From: arens@ISI.EDU (Yigal Arens)
Subject: More on ADL spying case
Organization: USC/Information Sciences Institute
Lines: 222
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: grl.isi.edu

Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, April 13, 1993.  P. A1.

NEW DETAILS OF EXTENSIVE ADL SPY OPERATION EMERGE

	* INQUIRY: Transcripts reveal nearly 40 years of espionage
	  by a man who infiltrated political groups

By Richard C. Paddock, Times staff writer.

SAN FRANCISCO -- To the outside world, Roy Bullock was a small-time
art dealer who operated from his house in the Castro District.  In
reality, he was an undercover spy who picked through garbage and
amassed secret files for the Anti-Defamation League for nearly 40
years.

His code name at the prominent Jewish organization was Cal, and he was
so successful at infiltrating political groups that he was once chosen
to head an Arab-American delegation that visited Rep. Nancy Pelosi
(D-San Francisco) in her Washington, D.C., office.

For a time, Cal tapped into the phone message system of the White
Aryan Resistance to learn of hate crimes.  From police sources he
obtained privileged, personal information on at least 1,394 people. 
And he met surreptitiously with agents of the South African government
to trade his knowledge for crisp, new $100 bills.

These are among the secrets that Bullock and David Gurvitz, a former
Los Angeles-based operative, divulged in extensive interviews with
police and the FBI in a growing scandal over the nation-wide
intelligence network operated by the Anti-Defamation League.

Officials of the Anti-Defamation League, while denying any improper
activity, have said they will cooperate with the investigation.  They
have refused to discuss Bullock and Gurvitz.

Transcripts of the interviews -- among nearly 700 pages of documents
released by San Francisco prosecutors last week -- offer new details
of the private spy operation that authorities allege crossed the line
into illegal territory.

At times, the intelligence activities took on a cloak-and-dagger air
with laundered payments, shredded documents, hotel rendezvous with
foreign agents and code names like "Ironsides" and "Flipper."

On one occasion, Gurvitz recounts, he received a tip that a
pro-Palestinian activist was about to board a plane bound for Haifa,
Israel.  Although the Anti-Defamation League publicly denies any ties
to Israel, Gurvitz phoned an Israeli consular official to warn him. 
Shortly afterward, another official called Gurvitz back and debriefed
him.

The court papers also added to the mystery of Tom Gerard, a former CIA
agent and San Francisco police officer accused of providing
confidential material from police files to the Anti-Defamation League.

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

Also in the briefcase were 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 one
target group, the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Each case of obtaining such data from a law enforcement officer would
constitute a felony, San Francisco Police Inspector Ron Roth noted in
an affidavit for a search warrant.

The Anti-Defamation League, a self-described Jewish defense and civil
rights organization, acknowledges it has long collected information on
groups that are anti-Semitic, extremist or racist. The ADL's
fact-finding division, headed by Irwinn Suall in New York, enjoys a
reputation for thoroughness and has often shared its information with
police agencies and journalists. 

However, evidence seized from Bullock's computer shows he kept files
on at least 950 groups of all political stripes, including the
American Civil Liberties Union, Earth Island Institute, the United
Farm Workers, Jews for Jesus, Mother Jones magazine, the Center for
Investigative Reporting, the Bo Gritz for President Committee, the
Asian Law Caucus and the AIDS activist group ACT UP.

The computer files also included information on several members of
Congress, including Pelosi, House Armed Services Committee Chairman
Ron Dellums (D-Berkeley) and former Republican Rep. Pete McCloskey
from the Bay Area.

In their statements, Bullock and Gurvitz said the Anti-Defamation
League has collected information on political activists in the Los
Angeles area for more than 30 years.  They said they worked closely
with three Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies who specialized in
intelligence work, a Los Angeles Police Department anti-terrorism
expert and a San Diego County Sheriff's Department intelligence
officer.

A spokesman for the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department said he knew
nothing of any contact between the deputies and the ADL.  The Los
Angeles Police Department, which earlier refused to cooperate with the
investigation, and the San Diego Sheriff's Department declined
comment.

Bullock, 58, is one of the most intriguing characters in the spy
drama.  Although he is not Jewish, he began working undercover as a
volunteer for the ADL and the FBI in Indiana in 1954 after reading a
book about a man who infiltrated the Communist Party.

Bullock moved to Los Angeles in 1960 and was given a paid position by
the ADL as an intelligence operative, he told authorities.  In the
mid-1970s, he moved to San Francisco and continued his spy operations
up and down the West Coast.

To keep his identity secret, his salary has always been funneled
through Beverly Hills attorney Bruce I. Hochman -- who has never
missed a payment in more than 32 years, Bullock said.

"I was an investigator for the ADL.  I investigated any and all
anti-democratic movements," Bullock said.  ". . . Officially, I'm only
a contract worker with Bruce Hochman.  That way, the league would not
be officially connected with me."

Bullock said he became a master at infiltrating groups from Communists
to Arab-American to gay radicals to skinheads, usually using his own
name but once adopting the alias Elmer Fink.

"I'm one of a kind," he told police.

In recent years, however, his ADL affiliation has increasingly become
known, and at one point he was confronted by a skinhead armed with a
shotgun who threatened to kill him.

In the mid-1980s, he helped San Francisco police solve a bombing at a
synagogue by combing through the trash of extremist Cory Phelps and
matching handwriting with samples on a threatening letter obtained by
police.  In part because of this investigation, he became close
friends with Gerard, who at the time was working in the San Francisco
police intelligence division.

Bullock frequently searched through the garbage of target groups.  An
FBI report noted how he investigated one Palestinian group:

"Bullock would write reports based on what he found in the trash, and
would share the reports with Gerard.  Bullock also gave the trash to
Gerard for Gerard to examine.  Gerard would later return the trash to
Bullock."

From a wide range of sources, Bullock compiled files on 9,876
individuals and more than 950 political groups.  Gerard, whose files
contained many identical entries, kept files on 7,011 people.

In 1987, Bullock and Gerard began selling some of their vast wealth of
information to the South African government.  Bullock tells of
meetings secretly with South African agents at San Francisco hotels
and receiving envelopes filled with thousands of dollars in new $100
bills.

Bullock insists the information he sold consisted of data he culled
only from public sources. Once he rewrote an innocuous item published
by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen about South African
Bishop Desmond Tutu and the wife of prominent attorney Melvin Belli --
and submitted it as his own work.

Bullock said it was Gerard who sold official police intelligence. 
Bullock said he split about $16,000 from the South African government
evenly with Gerard, telling him at one point, "I may be gay but I'm a
straight arrow."

In his interviews with the police and FBI, Bullock talked freely about
engaging in certain activities that prosecutors say would appear to
violate the law.

For example, Bullock admitted to receiving driver's license records
and criminal histories from Gerard on about 50 people -- a fraction of
the confidential police data found in his computer.  And he said
Gerard gave him complete San Francisco Police Department intelligence
files on various Nazi groups that were supposed to be destroyed under
department policy.

Bullock said he also received a confidential FBI report on the Nation
of Islam that he later shredded at the Anti-Defamation League's San
Francisco office.

Bullock seemed proud of his "Operation Eavesdrop," in which he used a
paid informant, code-named Scumbag, to help tap into a White Aryan
Resistance phone message network, listening to the messages left by
members of the right-wing group.  "For a short time, it was
wonderful," he told police.

In Los Angeles, ADL operative Gurvitz was hired about four years ago
as a "fact-finder" to keep intelligence files and occasionally go
undercover to the meetings of target groups.

Among other things, he told San Francisco authorities, the Los Angeles
ADL office kept a record of any Arab-American who had "anti-Israel
leanings" or who wrote a letter to a newspaper expressing such
sentiment.

Gurvitz was recently forced to resign after an incident in which he
attempted to misuse the ADL intelligence network to seek revenge on a
rival who got a job Gurvitz wanted at the Simon Wiesenthal Center for
Holocaust Studies.  Gurvitz got confidential police data on the rival
and threatened to expose him as a Jewish spy to a right-wing hate
group.

Gurvitz has since begun cooperating with police and the FBI in the
probe, providing considerable information about the ADL operation. 
Unlike Bullock, he has been assured he is not a subject of the
investigation.

Gurvitz declined through his father in Los Angeles to be interviewed
by The Times. Bullock's attorney said his client would not comment.
--
Yigal Arens
USC/ISI                                                TV made me do it!
arens@isi.edu
