4 - Spy Ring and Murder Squads?

An Article in the Los Angeles Times of 9th April, 1993, by Richard C. Paddock, detailed a police raid on ADL offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles where the police seized evidence of a nationwide intelligence network accused of keeping files on more than 950 political groups, newspapers, and labor unions and as many as 12,000 people.

Describing the spy ring in detail, San Francisco authorities simultaneously released voluminous documents telling how operatives of the Anti-Defamation League searched through trash and infiltrated organizations to gather intelligence on Arab-American, right-wing, and what they called "pinko" organizations.

Police alleged that the organization maintains undercover operatives to gather political intelligence in at least seven cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco.

According to police officials, groups that were the focus of the spy operation span the political spectrum, including such groups as the Ku Klux Klan, the National Alliance, Greenpeace, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the United Farm Workers, and the Jewish Defense League. Also on the list were Mills College, the board of directors of San Francisco public television station KQED, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian newspaper.

In addition to allegations of obtaining confidential information from police, the Anti-Defamation League could face a total of 48 felony counts for not properly reporting the employment of its chief West Coast spy, Roy Bullock, according to the affidavit filed to justify the search warrant.

The Anti-Defamation League disguised payments to Bullock for more than 25 years by funneling $550 a week to Beverly Hills attorney Bruce I. Hochman, who then paid Bullock, according to the documents released in San Francisco. Hochman, a former president of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles is one of the state's leading tax attorneys.

"Until 1990, Hochman, a former U.S. prosecutor, also was a member of a panel appointed by then-Senator Pete Wilson to secretly make initial recommendations on new federal judges in California."

Hochman is a former regional president of the Anti-Defamation League.

A second article from the Los Angeles Times, 13th April, 1993, also by Richard C. Paddock, details ADL spy Roy Bullock's possible role in death squads, torture and kidnapping.

The article introduces another ADL spy, Tom Gerard, a former CIA agent and San Francisco police officer who was accused of providing confidential material from police files to the Anti-Defamation League.

Gerard fled to the Philippines after the FBI interviewed him, but left behind a briefcase in his police locker. Its contents, according to the Los Angeles Times, included passports, driver's licenses, and identification cards in 10 different names; identification cards in his own name for four different embassies in Central America; and a collection of blank birth certificates, Army discharge papers, and official stationery from various agencies.

Also in Tom Gerard's briefcase was extensive information on death squads, a black hood, apparently for use in interrogations, and photos of blindfolded and chained men.

Investigators suspect that Gerard and other police sources gave the ADL confidential driver's license or vehicle registration information on a vast number of people, including as many as 4,500 members of just one target group of interest to the ADL, the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee.