- This is the first of a two-part series on the hidden
workings of the Anti-Defamation League and how three Bay Area activists
were able to uncover a spy operation that reached into the San Francisco
Police Department. Today: Paper trail of deceit.
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- By Dan Evans San Francisco Examiner 4-2-2
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- Locked in a nondescript computer database, a shadowy
operative named Roy Bullock kept file upon file on liberal San Francisco
Jews who disagreed with Israeli policies.
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- The files included Social Security numbers, driver's
license numbers, addresses, phone numbers and group memberships. Some of
the information was sold to foreign governments, including Israeli and
South African intelligence groups.
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- Shockingly, Bullock was in the employ of a civil rights
group whose motto is "fighting anti-Semitism, bigotry and extremism":
the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. Numerous targets of the ADL
-- who drew parallels to COINTELPRO, the FBI's tainted domestic surveillance
program -- say the profiling and covert activities continue to this day.
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- "They are continuing to gather facts," said
Abdeen Jabara, a Manhattan attorney and former president of the American
Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. "That, of course, is a euphemism
for what we say is private spying."
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- Not only were liberal Jews a target, but information
also was kept on labor unions, pro-Palestinian organizations, anti-apartheid
groups, American Arabs and anti-Semites. After the Federal Bureau of Investigation
broke the case in 1993, a number of these targets filed suit against the
ADL. The last lawsuit was recently settled.
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- The settlement in February marked the first time any
of the organization's victims were allowed to speak out. Usually, the ADL
demands plaintiffs keep quiet as a condition of any settlement.
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- Without those constraints, victims Jeffrey Blankfort,
Steve Zeltzer and Anne Poirier are revealing the underbelly of an organization
that previously had successfully shielded itself from condemnation. They
are using the ADL's own spy as a fulcrum.
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- Bullock's relationship with Blankfort and Zeltzer began
when he infiltrated a pro-Palestinian group started by the two, both of
whom are Jewish. Once inside, Bullock collected and sold information about
the two men to the ADL and, possibly the Mossad, the foreign arm of Israeli
intelligence.
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- Although Bullock never met Poirier, he may have sold
information on her organization to the South African government. The woman,
who lives in Berkeley, ran a scholarship program for South African exiles
in the early 1990s. During the course of her lawsuit against the ADL, she
discovered the ADL's operative had sold confidential information to a South
African agent in San Francisco for $15,000.
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- Poirier had never done any work relating to the Middle
East, and she was astounded when she found out that the ADL had kept tabs
on her. During her nine-year court fight with the group, she found out
more than she needed to know about its operation, and now nothing much
surprises her.
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- "They gathered information on anti-apartheid activities,"
she said, "anyone the organization felt, by definition, would be against
Israel because they were too left-wing."
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- A few files, so what?
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- The fact the ADL has a file on a group doesn't imply
clandestine activities, said San Francisco regional director Jonathan Bernstein.
He resents the implication of the word spying, saying it implies people
were being followed around and trailed. That simply wasn't the case, he
said, though he acknowledged he never met Bullock.
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- "We have files on the NAACP because we've done collaborative
projects with them," he said. "They probably have files on the
ADL, too."
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- In Bernstein's eyes, the group's fact-finding operations
are one of its most important missions.
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- Much of the time, the "missions" are nothing
more than gleaning information from media reports, he said. People employed
by the ADL do attend public meetings to keep an eye on people, just as
other journalists do.
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- The area's top boss, however, repeatedly sidestepped
questions on whether fact-finders employed subterfuge to get information.
The fact that some of the people being watched by the ADL were Jewish was
immaterial, Bernstein said.
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- Other civil rights groups, such as the Southern Poverty
Law Center, do similar things on a limited scale, he said.
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- A representative of the Southern Poverty Law Center,
which is headquartered in Birmingham, could not be reached for comment.
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- Because the ADL has 30 regional offices, the organization
is much better equipped to ferret out anti-Semitism and other racist behavior.
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- "It can help us to respond to hate activity before
someone gets hurt," Bernstein said. "That's the ultimate objective."
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- But are there times when fact-finding becomes a civil
rights violation?
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- The San Francisco office of the American Civil Liberties
Union, a group one might expect to have a dim view on the tactics employed
by the ADL, refused to comment on the group's fact-finding activities.
Nor would spokeswoman Rachel Swain give a reason for the silence.
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- Ongoing complaints
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- Groups have been saying for years that the ADL isn't
the civil rights organization it claims to be, but no one has been listening.
Mostly, it's because those groups have been thinly-veiled anti-Semites,
such as the Liberty Lobby, or hate groups such as White Aryan Resistance
and the KKK.
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- But, as vile as some of these groups are, there is a
significant amount of evidence that their vitriol is not unfounded. For
at least four decades, the ADL continuously has tracked and spied on groups
it considers not only a threat to the Jewish community, but to the state
of Israel.
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- Hussein Ibish certainly thinks so. Ibish is the spokesman
for the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee -- an organization
that is, in many ways, the Arab counterpart to the ADL. Though certainly
at odds with many Israeli policies, the ADC is not anti-Semitic, and plays
a rather moderate role.
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- "Was the ADL spying on people?" asked Ibish,
quickly answering his own question. "Certainly in San Francisco they
were. We know they were engaging in illegal activities to gain information.
They, and their operatives, were working hand-in-glove with South African
intelligence and Israeli intelligence."
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- Meet Mr. Spy
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- By his own admission, Bullock had been working off the
books as a fact-finder for the ADL since the mid-1960s. He would infiltrate
not only openly anti-Semitic groups, but also pro-Palestinian and anti-apartheid
organizations, usually under false pretenses. Bullock, who is not Jewish,
would then pass that information along to the ADL.
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- He received information about his targets from former
San Francisco Police Inspector Tom Gerard, who fled to the Philippines
after being indicted in 1994 for illegal use of a police computer. Gerard's
current whereabouts are unknown.
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- Bullock, who no longer does undercover work for the organization,
declined to be interviewed for this article.
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- Nobody could have known about the extent of Bullock's
surveillance, if police had not seized his computer database in April 1993.
It contained thousands of files on liberal Jewish San Franciscans, Arab-Americans,
anti-apartheid activists, anti-Semitic groups, and plain ol' white racists.
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- On April 8, 1993, armed with this information, police
in San Francisco and Los Angeles searched the ADL offices in those two
cities. In San Francisco, roughly 10 banker's boxes of information -- 75
percent of which officers said was illegally obtained -- were seized.
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- A majority of data in those boxes confirmed police suspicions
that it had come from Bullock's computer. On that computer was information
on 9,876 people, including 1,394 driver's licenses. The files were divided
into five categories: "Pinko," "Right," Arabs,"
"Skins," and "ANC," the last standing for African National
Congress.
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- Bullock also told the FBI that he had information on
various labor groups. These groups included: the San Francisco Labor Council,
the Oakland Educators Association, the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People, Irish Northern Aid, the International Indian Treaty
Council and the Asian Law Caucus.
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- Lawsuits galore
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- After the SFPD raid on the ADL offices, then-District
Attorney Arlo Smith filed a lawsuit against the organization to stop the
spying. The suit was settled that November. Though the ADL acknowledged
no wrongdoing, the group agreed to stop using police to get confidential
information. The league also agreed to pay $75,000 to a fund used to help
stop hate crw weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee On April 18, 1993, 19 people who Bullock
kept files on sued the ADL in San Francisco Superior Court. Pete McCloskey,
a former Republican congressman from San Mateo County, was the group's
attorney. His wife, Helen, was one of the original plaintiffs.
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- A few months later, in October, the ADC slapped its Jewish
counterpart with a similar lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court. The ADC
claimed the ADL passed along information on the group to the Israeli government.
The ADC's suit was settled in October 1996.
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- The ADL agreed to pay $175,000 toward the Arab group's
legal costs. The ADL also agreed to contribute $25,000 to a foundation,
administered by the ADL and the ADC, dedicated to improving relations between
Jews and Arabs. The ADL was able to deny all wrongdoing.
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- Journalistic enterprise?
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- The McCloskey case, however, would drag on. The main
point of contention in that case was whether the ADL could be considered
a journalistic enterprise, a point won in court by the ADL.
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- The ADL publishes hundreds of newsletters, papers and
books on a wide range of subjects, attorney David Goldstein said. As with
any other journalistic enterprise, it contended it was not required to
release its confidential information or sources.
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- After a 1998 ruling by the 1st District Court of Appeal,
giving the ADL journalistic protection, 14 of the remaining 17 plaintiffs
-- two had died in the interim -- dropped their cases against the ADL.
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- On Feb. 22, 2002, the ADL settled with Blankfort, Zeltzer
and Poirier.
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- What held up the process, said McCloskey, was his clients'
refusal to sign a confidentially agreement. The three felt they had been
viciously wronged, he said, and wanted to publicize that fact.
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- With the settlement, each of the three plaintiffs received
about $50,000. None of the three, or McCloskey, believes the ADL will stop
their spying ways.
- "It was settled partially out of fatigue,"
said the attorney. "Everyone figured it might be best if we all just
moved on."
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- Even if the case had continued, said Goldstein, there
is a debate over how much the three plaintiffs could prove they had been
injured. Most of the contested information consisted of Social Security
and driver's license numbers, which are hardly difficult items to find.
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- Nine years later, McCloskey is still angry about the
case and wants the federal government to revoke the group's tax-exempt
status.
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- Since they obviously are working in conjunction with
the Israeli government, he said, they should register as such. Referring
to themselves as an education group, said the attorney, is simply a sham.
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- E-mail Dan Evans at devans@sfexaminer.com http://www.examiner.com/news/default.jsp?story=n.adl.0401w
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