ADL Espionage

James Rosenberg Case

In early October of 1981, on the east side of Manhattan, two men were arrested for brandishing rifles on the roof of an apartment building just two blocks from the United Nations headquarters. The men, Jim Anderson and John Austin, were in the middle of a photoshoot, taking turns posing menacingly with two sniper rifles when concerned neighbors called police, who would ultimately charge Anderson and Austin with possession of unregistered rifles and carrying weapons in public view. But Anderson and Austin weren't just any arrestees. Both men had spent years deeply entrenched in right-wing extremist groups all over the United States. In March of 1979, Anderson had been implicated in a plot to provoke a Pennsylvania KKK group into blowing up the Trenton, New Jersey headquarters of the NAACP. Anderson had also been involved in riots and street fights throughout the late 70s with people who showed up to protest at his racist rallies for groups like the KKK and the National Renaissance Party. Just a few months after their arrest, Jim Anderson and John Austin were prominently featured in a documentary about the far right produced by the Minneapolis PBS station WCCO titled "Armies of the Right." The documentary focused on yet another far-right organization that Anderson was involved in: the Christian Patriots Defense League, CPDL for short, a militia group that was "opposed to Zionism and communism," which held frequent paramilitary training events on the two compounds it owned, where Anderson and others taught courses on topics like handgun use, street fighting, knife fighting, and the construction of improvised explosive devices. Anderson and Austin identified in the documentary as the leaders of the Christian Patriots Defense League's New York branch, were responsible for the most racially inflammatory parts of the entire film, and Anderson had even tried to provoke a fight with random Latino passersby during a CPDL rally he'd arranged specifically for the documentary crew to film. During filming for the movie, the director had contacted the nonpartisan extremism researcher and archivist Laird Wilcox, and invited him to participate in a panel discussion at the movie's premiere in Minneapolis, along with representatives from the Anti-Defamation League and some of the far-right groups featured in the film. Wilcox would end up consulting on the documentary, giving the filmmakers information on far-right groups from his archive and new leads to follow. But the director confided in Wilcox that something about Jim Anderson and John Austin just didn't sit right with him. To quote from Wilcox's book, The Watchdogs, "The director told me that Anderson and Austin behaved strangely during the shot, often huddling together and whispering between themselves, and that Austin insisted on wearing a fake mustache. They didn't seem right," the director said, noting that they seemed to be acting and trying to create the impression of the stereotypical right-wing racist. He wondered if they were legitimate. I replied that these movements are full of strange characters and that I could spend hours relating my own experiences interviewing them. After participating in the town hall at the documentary's premiere, Wilcox flew home and started looking into Anderson's background. He quickly unearthed the records of Anderson's New York arrest on gun charges. But for some reason, Anderson's accomplice, the man who Wilcox knew as John Austin, was identified in the arrest reports under a different name: Kevin Reed. Even stranger still, there seemed to be no record of the charges after a preliminary hearing in a Manhattan courtroom. After talking to his contacts in journalism and right-wing extremist circles, Wilcox discovered that the gun charges against Anderson and Austin had been dropped at the behest of the Anti-Defamation League and its fact-finding division chief, Erwin Sewell. This seemed strange. Why was this civil rights advocacy group dedicated to eradicating right-wing extremism, the ADL, intervening in court cases on behalf of violent right-wing extremists? Well, it turned out that the white nationalist presenting himself as Jim Anderson was actually James Mitchell Rosenberg, a Jewish man who had served a tour of duty in the IDF and at one point worked for the extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane. And the reason his accomplice, John Austin, was on paper under a different name is because John Austin was just a pseudonym and his real name was Kevin Reed. In reality, Erwin Soel had been employing James Rosenberg and Kevin Reed as undercover agents of the Anti-Defamation League, sent to infiltrate and sabotage the far-right groups the ADL was targeting. The judge in the New York case was happy to help the ADL cover up what should have been a major scandal. The Anti-Defamation League, while posing as a civil rights activist group, had been caught sending out informants not just to observe far-right groups, but to actually help establish and run them, while trying to provoke the members of those same groups to engage in violence and even bombings on their group's behalf.

1992 Spy Scandle

In 1992, an investigation into the theft of classified files from the FBI San Francisco office would explode into the largest domestic espionage case in American history when raids were carried out on ADL offices, an ex-CIA agent cop in San Francisco, and a professional informant who'd spent decades spying on political movements for the ADL. What cops uncovered was a nationwide espionage operation with identical cells operating in every big and medium-sized US city where cops were being bribed, classified files stolen, and political groups infiltrated and sabotaged. Only this time, the targets of the ADL spying weren't the far right, but rather left-wing and human rights groups like the NAACP, the ACLU, Greenpeace, and the United Auto Workers, as well as journalists from the LA Times and KQED Public Television, and even elected politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Congressman Pete McCloskey, Senator Alan Cranston, and Congressman Ron Dellums. The evidence showed that the ADL was not only stealing thousands of highly classified documents, each one a felony, and illegally spying on American politicians, but they were also passing the information they gleaned onto foreign governments, an act which in any other context would rightly be called treason. This spy operation went on for at least seven years and remains to this day the biggest political espionage case in American history, with literally thousands of felonies committed, dozens of cops and FBI agents compromised, countless political and civil society organizations infiltrated and subverted, and almost certainly numerous acts of literal treason.

On August 19, 1992, an article co-authored by the ADL's then-president Abe Foxman appeared in the Washington Times newspaper titled Fruit of Islam on US Tab. The article immediately piqued the FBI's interest because it centered around information lifted from classified FBI reports showing that the leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, had solicited cash payments from Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, allegedly in exchange for carrying out violent acts against Gaddafi's enemies on US soil. The FBI had already been investigating the disappearance of files on the Nation of Islam from its San Francisco office when the Times article was published, allowing them to quickly zero in on a suspect, a recently hired FBI informant named Roy Bullock, and the San Francisco cop who had introduced him to the Bureau, Tom Gerard. Roy Bullock was a professional informant and spy for the ADL who had been working for the group full-time since at least the 1950s, and spent the 80s posing as an art dealer in San Francisco while infiltrating political groups all over the Bay Area. Tom Girard was a former CIA agent and San Francisco police detective who had been stealing information from both the SFPD in his capacity as a cop and the FBI as the SFPD's liaison officer for the Bureau. The men had met at the ADL's San Francisco office in 1986 and formed a prolific spying partnership that leveraged Gerard's access to confidential government information and Bullock's network of informants to pursue the ADL's political goals at a national and international level. The FBI quickly moved to wiretap Bullock and Gerard, expecting to find a local case of a corrupt San Francisco cop selling classified information. What they found instead was a spy network that stretched across the United States, being run out of ADL offices in every big American city, that recruited local police officers as collaborators. In the San Francisco investigation alone, the ADL was found to have illegally penetrated at least 20 different police agencies just in California. and it also gained access to classified police files in Chicago, St. Louis, Atlanta, and a half dozen other cities around the country. Roy Bullock alone was found to have compiled files on over 9,800 individuals and at least 950 different groups. As politically disparate as Jews for Jesus, Mother Jones Magazine, anti-apartheid organizations, the National Conference of Black Lawyers and opponents of the Reagan administration's dirty wars in Latin America. Under the cover of a fake art dealership in San Francisco called East West Traders, Bullock was tasked with maintaining intelligence files on individuals and groups identified by his bosses, reporting directly to both the ADL's regional director in San Francisco, Richard Hirschhout, and Erwin Sewell, the head of the ADL's fact-finding division in their New York headquarters. Bullock's methods of investigation varied widely, from tapping phones to infiltrating groups under fake identities, recruiting informants, and digging through trash. During one scheme Bullock devised, called Operation Eavesdrop, he used a paid informant codenamed Scumbag to tap into a phone messaging network maintained by white Aryan resistance to listen in on the group's internal communications. During a raid on Bullock's residence, investigators found lists of names and phone numbers of employees at the left-wing public interest law firm the Christek Institute, run by attorney Daniel Sheehan, along with office correspondence and banking information, which indicated that Bullock had spent considerable time collecting and sorting through the Institute's trash. Bullock had also exploited the privileged access Tom Girard had to SFPD databases as a San Francisco cop, which they used to obtain confidential arrest, fingerprint, and DMV records, which were shared not only with the ADL, but often with Israeli and South African intelligence agencies as well, at the ADL's behest. According to an affidavit written by San Francisco Police Inspector Ron Roth, based on the evidence, I believe that Roy Bullock and the ADL had numerous peace officers supplying them with confidential criminal and DMV information. In Chicago, there's an ex-police officer named Shy 3. There are also references to Shy 1 and Shy 2, who apparently are not policemen. In St. Louis, there's Ironsides. In Atlanta, there's an Arab-speaking man named Flipper. For just one group, the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, Bullock and Gerard illegally obtained confidential driver's license and vehicle registration information for at least 4,500 people, each one a felony. The FBI and SFPD never publicly released a full accounting of all the information stolen and collected by the ADL, so we only have a few data points from which to extrapolate. One of these involves the case of the investigative journalist and researcher of right-wing extremism, Chip Burleigh. Burleigh considered himself an ideological ally of the ADL, and in the early 1980s, well before the spy scandal became public, he requested a meeting with the head of the ADL's fact-finding, aka spying division, Erwin Sewell, at the league's Manhattan headquarters to discuss a mutual enemy of Burleigh's and the ADL's, the political cult leader Lyndon LaRouche. Burleigh expected a friendly meeting. "Our view then of Erwin Sowell was that he was this really terrific investigator. But when the meeting started, Sowell leans back in his chair and basically runs down a dossier on me and my research partners about what our political activities are, who we work with, what organizations we belong to. Obviously he was just trying to blow us away, and he succeeds admirably. We were just sitting there with our mouths open, feeling very uncomfortable." And then he leans forward and says, "The right wing isn't the problem. The left wing is the problem. The Soviet Union is the biggest problem in the world for Jews. It's the American left that's the biggest threat to American Jews. You're on the wrong track. You're part of the problem.'' I was virtually in tears. This is not how I perceived myself. We basically stumbled out of there in a daze. If this was what Sewell was comfortable revealing to a friendly journalist, it's scary to imagine what his dossiers on his political enemies may have contained. Local police would end up releasing a batch of documents from their search of the ATL's San Francisco office, which showed that the database of espionage files was divided into five groups: ANC, Arabs, PINCO, RITE, and SKINS. The RITE label was for right-wing extremist groups, except for skinheads, who had their own label, while PINCO was for left-wing and civil rights groups. ARAB was for organizations devoted to Arab causes, both inside the United States and internationally, while the ANC label was for causes related to the African National Congress, the left-wing quasi-communist South African paramilitary and political group led by Nelson Mandela, which opposed the apartheid South African government. According to police, Bullock's central database on his computer contained the names of nearly 12,000 individuals, 77 Arab American organizations, 29 anti-apartheid groups, and more than 600 PINCO groups, including the NAACP, the Asian Law Caucus, and the Anti-Nuclear Weapons Group. Sane Freeze, plus 20 Bay Area labor unions, including the San Francisco Labor Council, 612 right-wing organizations, and 27 skinhead groups. According to San Francisco Police Inspector Ron Roth, some three-quarters of the information in the database had been illegally obtained from government agencies. 

ADC - But information gathering was only part of the ADL spy operation. Bullock in particular spent much of his time on infiltration and sabotage operations against the ADL's targets. In one case, Bullock came to be one of the most active members in the Bay Area chapter of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, or the ADC, a group dedicated to championing the civil rights of Arab Americans and the Arab diaspora. According to the ADC's executive director, Albert Mokhaber, Bullock was one of our most vocal members. In fact, we have pictures of him carrying banners in support of Palestinian human rights, and we printed one of them in our most recent newsletter. He portrayed himself as someone sincerely interested in Arab civil rights and someone dedicated to the principles of our organization, and everyone believed him to be so. But at the same time, Bullock was joining local neo-Nazi and racist groups and distributing ADC literature at their meetings, trying to recruit their members to join or publicly praise the ADC so the Anti-Defamation League could turn around and publicly smear the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee as being allied with neo-Nazis and racists. 

It became apparent that leading members of the U.S. Congress who the ADL even suspected might harbor opinions critical of Israel had been targeted, including representatives Ron Dellums and Paul McCloskey, Senator Alan Cranston, and future Senator Nancy Pelosi, according to files seized by the San Francisco police. As the scandal unfolded, Henry Schwarzschild, a former ADL employee, confirmed to San Francisco Weekly that back in the 1960s, the ADL had even spied on Martin Luther King Jr., They thought King was sort of a loose cannon. He was a Baptist preacher, and nobody could be quite sure what he would do next. The ADL was very anxious about having an unguided missile out there. The NAACP was another prime target of ADL espionage and disruption. 

Alex Odeh - There's even been speculation that the ADL spy operation may have led directly to the assassination of a Palestinian rights activist on U.S. soil, which remains unsolved to this day. In 1985, a Christian Palestinian named Alex Odeh, who was employed as the executive director of the Western Region of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, was murdered in a bombing at his office in Santa Ana, California. Eight years after the bombing, it was revealed that Bullock, who had worked closely with Odeh and had virtually unrestricted access to his Santa Ana office right up to the day of his murder, had been spying on Odeh on behalf of the ADL for years before his death. The attack on Odeh was part of a rash of mostly unsolved bombings across the US in the mid-1980s that targeted Arab Americans and other people perceived as enemies by the most extreme fringes of the Zionist movement. Odeh's colleagues at the ADC noted that Bullock's partner, Tom Gerard, had specialized in explosives during his tenure in the CIA and expressed their suspicions to the FBI at the time. But there's no evidence that any links between the bombing and Girard were ever established or even investigated. 

Mohammed Jarad - One man, a Chicago grocer with roots in Palestine named Mohammed Jarad, spent months detained without charge in Israel when he flew there to visit relatives in Palestine in January of 1993. San Francisco Assistant District Attorney John Dwyer later revealed in a court hearing that Jarad had been a subject of ADL spying in the US, and they had passed his information directly to the Israeli government. 

Jeffrey Blankford - One Bay Area Middle East peace activist, Jeffrey Blankford, was tracked throughout an entire tour of the Middle East and North Africa, his movements ending up cataloged in his ADL file. The FBI documents released on the case also indicated that an employee of the ADL admitted to the FBI that they had personally given the Israeli government advance notice when an American member of a Palestinian rights group they'd been spying on was traveling to Israel.

Between 1985 and 1993, the ADL paid Bullock a loan nearly $170,000, equivalent to over $400,000 in 2025 dollars, illegally funneled through famous Beverly Hills attorney Bruce Hockman to conceal the true source of the funds. That's besides all the money that the ADL had paid Bullock from the 1950s through 1985, his sole source of income for most of the period, and the thousands more both Bullock and Girard regularly received from South African intelligence. 

After the Nation of Islam article came out, the San Francisco District Attorney's Office and the FBI opened separate investigations into Bullock for tapping phones, illegally accessing answering machines, and assuming false identities, while Girard faced investigation over theft of classified information and illegally accessing police and DMV files. Early in the investigation, the ADL itself was thought to be facing at least 48 felony counts, including an indictment for gaining illegal access to police computers. One source close to the West Coast investigation told The Village Voice, "It is 99% certain that the ADL will be indicted." And how did the ADL react upon learning of the FBI investigation? They quickly sent Roy Bullock on a mission to Germany, which was supposed to last two weeks, but once he was in the country, they told him to stay there until his money ran out, hoping to keep him incommunicado until the investigation blew over. Tom Gerrard was picked up for an FBI interrogation and within days was on a one-way flight to the Philippines with his wife, a country that had no extradition treaty with the U.S. Police searches of Gerrard's property turned up CIA manuals, including some about torture methods. a number of photos of dark-skinned men being shamed and blindfolded, a secret document on interrogation techniques from El Salvador, a black executioner's hood, and 10 different passports, all with Gerard's photo but under different names. From his jungle hideout in the Philippines, Gerard told the LA Times that if he were indicted in the ADL spy case, he would go public with his knowledge of the CIA's involvement with Latin American death squads, a credible threat considering the years he'd spent traveling throughout the region for the CIA. 

For their part, the ADL claimed that they'd had no relationship with Gerard and knew nothing about his and Bullock's spy ring. This position became untenable when FBI searches uncovered a private memo by Bullock outlining how he'd been introduced to Gerard by the regional executive director of the ADL, Richard Herschhout, and an ADL memo written by Erwin Sewell describing Roy Bullock as the group's number one investigator. The national director of the ADL, Abe Foxman, went on a media tour shamelessly lying about the group's actions. Speaking to the Washington Post, Foxman said: "We do not spy, okay? I don't care which definition you use. And anybody who says that the ADL spies is engaged in a lie is engaged in trying to destroy what it is that we do." 

Gerard returned to the US after a few months saying he feared for his life in the Philippines, believing that the CIA may have put a contract out on his head. The San Francisco Examiner spoke to sources in the Philippines who said Gerard had been receiving threats and was even physically attacked by two unknown assailants. San Francisco police picked up Gerard immediately after he touched down at San Francisco International Airport, booking him on eight counts of theft of government documents and one count each of burglary, computer theft, and conspiracy. The case against Gerard was straightforward and overwhelming. As a San Francisco cop and liaison to the FBI, he had stolen private and classified documents and passed them on to the ADL and the Israeli and South African governments. as part of a conspiracy, ample proof of which was discovered during FBI and SFPD searches of his property. The cases against Bullock and the ADL, on the other hand, proved to be somewhat more ambiguous if just as well substantiated.

Cover Up - They had conspired in the theft of classified documents and spied on domestic political groups and even elected politicians on behalf of foreign countries. The ADL and Bullock could have faced credible charges of theft, conspiracy, espionage, and even treason. But the story of the legal case against the spy ring is perhaps the most convoluted part of the whole scandal, with the media coverage marred by contradictions and a conspicuous lack of detail. Although the case would be investigated by both the FBI and the San Francisco District Attorney's Office and local police, the exact sequence of events can't be ascertained from the scrupulously ambiguous contemporaneous news coverage. It seems that the case began as an investigation into the theft of files from the San Francisco FBI office, but quickly ballooned in ways that the FBI didn't anticipate and became highly politically inconvenient. 

One of Bullock's fellow spies at the ADL, a law school dropout named David Gerwitz, was trying to get a higher paying job in the fact-finding, aka spying, division of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, but found that the job had already been taken by a rival researcher. As FBI agents listened in on wiretaps, Bullock and Gerwitz formulated a plan to set up the rival researcher. The Wiesenthal Center spy had gone undercover to join a local skinhead group in Los Angeles as part of an infiltration operation. Olic and Gervitz planned to unmask the mole to the other skinheads, setting him up for a violent confrontation, or possibly even assassination. The FBI, unwilling to risk letting the Wiesenthal Center spy be harmed on their watch, moved to arrest Gervitz, who quickly turned informant. The FBI would find numerous stolen classified documents in the ADL's San Francisco office, including FBI reports on groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, along with a trove of memos between Richard Herschout and Erwin Sewell, bragging about Tom Gerrard passing on whole dolly loads of files on Arab Americans to the ADL. During his FBI interrogations, Roy Bullock would initially claim that it was his superiors in the ADL who put him in touch with the South African intelligence agents to whom he'd been passing information. Later, he changed his story and blamed Tom Gerrard. Gerrard in turn blamed Bullock and the ADL blamed both of them, claiming that they'd never met Gerrard and barely knew who Bullock was and took no responsibility for their actions. Bullock would eventually tell FBI investigators that he was introduced to South African intelligence agents and began passing them information after being tasked with infiltrating the Bay Area anti-apartheid movement by the ADL. The FBI quickly recognized the national scope of the spy scandal, finding that similar operations were being conducted in cities all over the United States, coordinated from Erwin Soule's office at the New York headquarters of the ADL. Sensing the impending danger of a full-fledged national FBI investigation, the ADL sought to bring the scandal out of the legal realm and into the political, where they could leverage their connections to Israel and its lobby to influence Washington. According to a secret March 29, 1993 FBI memo, ''The San Francisco Police Department has received information from a reliable source that two persons— described as 'Israeli generals' are in or are about to travel to Washington, D.C. in regard to the ADL case. The purpose of their travel is to try to visit the Attorney General to press for an end to the FBI's investigation concerning Redacted and Redacted, likely Bullock and Girard. According to the SFPD, the FBI's investigation of these matters are causing a great deal of interference in the U.S. activities of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, and so Israel is seeking to intercede on the ADL's behalf.'' In private, the pretense that the ADL was anything other than an arm of the Israel lobby was dropped completely. The ADL also sought out friendly journalists in the American media and introduced them to some of the corrupt Chicago cops who had turned moles for the ADL, hoping to sway public opinion by seeding articles with suggestions that their operations were innocuous or even patriotic. 

Jonathan Pollard - The ADL came under FBI scrutiny in the late 80s over the Jonathan Pollard spying case when it was discovered that Pollard's handler, an Israeli Air Force colonel named Avi Sella, was married to a lawyer in the ADL's New York office, prompting an investigation which ultimately came to nothing. 

But by 1993, Tom Gerard had been arrested. The FBI had found stolen government documents and evidence of extensive spying in raids of both the ADL and Roy Bullock's offices, and they'd extracted a confession from Bullock regarding an espionage conspiracy involving the ADL, the State of Israel, and South African intelligence. But despite the overwhelming evidence the FBI had uncovered, by the spring of 1993, their investigation ended without explanation before a single federal charge or indictment had been presented. Apparently, whatever influence the Israelis had brought to bear against the FBI had worked. But by this point, a parallel investigation had been opened by the San Francisco District Attorney's Office into state and local crimes committed by Bullock, Gerard, and the ADL, along with various lawsuits from the subjects of the spy ring, who sought damages for things like invasion of privacy or slander, cases which continued despite the FBI's dereliction of duty. In the spring of 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's 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 DA's office would conduct another raid of the ADL San Francisco branch, ultimately carting out 10 boxes full of files. Among the documents seized were Israeli government files about individual American citizens, further cementing the impression that the ADL was acting as an agent of the Israeli state. In public statements, the San Francisco DA's office referred to potential fines that would run into millions and felony charges that could put Anti-Defamation League spies behind bars for years. The ADL would once again go on the offensive. According to the Washington Post, The organization, quote, waged an aggressive public relations campaign to try to persuade news organizations and ADL supporters to disregard the evidence and be skeptical of the motivations of the San Francisco District Attorney's Office. While the FBI's investigation had expanded to cities across the United States, the San Francisco DA's office investigation only got as far as Los Angeles, where they were looking into a parallel ADL operation run out of the league's office there. But the SFPD and DA's office investigators kept running up against inexplicable refusals to cooperate with the investigation from local law enforcement and the FBI. One of the clearest illustrations of this stonewalling comes from a memo written by the San Francisco detective who was sent to LA to investigate the ADL's spy operation there. The detective writes that he was surprised at how little cooperation he received from the LAPD when he was in Los Angeles working on the case. Then, after leaving Los Angeles, the detective says he received a series of phone calls from the LAPD's Anti-Defamation League liaison officer and an FBI agent, the contents of which suggested that the two agencies may have been coordinating with each other to impede the investigation. The first calls came from the LAPD's ADL liaison officer, who said he was, ''very interested in the files the detective had seized from the ADL's Los Angeles office'', and asked to meet the detective for dinner, even offering to drive to San Francisco so they could talk about the case. The San Francisco detective found this extremely odd, since he had just left Los Angeles, where he'd been effectively stonewalled by the LAPD. But then as soon as he leaves, this ADL liaison officer is suddenly very interested in learning what he'd uncovered. Then, the San Francisco detective reports receiving a phone call from an FBI agent asking what the detective knows about the case of the Los Angeles Eight, a group of seven Palestinians and one Kenyan who were all facing deportation in a highly politically charged case involving pro-Palestinian activism. 

LA Eight - It's too complex to go into detail here, but the U.S. government was trying to deport the eight legal U.S. residents using a novel interpretation of a law against, quote, advocating for world communism that hadn't been used since the 1950s, all because the Los Angeles Eight had supported the Popular Front for the liberation of Palestine. The FBI agent was calling the San Francisco detective, ostensibly to ask if any of the Los Angeles Eight defendants' names had shown up in the files they'd confiscated from the ADL's offices. The San Francisco detective noted in his report of the conversation that the judge in the Los Angeles Eight case, Bruce J. Einhorn, was known to have connections with the ADL. The very next day, the San Francisco detective receives another call. It's redacted here, but the context implies it was from the same LAPD Anti-Defamation League liaison officer as before, asking about the same Los Angeles 8 deportation trial, saying that he knew Judge Einhorn well, and that Einhorn was intimately familiar with the ADL, and considered himself a, quote, Nazi hunter. The two calls on the same topic, coming less than a day apart, seemed more than coincidental, and it appears likely that there was at least some level of coordination between the FBI and the other agencies that were stonewalling the San Francisco investigation, including the LAPD. Was this ADL liaison officer in Los Angeles yet another spy trying to undermine the investigation into his handlers? Was the FBI agent a spy? And why was the LAPD stonewalling them in the first place? Incredibly, this likely wasn't even the FBI's most egregious interference in the San Francisco DA's case. Tom Gerard faced 11 charges at the time of his May 1993 arrest, eight counts of theft of government documents, and one count each of burglary, computer theft, and conspiracy. However, each individual stolen FBI and DMV document was grounds for a separate felony charge, meaning he could have credibly faced hundreds, if not thousands of felonies at trial. But in late April of 1994, the judge in Gerard's criminal case ruled that the prosecution couldn't move forward because the FBI refused to release their evidence in the case. This evidence, which had been requested by Gerard's defense attorneys, was believed to be summaries of the FBI wiretaps on Gerard and Bullock that showed the two were selling confidential information on anti-apartheid groups to the South African government. Despite having overwhelming proof of Gerard's guilt, the San Francisco DA let Gerard off with a single misdemeanor charge of illegal access to a police computer system, for which he was sentenced to 45 days sheriff's work detail and three years probation. Even more incredibly, San Francisco District Attorney Arlo Smith announced that he would not be criminally prosecuting either Roy Bullock or the ADL because it would be "expensive and time-consuming both to the San Francisco DA and the defendants." This must be the only criminal case in American history where a prosecutor declined to pursue espionage charges because they might have had a negative effect on the spies themselves. In what the media described as a quote "unusual procedure," instead of criminal charges, the district attorney filed a civil lawsuit against Bullock and the ADL for illegally possessing confidential documents, then immediately settled the suit with no admission of wrongdoing. The text of the settlement agreement showed that the only legal matters being considered by the DA were whether the ADL had acquired government documents illegally and whether it broke tax laws with Bullock's employment. The terms of the agreement required the ADL to pledge not to engage in illegal information gathering activities, in other words, spying. in California and to put $75,000 towards fighting hate crimes, an ironic request considering "fighting hate" is ostensibly the whole point of the ADL in the first place. The civil suits filed by the victims of the ADL's spying fared only slightly better. Taking the case all the way to the California Supreme Court, ADL attorneys successfully argued that the ADL itself as an organization qualified as a journalist and was therefore entitled to the same First Amendment protections as any legitimate journalist, including the right to receive and publish classified information. Most of the plaintiffs would combine their cases into a single class action lawsuit which lasted until 1999, when the ADL agreed to pay $175,000 for the plaintiffs' court costs and dedicate $25,000 to improving relations between the Jewish, Arab, and African American communities, without any admission of wrongdoing or even a binding promise that the ADL wouldn't continue spying on the very same people. Despite containing unimplicit admission that the ADL had been illegally spying on dozens of civil rights and left-wing activist groups, from Greenpeace to the American Indian Movement, the settlement received almost no coverage in the mainstream media. In Los Angeles, the city where the class action suit was settled, the Los Angeles Times gave the case a mere 281 words in a news summary in its smaller circulation, Metro Home Edition. The San Francisco Chronicle also buried its sole mention of the settlement far behind the front page. Predictably, the ADL shamelessly took a victory lap, declaring that the entire affair had been an anti-Semitic hoax, and that anyone claiming otherwise was a liar, conspiracy theorist, or an anti-semite. The head of the ADL, Abe Foxman, released a prepared statement, saying, quote, This settlement confirms our consistent position that the ADL has engaged in no misconduct of any kind. Being of little use as a spy in the wake of the scandal, the ADL put Bullock directly on their payroll, no longer deeming it necessary to funnel his salary through a third party. As of about 10 years ago, the ex-CIA agent and San Francisco cop Tom Gerard was rumored to be back living in the Philippines. The spymaster and chief of the ADL's fact-finding division out of New York, Erwin Sewell, who remained in his position until 1997, passing away the next year. 

The ADL's regional executive director for the San Francisco region, Richard Herschout, who coordinated the espionage activities along with Sewell, later became the head of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie and is now the director of the American Jewish Committee of Los Angeles. 

The ADL had conspired to steal thousands of confidential government documents, each one a felony, bribed police officers all over the United States, spied on American congressmen, and passed stolen government files on Americans to foreign intelligence agencies in Israel and South Africa, crimes that would amount to a treasonous conspiracy under any rational reading of the law. And yet everyone involved not only avoided prosecution with the minor exception of Gerard's single misdemeanor plea, but no one even suffered any professional consequences either. And apparently the American media unanimously decided early on that the ADL's espionage conspiracy wasn't newsworthy because the little coverage that actually made it to print studiously ignored the implications of having a nationwide network of police spies being bribed by the ADL. To this day, the mainstream media treats the Anti-Defamation League as an authority on civil rights issues and an apolitical human rights group. that can be relied on to produce objective reports about the state of minority rights in the United States. The spy scandal and the fact that the ADL engaged in brazenly illegal conduct while acting as an agent of the State of Israel are never mentioned when the media reports on a new political initiative or research study being touted by the ADL. Omissions that allow the group to continue posing as champions of the very rights they sought to undermine by spying on behalf of the apartheid government of South Africa.

The ADL argues that any threat to Israel's image in America endangers the $3 billion annual package of U.S. military and economic aid to Israel and thereby jeopardizes the long-term fate of all Jews. 

The question of the FBI's participation in the cover-up of the spy network is even more perplexing. The Bureau does have a track record of using informants from groups like the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center to infiltrate extremist political groups, which the FBI lacks the legal grounds to target. But those cases have involved domestic extremists, not information gathering for foreign governments. So what explains the FBI's behavior here? Well, it's possible that the FBI just didn't want to face any inconvenient questions about their deep, pre-existing relationship with the ADL. In 1985, seven years before the spy scandal broke, the FBI Director William Webster wrote a priority cable to the FBI's 25 largest field offices, ordering them to establish permanent local liaisons to the Anti-Defamation League, mirroring the LAPD's ADL liaison program that would later be implicated in the Los Angeles spy ring. By 1986 at the latest, the ADL was giving annual training lectures on the subject of hate crimes at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. In 1989, Thomas F. Jones, the Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI in charge of the Criminal Investigations Division, invited the ADL's chief spymaster, Erwin Sewell, and two of his associates to lecture the top 50 FBI agents on civil rights law. Clearly, those at the top of the FBI considered the ADL a partner organization with a mission that was at least broadly consistent with that of the FBI. 

COINTELPRO - The original COINTELPRO, or Counterintelligence Program, was a series of FBI operations where political groups which the Bureau had deemed subversive were targeted for surveillance, infiltration, and sabotage to discredit the groups and disrupt their operations. COINTELPRO targets famously included Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panthers, but also extended to some extreme right-wing groups like the KKK. After a break-in at an FBI office in Pennsylvania revealed the existence of COINTELPRO, the program was officially terminated by the Bureau, but many of its functions continued under different program names. In the mid-70s, however, the Church and Pike congressional committees, which investigated various abuses committed by America's intelligence agencies, provoked outrage when they revealed the true extent of COINTELPRO, including spying on peaceful civil rights activists and left-wing groups. 

By the 1980s, however, these domestic political espionage and infiltration programs had largely been scaled back, both at the FBI and at the equivalent state and local agencies. In fact, one of the biggest sources for Bullock's database was a batch of files he had received when the SFPD shut down its version of COINTELPRO, the police intelligence unit. And instead of destroying the files as had been ordered, Girard stole them and handed them over to Bullock. The Bureau had collected several weeks' worth of conversations from their wiretaps of Bullock and Girard, but they but they decided to let the criminal case against Gerard lapse rather than release the contents of those wiretaps. Was it the visit from the Israeli generals that convinced the DOJ to quash the cases? Or was there something on those wiretaps that would have created an even bigger scandal for the FBI? And in fact, it seems that federal agency collusion with the ADL spies reached beyond even the FBI. Tom Gerard, the ex-CIA agent and San Francisco cop, provided Roy Bullock with surveillance photos of Arab Americans that he claimed he had received from the U.S. Customs Service in New York. Gerard claimed to be in frequent contact with a CIA affiliate in San Francisco. And Bullock believed Girard was exchanging information with the CIA, and possibly being tasked with domestic intelligence work for them as well. 

One of the ways the ADL recruited their moles in American law enforcement was by offering police departments and federal agencies all-expense-paid trips to Israel, where officers could receive free training from Israel's espionage and counterintelligence organizations. According to the San Francisco DA's office, they had uncovered ADL spies working in police departments across the country. They're even still doing the same kinds of FBI trainings they were doing in the 1980s. 

But behind the scenes, they're perfectly comfortable coordinating with the Mossad and sending Israeli generals to Washington to lobby on the ADL's behalf.

Lawrence Franklin spy scandal

In the 2009 Lawrence Franklin spy scandal, members of the Office of Special Plans, the very Pentagon office that had been cooking the intelligence on WMDs to lie the United States into the Iraq War, were caught passing classified information to AIPAC and the Israelis.