The ADL Domestic Surveillance Scandal

In April 1993, San Francisco police raided the offices of the Anti-Defamation League in San Francisco and Los Angeles and carried out about ten boxes of files.

According to investigators, roughly three quarters of what was in those boxes consisted of confidential information that had been obtained illegally.

The files were not a list of violent extremists. They covered somewhere between 9,876 and 12,000 individuals and around 950 organizations, and the names in them included the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the ACLU, Congressman Ron Dellums, anti-apartheid campaigners working against the South African government, Palestinian solidarity groups, the left-wing Jewish organization New Jewish Agenda, and the Middle East Research and Information Project.

What most of these people had in common was that they engaged in constitutionally protected political speech, and a good deal of it was critical of Israel or of apartheid South Africa.

How it worked

The operation ran on two men.

Roy Bullock was a San Francisco art dealer who had worked as a paid ADL operative for close to four decades. He had also done work for the CIA in El Salvador in the 1980s and served as an FBI informant. An internal ADL memo from 1992, written by the organization’s fact-finding director Irwin Suall, called Bullock the League’s “number one investigator.”

Thomas Gerard was an inspector in the San Francisco Police Department’s intelligence unit, which meant he had access to confidential law enforcement databases. According to the District Attorney, Gerard fed Bullock a steady flow of that material: driver’s license data, physical descriptions, criminal records. Bullock put it into the files.

The scandal surfaced not because anyone was looking at the ADL, but because the FBI assembled evidence that a police officer was leaking confidential data. Following the leak led to Bullock, and Bullock led to the raids.

What happened to everyone involved

The criminal exposure looked serious at first. The District Attorney’s office discussed fines running into the millions and felony charges that could have put ADL operatives in prison. Inspector Roth, whose affidavit documented the database, stated that “ADL employees were less than truthful with regards to the employment of Roy Bullock and other matters.”

None of that materialized. The criminal matter was resolved through an arrangement with the San Francisco District Attorney that avoided prosecution. No ADL official served any time.

Thomas Gerard, the officer at the center of the illegal data flow, left for the Philippines as the investigation closed in.

The civil side produced more. A class action filed in 1993 alleged the ADL had used agents with police and government connections to compile confidential information on Arab-Americans, African-Americans, Native Americans and left-wing groups. The ADL settled, agreed to constraints on its information gathering, and admitted no wrongdoing. Its position throughout was that it had done nothing improper or illegal, and that position has never changed.

The plaintiffs’ attorney put the principle simply: “The important thing is that there was a gathering of information that shouldn’t have been going on. Whether it’s the police department or the ADL, there shouldn’t be spying on individuals who have done nothing wrong.”

One thread that was never resolved

Alex Odeh, the regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, was killed by a bomb at his office in Santa Ana, California in 1985. When the surveillance operation came to light, members of the Arab-American community asked publicly whether information gathered through it could have reached whoever killed him.

No charge, finding or investigation has ever connected the two. It is an unresolved question that was raised at the time, and it is recorded here as that and nothing more.

Why it matters

Elsewhere in this category the suppression of criticism takes indirect forms: a law that conditions a contract, a definition adopted by an institution, an employer responding to pressure. This case is the literal version.

An organization devoted to defending Israel’s reputation and confronting its critics built and maintained, over decades, a secret intelligence file on twelve thousand Americans, and powered it with police data obtained illegally through a corrupt officer. That is not an allegation from opponents. It came out of a police raid, a sworn affidavit and a District Attorney’s investigation.

What followed is the part that belongs to the wider pattern. The prosecution that was discussed did not happen. The officer left the country. The organization settled, accepted some limits, admitted nothing, and continues today as one of the most cited authorities in American public life on what constitutes bigotry.

Sources

Baltimore Sun, “Anti-Defamation League Offices Raided by Police; Spy Data Sought in San Francisco,” April 9, 1993 — Inspector Roth’s affidavit and the 9,876 figure
SFPD inspector’s affidavit and the San Francisco District Attorney’s investigation, 1993
MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project), “ADL’s Spy Ring,” July 1993 — the targets and the approximately 12,000 individual and 950 organization totals
J. (The Jewish News of Northern California), “ADL Ready to Settle 1993 Class-Action Suit on Spying,” May 14, 1999 — the settlement and attorney statements
Pacific Standard, “The Kings of Garbage, or, The ADL Spied on Me and All I Got Was This Lousy Index Card,” 2014
Detroit Jewish News archive, April 16, 1993, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan — contemporaneous reporting including reaction from Jewish community figures
University of Kansas, Wilcox Collection (RH WL MS 49) — archival FBI material on Roy Bullock and the San Francisco case