In January 1993, EIR published The Ugly Truth About the ADL. This excerpt by Jeffrey Steinberg is from the second edition's Preface, "Since the First Printing: ADL in Middle of a Spy Scandal Too Big To Bury."
On Jan. 15, eight days after the publication of the first edition of this book, The San Francisco Chronicle shocked the public with the revelation that the office of the ADL in San Francisco had been zeroed in on, in a scandal involving a San Francisco police officer and a Bay Area art dealer/self-described private eye....
The two men, Sgt. Tom Gerard of the San Francisco Police Department, and Roy Bullock, a longtime paid undercover operative for the local office of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL), had already been under Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) scrutiny since 1990, when Federal agents discovered that secret Bureau records on American black Muslims had been obtained by South African spies.
The trail pointed to Bullock, who, in addition to his full-time paid work for the ADL, had been "moonlighting" as an undercover snitch for the Bureau. On at least one occasion, Bullock received a $500 cash payment from the FBI for infiltrating meetings of two Bay Area groups.
Bullock had access to confidential Bureau files, and became a suspect when FBI files showed up in the hands of the South African government at the same time he was regularly meeting with two South African spies and passing confidential data to them. Bullock received cash payments that eventually totalled over $16,000.
The early meetings between Bullock and the two South African agents, identified as "Humphries" and "Louie,' included policeman Gerard. Later, Bullock would meet with the South African alone. According to one version of the Bullock-South Africa story, it was ADL officials who put him in touch with the foreign agents.
Nearly three years later, that FBI probe of South African spying has mushroomed into one of the biggest espionage scandals in years. And the center of the scandal has shifted from cops and art dealers to an alleged command center. The central target is now the ADL.
On April 1, 1993, San Francisco Assistant District Attorney John Dwyer told reporters: "The ADL is the target. Their involvement is just so great. People have called this the Gerard case. Now, it's the ADL case. Gerard is just their guy in San Francisco. The ADL is doing the same thing all over the country. There is evidence that the ADL had police agents in other cities. The case just gets bigger every day. The more we look, the more we find people involved."
The San Francisco probe soon proved that the profile of the ADL contained in The Ugly Truth was right on the mark.
Far from living up to its thoroughly undeserved and self-promoted reputation, the Anti-Defamation League has been caught by San Francisco police investigators:
- Illegally spying on at least 950 political organizations ranging from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to the Rainbow Coalition, to Greenpeace, to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, to the United Auto Workers, the Christic Institute, New Jewish Agenda, Operation Rescue, the Liberty Lobby, the Nation of Islam, the United Farm Workers, Act-Up, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Lawyers Guild, the Bo Gritz Presidential Campaign, and the political movement led by Lyndon LaRouche;
- Infiltrating countless police and sheriff departments across the country, bribing police officers and illegally obtaining classified government data on at least 20,000 American citizens;
- Selling information on anti-apartheid groups to agents of the South African government;
- Passing surveillance and classified police data on Arab-Americans to Israeli authorities who then used the ADL data to illegally detain American citizens visiting Israel;
- Passing off Israeli intelligence propaganda as ADL-generated research in an effort to sway American public opinion and government policy, while never being forced to register as foreign agents and while even enjoying tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
The San Francisco district attorney and police investigators have concluded that the pattern of illegal spying that they unearthed in California is a mere "cog" in a nationwide spy operation run centrally out of the ADL's national headquarters in New York City under the direction of its "fact finding" director, Irwin Suall.
In the San Francisco probe alone, police uncovered evidence that the ADL had illegally penetrated 20 different police agencies in California alone, and had also gained access to classified police files in Chicago, St. Louis, Atlanta, and a half-dozen other cities across the country.
On April 8, 1993, San Francisco police released nearly 800 pages of documents, providing previously classified details of the ADL's nationwide criminal operations. Those documents were released as attachments to a search warrant affidavit which police executed the same day. In raids on the San Francisco and Los Angeles offices of the ADL, police obtained "a mountain" of new evidence of the spying and agent provocateur operations of the League....
Next: ADL Settles Spying Case Rather Than Go To Trial
