http://www.counterpunch.org/adlspies.html
Were the Spies "Journalists"?
The ADL Snoops
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 $2500.
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.
In1994, 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
melblcome@igc.com.)
--CP