Spy Case Update: The Anti-Defamation League Fights Back

By Rachelle Marshall

Former policeman Tom Gerard returned to San Francisco from the Philippines on May 7 and was immediately arrested on four counts of conspiracy and stealing government documents. The stolen records are police intelligence files that were ordered destroyed in 1990 and contain information on thousands of individuals and hundreds of groups ranging across the political spectrum. Some 1,200 of the individuals listed in Gerard's files are Arab Americans who have never broken the law.

Gerard allegedly incorporated the police files into his own intelligence-gathering operation and shared the information with Roy Bullock, a long-time undercover agent for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). As a result, much of the police intelligence illegally retained by Gerard ended up in ADL's files. Bullock has admitted that he and Gerard cooperated in spying for the FBI as well as for ADL, and that they sold intelligence on anti-apartheid groups to the South African government.

Gerard's trial date will be announced on July 23. Meanwhile, Arab Americans, civil liberties advocates, and community activists are waiting for the other shoe to drop. The San Francisco district attorney's office said that although the investigation was continuing, it was unlikely that additional indictments—if any—would be handed down before late June. May Jaber, of the National Association of Arab Americans, expressed the feeling of many interest groups when she called for the broadest possible investigation.

"We do not want Tom Gerard to be made the scapegoat," she said following his arrest. "We have been informed that other officers and other police departments have contributed to this spy list and we want the whole truth to come out."

The Arab-American community and others also are waiting to see whether ADL will be indicted and on what charges. A San Francisco police affidavit released last April accused the most powerful and well-financed Jewish organization in America of invading the privacy of the individuals named in its files, and of failing to report Bullock's employment even though he has been on the ADL payroll for more than 30 years. On April 10, an unnamed "source" told the San Francisco Examiner that "top officials of the ADL are the ultimate targets" of the district attorney's investigation. But the assistant D.A. in charge of special operations quickly denied the report, saying, "Right now the primary focus of our investigation is Tom Gerard." Gerard has been offered immunity from serving jail time in return for his full cooperation.

Even in the absence of an indictment, ADL has come out fighting—with advertisements and op-ed columns in the Jewish press, interviews with editors of major newspapers, meetings with Jewish organizations to rally support, a barrage of letters to the editor, and an op-ed column in The New York Times (which carried a column critical of ADL on the same page, but has yet to carry a news story on the case).

In an interview with a local Jewish weekly, the Northern California Bulletin, that turned into a tirade, ADL National Director Abraham Foxman lashed out at the San Francisco district attorney; the newspapers that enabled "the D.A. to try us in the media"; critics who call ADL information-gathering activities "spying"; and, for good measure, all other "bastards" who are "anti-Semitic, undemocratic, and anti-American."

Bulletin reporter Garth Wolkoff described Foxman as behaving like "a general dressing down his troops" during the one hour session, "speaking angrily of conspiracy and at times fuming as he turned several shades of red." In response to questioning, Foxman said ADL would continue to monitor people or groups that "pose a threat to Jews" and defended the organization's spy operation against the African National Congress on grounds the ANC "were violent, they were anti-Semitic, they were pro-PLO, and they were anti-Israel." Communists, too, are "pro-PLO and anti-Jewish," Foxman added.

An op-ed column by T.J. Anthony in the Northern California Bulletin three weeks later began simply: "The Jewish community is under attack," and complained that Jews were victims of "the worst kind of prejudice and stereotyping." In a four page advertisement headed "The Big Lie," published in Jewish newspapers in late May, Foxman asserted that "There is no ADL spy network. That is a lie!" He called charges that ADL had investigated organizations such as NAACP and Greenpeace "pure nonsense," adding that ADL's mandate was "to monitor and investigate extremist and hate groups."

The ADL ad reproduced as a "sample of what the hate peddlers are saying" the cover of a White Aryan Resistance pamphlet portraying grossly caricatured Jewish faces along with the headline "Cops Bust Jew ADL. " The implication, of course, is that all those who accuse ADL of spying are anti-Semites. Foxman carried the point further in his New York Times column of May 28, charging ADL's critics with something "more sinister" than irresponsibility. By exploiting the myth that Jews have too much power in the U.S. and spreading the "big lie" about ADL, Foxman wrote, its critics have launched "an attack in the broadest sense on the community relations and political efforts of the entire Jewish community."

Foxman's words, like almost all of the published statements in defense of ADL, are a call to Jews to circle the wagons. The logic is simple: criticism of ADL is motivated by anti-Semitism and is a threat to all Jews. Therefore, for the sake of their own survival, Jews are obliged to come to ADL's defense.

Simple Logic, Complex Truth

But if the logic is simple, the truth is more complex. The contents of ADL's files directly contradict Foxman's claim that the organization targets only hate groups. Women in Black, the Northern California Ecumenical Council, and KQED-TV's board of directors are hardly hate-mongers. Nor are members of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Yet, according to San Francisco chapter representative Maha Jaber (May Jaber's sister), "nearly the entire membership of ADC is listed in ADL computers." Attorney Marc Van der Hout of the National Lawyers' Guild, which is listed in ADL's files, said, "I am a Jew myself, and when I see the breadth of the organizations in these files that the ADL has conducted surveillance on, it is very clear to me that they have sort of lost touch with reality in terms of organizations that are engaged in real anti-Semitic activity."

In fact, ADL is less concerned with bigotry than with promoting its own rightwing agenda and silencing criticism of Israel. In a Village Voice article of May 11, Robert Friedman reported that ADL's director of fact-finding, Irwin Suall, regards the real danger to Jews as coming from ''a coalition of leftists, Blacks, and Arabs.'' In pursuit of these perceived enemies, ADL obviously does not stop at "fact-finding." ADL-investigator Bullock, for instance, not only joined ADC under a false name but tried to recruit neo-Nazis into the ADC in order to discredit the Arab-American organization. A more common tactic of the ADL is blacklisting Middle East scholars and other analysts who express criticism of Israel.

A Common ADL Tactic

At its annual meeting in 1984, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) condemned ADL for distributing a 16-page list of teachers and researchers at major universities and describing them as "pro-Arab propagandists" who "use their anti-Zionism as a guise for their deeply felt anti-Semitism." A MESA resolution accused ADL of making "false, vague, or unsubstantiated assertions." In 1991, when Noam Chomsky was scheduled to speak in Berkeley, 17 UC Berkeley professors signed a letter accusing him of defending anti-Semites and his sponsor, the Middle East Children's Alliance, of being pro-PLO, pro-Saddam Hussain, and anti-Israel. The letter contained the kind of details—and gross distortions—that are the hallmark of ADL efforts to smear those it opposes. In his book They Dare to Speak Out, former Congressman Paul Findley quotes Chomsky as saying, "Virtually every talk I give is monitored, and reports of their alleged contents are sent on to the league to be incorporated in my file." He added that whenever he is scheduled to speak, ADL distributes literature in advance containing distorted or fabricated accounts of his views in an attempt to identify him as an anti-Semite.

But regardless of how ADL uses its files, even their very existence poses a threat to the nearly 10,000 individuals whose names are contained in them. As New York Times columnist Russell Baker pointed out in a recent column about the McCarthy era, the very act of "naming names" was harmful since the word "name" became a synonym for "possibly treasonous." Given ADL's insistence that it only targets extremists, it follows that anyone listed in its files becomes automatically suspect. Even worse, as Robert Friedman points out, since ADL files are not open to public scrutiny, false information cannot be challenged. In effect, he concludes, "the ADL has become the Jewish thought police. "

The Anti-Defamation League will undoubtedly pull out all the stops in an effort to preserve its image as a defender of human rights. But despite the blustering claims of Foxman and other ADL officials, the evidence so far made public in the current spy case investigation reveals how false that image is.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of New Jewish Agenda, she writes frequently on the Mideast.