Bookburners and Their Victims: First-Hand Accounts
               of Pro-Israel McCarthyism

     In California Court Case, ADL Still Delaying Disclosure
     of Where It Got and What It Did With Personal Data
     on Anti-Apartheid and Pro-Palestinian Activists

                    By Kurt Holden

     WASHINGTON REPORT on Middle East Affairs
               DECEMBER 1997, Page 57

In late 1992, the FBI informed the San Francisco police
that one of its officers, Tom Gerard, had been secretly
cooperating with a "spy," Roy Bullock, who had been
secretly paid by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of
B'nai B'rith for over 30 years to infiltrate
organizations which the ADL deemed hostile to Israel.

Gerard was believed to have illegally turned over to
Bullock material gathered from police files. Worse, the
police previously had been ordered to destroy those
files, which a court had ruled violated the civil rights
of the people upon whom files had been opened.

Bullock's job was to collect facts about "enemies of
Israel" which were then organized in central ADL files in
Los Angeles and New York, and used for confidential
dissemination to the "active" Jewish community, which
could be counted on to take "counter-action" to
neutralize or discredit these "enemies."

In the 1980s, Bullock's assignments had been expanded to
include surveillance of individuals and organizations
opposed to apartheid in South Africa, presumably because
Israel and South Africa were allies, drawn to each other
because both were resisting United Nations human rights
resolutions regarding the Palestinians and indigenous
South Africans.

Bullock would ingratiate himself into Arab-American and
anti-apartheid groups by indicating he was in sympathy
with their goals. Attending their meetings and going into
their homes, he would note their car license plates and,
through "official friends" who were police officers or
who had access to government records, try to get drivers'
license numbers, P. O. boxes and criminal investigative
reports, if such existed.

FBI officials had become interested in 1992 when they
discovered that in addition to collecting information for
the ADL, Bullock and Gerard were selling information to
South African intelligence agents.

The San Francisco police, made up of officers largely of
Irish and Italian ethnic backgrounds (and certainly not
aware of the enormous political clout of the Jewish
community), obtained search warrants and seized some 12
boxes of records at the ADL headquarters in Los Angeles
and San Francisco in early 1993.

Subsequently they sent notices to some 12,000 people and
organizations whose names were found in ADL's files. In
at least two cases, they also provided such individuals
with excerpts from ADL's files on them which obviously
had come from confidential government records.

Both individuals, Jeffrey Blankfort and Steve Zeltzer,
were prominent Jewish advocates of fairness to
Palestinians and for ending apartheid in South Africa.
From those activities they already were aware that the
ADL worked in cooperation with Israel's Mossad.

The ADL worked in cooperation with Israel's Mossad.

In 1993 they and 17 other plaintiffs filed a class-action
lawsuit in the San Francisco Superior Court. The suit has
become known as Audrey Parks Shabbas, et al., plaintiffs,
vs. Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, et al.,
defendants. In addition to the three above-named
plaintiffs, others are Victor Ajlouny, Yigal Arens (son
of former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens), Amal
Barkouky-Winter, Manuel Dudum, Colin Edwards, Carol
El-Shaib, George Green, Paula Kotakis, Stephen Mashney,
Helen Hooper McCloskey, Margaret Ann McCormack, Donald
McGaffin, Anne Poirier, Agha Saeed, Jock Taft and
Marianne Torres. Attorney for the plaintiffs is former
Congressman Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey, who practices law
in Woodside, California.

In fact, the suit was filed on behalf of two classes of
individuals--those who opposed Israeli policies toward
the Palestinians and those who opposed apartheid in South
Africa. The lawsuit alleged an invasion of their privacy,
citing a California law which imposes a minimum of $2,500
in punitive damages for each act of publication of
confidential information obtained from governmental
files.

The ADL responded by arguing that it is a newsgathering
organization and thus entitled to the reporter's
privilege of keeping sources of information secret.

Under California law and a famous Supreme Court ruling
known as the Mitchell decision, a plaintiff is barred
from obtaining what a reporter claims is "privileged"
information until the plaintiff can show that he has
exhausted all other reasonable means of obtaining the
facts necessary to prove his case, and has met four other
requirements. For four and a half years, ADL refused to
produce the information.

An Order to Disclose

Depositions were taken of ADL employees and law
enforcement personnel, but ADL was able to withhold the
information until Aug. 19, 1997, when Judge Alexander
Saldamando of San Francisco ruled that ADL and the San
Francisco police would have to disclose to the plaintiffs
the illegally obtained information, from whom it had been
obtained, and to whom it was sent.

ADL has announced it will seek a writ from the Court of
Appeals to block enforcement of Judge Saldamando's order.
The result should be known by Oct. 30, which is the date
ADL is required to produce the information.

The stubborn refusal of ADL to reveal where it received
its information, and to whom and for what purposes it was
disclosed, promises many more revealing insights on the
methods and motivations of this American-incorporated
organization which has been working diligently on behalf
of the governments of Israel and apartheid South Africa. 

Kurt Holden is a free-lance writer who divides his time
between the U.S. and the Middle East.