San Francisco Spy Ring "The Tip of the Iceberg"

By Greg Noakes

Some four months after it began to unravel, the true extent of the private intelligence network linking former San Francisco police inspector Tom Gerard, art dealer and paid informant Roy Bullock and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith is becoming clearer. The case involves intelligence files kept on tens of thousands of individuals and organizations and questions about exactly how the information in those files was obtained. Material in the files was culled from confidential police records not only in the San Francisco Bay Area but from law enforcement agencies across the country, prompting allegations of a covert nationwide intelligence-gathering system run by the ADL in conjunction with individual police officials.

The San Francisco operation collapsed as a result of a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe into the activities of Tom Gerard and his associates. The former police inspector compiled secret intelligence files on both Arab Americans and individuals and organizations involved in anti-apartheid activities, and allegedly peddled the information to the Israeli and South African governments for more than $20,000. Some of Gerard's private files were later discovered in a sweep of the San Francisco and Los Angeles offices of the Anti-Defamation League.

Gerard, who was employed in the early 1980s by the CIA in Central America and who worked part-time as a security official for Philippine Airlines, fled to a remote island in the Philippines after being questioned by the FBI last November. He later resigned in a letter to the San Francisco Police Department and, despite his covert activities, was awarded his pension by the city. It is unlikely that Gerard will be brought to trial since there is no extradition treaty between the U.S. and the Philippines.

One of Gerard's associates was Roy Bullock, a 58-year-old undercover informant who compiled information on Arab Americans, Irish Americans, supporters of the African National Congress, the National Lawyers Guild, the Nation of Islam, white supremacist groups and a variety of left-wing organizations on the West Coast.

Bullock was a member of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's San Francisco chapter in the mid-1980s and collected information on ADC's members and activities. He allegedly funneled information to representatives of the ADL and the South African government. Bullock worked closely with Tom Gerard while the latter was involved in police intelligence, and when the San Francisco Police Department cut back on its intelligence-gathering operations Gerard helped arrange for Bullock to work as a paid informant for the FBI. It was the bureau's discovery in 1991 that Bullock was also an agent of the South African government that first prompted the present investigation.

The third leg of the intelligence triangle was the Anti-Defamation League, and in particular its California offices. The ADL admits it maintains files on white supremacist, neo-Nazi and other organizations and individuals it considers anti-Semitic, uses a network of paid informants to gather intelligence and routinely exchanges information with police departments around the country. The executive director of the ADL's Central Pacific Region, Richard Hirschaut, denies widespread reports that the San Francisco police found confidential police files on Arab Americans in a sweep of the organization's San Francisco and Los Angeles offices, including some of the same files that Tom Gerard allegedly sold to Israeli agents. Hirschaut told the Northern California Jewish Bulletin that allegations the ADL spies on Arab Americans and collaborates with Israeli intelligence were "phantasmagoria."

The San Francisco district attorney's office, which is conducting an investigation into the ADL's intelligence activities, believes the network extends beyond the Bay Area, however, and that a number of police officers around the nation have been illegally channeling information to the Anti-Defamation League. Confidential material from the police departments in Portland, OR, and at least one other city outside of California was found in the possession of the ADL, while the San Francisco Examiner reports that files have been discovered from up to 20 police departments and other law enforcement agencies within the state, including the Los Angeles Police Department and the California Department of Corrections.

Material also reportedly has been found in ADL files from at least one federal agency. One source close to the district attorney's investigation told the Los Angeles Times, "The ADL is running this all over the country," while another law enforcement official said, "This Gerard-Bullock thing is the tip of the iceberg—this is going on nationwide."

The magnitude of the files uncovered by the FBI, the San Francisco police and the district attorney's office is staggering. Between Gerard, Bullock and the ADL, authorities seized 12,000 computer files and thousands of hard files kept on individuals throughout the U.S. Approximately one fourth of the names belong to Arab Americans, and most of those listed in the files reportedly live outside of California.

Information for Use at Home and Abroad

Information collected by the network includes such material as criminal records or "rap sheets," intelligence files on political activists, fingerprint charts, car registration documents, driver's license photographs and other Department of Motor Vehicles records which include home addresses. This information could be used locally to stake out individuals' homes and businesses and facilitate the surveillance of political activities, while the Israeli and South African governments could use the material to monitor and take action against American visitors opposed to their policies. The ADL's crucial role in the 1987 arrest in Los Angeles of seven Palestinians and one Kenyan for the distribution of literature produced by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, coupled with the fact that information was found in the ADL's computer files on one of the two Palestinian Americans recently arrested in the West Bank for their alleged pro-Hamas activities, suggest that such suspicions go beyond idle speculation.

The maintenance of covert intelligence files and "enemies lists" has had a chilling effect on the exercise of First Amendment rights of Arab Americans and others. The manner in which the information in the files was obtained and how it was dispersed may be grounds for criminal prosecution or other legal action. In a Feb. 26 meeting with ADC President Albert Mokhiber and Director of Legal Services Greg Nojeim, Special Agent Richard Held and ALSst. Special Agent Edward Apple of the FBI's San Francisco field office said the bureau is investigating whether the persons involved in activities of the Gerard Bullock-ADL network should be charged criminally. Though the FBI admits it worked with Gerard, employed Bullock and exchanged information on hate crimes with the ADL, the agents expressed concern that confidential information may have been used outside the scope of official law enforcement activities.

During their visit to San Francisco, Mokhiber and Nojoim also met with San Francisco Chief of Police Anthony Ribera and Asst. District Attorney John Dwyer. Ribera assured the ADC officials that he was working to end any covert collection and dissemination of intelligence and misuse of official documents by individuals within his department, while Dwyer assured them that a complete investigation would be conducted.

Despite the continuing revelations about the Gerard-Bullock-ADL network, a number of questions remain. The extent of the spy ring's contacts with various police departments, the activities of a number of other paid ADL informants like Roy Bullock, the degree of cooperation between the network and the governments of Israel and South Africa, and the use made of the illegally obtained information kept on thousands of individual Americans are all matters for further investigation. What is certain is that a vast number of confidential government records have been given or sold to individuals, organizations and foreign governments because of private citizens' political beliefs and activities, and that these transactions extend far beyond Northern California.

"You don't think about the DMV giving your driver's license to some police officer who gives it to an organization that doesn't like you," Asst. District Attorney Dwyer told the Los Angeles Times. "This practice has to stop. You can't let the government collect all this information and give it to whomever they choose."