Caucus and
SANE/FREEZE, as well as 20 Bay area labor
unions including the SF Labor Council.
There were in addition, files on 612
right-wing organizations and 27 skinhead
groups. According to SF police inspector Ron
Roth, 75 percent of their contents was
non-public information illegally obtained
from government agencies. After indicating that the ADL would be
charged with violating the California's
Business and Profession's code, SF
District Attorney Arlo Smith did an
extraordinary thing. He made available to
the public, merely for the copying costs,
some 700 pages of documents incriminating
the ADL in a nation-wide intelligence
gathering operation run out of New York by
Suall. One of the significant parts of
that report was Bullock's admission that
he was paid by a South African
intelligence agent to spy on
anti-apartheid activists (which he was
already doing for the ADL.) He had
reported on a visit to California by the
ANC's Chris Hani, ten days before
the man expected by many to succeed
Nelson Mandela, returned home to be
brutally murdered. The ADL attempted to portray Bullock as
a free-lance investigator, but no one was
convinced, because since 1954 Bullock had
been paid through a cutout, an ADL lawyer
in Beverly Hills. After his exposure,
Bullock was put directly on the ADL's
payroll. ADL's position on the ANC was
identical to that of the South African
government - they considered it to be a
"terrorist", "communist" organization. At
the time, Israel was furnishing arms to
maintain the apartheid regime in
power. In 1994, Smith
announced that he would not prosecute
either the ADL or Bullock since it
would be "expensive and time-consuming
both to the SFDA and the defendants," a
curious judgement considering the
overwhelming evidence in his
possession. In its settlement with the city, the
ADL, admitted no wrongdoing, agreed to
restrain their operatives from seeking
non-public data on ADL's enemies from
government agencies and, putting a happy
face on the story, promised to create a
$25,000 Hate Crimes Fund and another
$25,000 for a public school course. Another class-action case filed by the
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination
Committee and other spied-upon groups such
as CISPES, the Bay Area Anti-Apartheid
Network and the National Lawyers Guild,
was settled in 1996, also under conditions
favorable to the ADL, but without the
approval of some of the suing groups. In that instance, again without
admitting wrongdoing or opening its files,
the ADL agreed: to remove questionably
obtained information from its files; that
it would not seek non-public information
on individuals from government employees
and would pay $25,000 to a fund to improve
relations among Jews, blacks and other
minorities. A similar deal was offered to
McCloskey's plaintiffs but they turned it
down since it would let the ADL off the
hook and allow its secrets to be kept
intact. Both sides will be back in Judge
Saldamando's court in March to hear a new
discovery motion from McCloskey and
probably to set a trial date, something
the ADL has been trying to avoid, given
the embarrassment that would inevitably
ensue, whatever the outcome. Its latest
ploy has been to ask the judge for a
summary judgement, in other words,
dismissal of the case, something he is
unlikely to do. The deaths of veteran journalists
Colin Edwards and George
Green reduced the number of plaintiffs
by two and subsequently four others, whose
political activities were relatively
limited, were dropped from the case.
McCloskey, himself a victim of ADL attacks
and whose wife Helen is one of the
plaintiffs, is pursuing the case pro bono.
Typically he is faced in court by four or
five lawyers for the ADL. Contributions
for the plaintiffs may be sent to Paul N.
McCloskey, Jr. Atty., 333 Bradford St.,
Redwood City, CA 94063 (For more
information see: http://www.adlwatch.org
or e-mail
at [email protected].)
CP 
© Copyright: 1998-1999. All
rights
reserved. |
Posted Wednesday,
November 11, 1998
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