ADL spying exposed nationally

• The ADL spy scandal that erupted in San Francisco is finally receiving national exposure. As national news organizations begin to dig into the affair, the police investigation is turning up a number of shocking new details of the massive extent of the ADL's espionage effort. ADL officials could face 48 felony counts.

On April 8 the story of the illegal spying operations of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith were finally reported in surprising detail by one of the major television news networks. And the story is beginning to receive national exposure, after long silence broken only by the San Francisco papers and The SPOTLIGHT.

ABC's "Nightly News" broadcast a lengthy, detailed report on the scandal, which first erupted in San Francisco but which has spread nationwide.

What amazed many viewers interviewed by The SPOTLIGHT afterward is that ABC's report put the ADL in a very bad light, and bad publicity is not something the ADL is used to receiving.

ABC-News reporter James Walker brought some 18 million estimated TV viewers a story that has been told by The SPOTLIGHT and its publisher Liberty Lobby since 1955: that the ADL has been operating a massive and permanent espionage apparatus in this country, taking orders from and acting as proxy for a foreign intelligence agency--Israel's Mossad.

According to the police, it was not only patriotic groups such as Liberty Lobby and Black nationalist groups such as the Nation of Islam that were targeted by the ADL. The ADL also sent operatives into the ranks of such liberal organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the United Farm Workers.

Also targeted were the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, the environmentalist group Greenpeace and the board of directors of station KQED, a San Francisco public television station. These are just a handful of the ADL's victims.

SPOTLIGHT SCOOP

When the San Francisco spy scandal first erupted at the beginning of this year--involving the theft of classified police intelligence files by San Francisco police inspector Tom Gerard and their sale to the ADL-- initial reports about the affair appeared only locally, except for national coverage provided by The SPOTLIGHT.

The televised report on ABC news was interesting in that it included film footage of ADL informant Roy Bullock (first exposed by The SPOTLIGHT as an ADL operative as far back as 1986), as well as very rare, somewhat blurry film footage of the elusive Irwin Suall, the "ex-Marxist" who runs the ADL's spy division out of his offices at the UN plaza in Manhattan.

ABC reported it had received information that Bullock--whose code name was "Cal"--had been hailed by Suall as being one of the ADL's "best" spies. (Bullock had spied on Liberty Lobby for years until an alert Liberty Lobby staffer sensed Bullock's real agenda and exposed him as an ADL operative.)

MORE ADL SPIES AT LARGE

The Establishment network also reported a former ADL official in Los Angeles told ABC he was aware of at least three more ADL spies operating in Chicago and at least one in Atlanta. The Los Angeles ADL official also admitted his own job was to maintain the ADL's spy files at the ADL office where he was employed.

(Further information uncovered by The SPOTLIGHT indicates the ADL also maintains operatives in Washington, St. Louis and New York, among other major cities. These operatives can be deployed elsewhere as the need arises.)

ABC reporter Walker journeyed to a remote Philippine island to interview fugitive former cop Gerard, who fled the country when the investigation began.

Officials of the ADL refused to be interviewed by ABC. Historically, when confronted with the truth, the ADL always refuses to face questioning or to participate in any form of debate.

To make matters worse for the ADL, the ABC report came on the heels of yet a second police raid on the offices of the ADL in both San Francisco and Los Angeles.

This raid was a follow-up to initial raids by San Francisco police with the assistance of federal marshals and the FBI on ADL headquarters in the two cities in December of last year.

1 MILLION VICTIMS?

Police sources have revealed that the information they have uncovered suggests the ADL has been maintaining secret files on more than 950 political groups, newspapers and labor unions and on a minimum of 12,000 people.

(The 12,000 figure, however, is based only on the number of names discovered in the West Coast offices of the ADL. The ADL has offices all over the United States, suggesting that the individual files kept by the ADL are much more numerous, perhaps as many as 1 million people nationwide.)

The Los Angeles Times reported on April 9 that the ADL may face a total of 48 felony counts for not properly reporting the employment of its spy Bullock.

According to the Times, the ADL disguised payments to Bullock for more than 25 years by funneling $550 a week to a Beverly Hills, California attorney, Bruce I. Hochman, who turned the money over to Bullock.

(Attorney Hochman, a prominent ADL figure, is one of the major tax attorneys in California and a former U.S. prosecutor. He was also a member of a secret panel appointed by former U.S. senator [now governor] Pete Wilson [R-Calif.] to make recommendations on new federal judges in the Golden State.)

The Times also reported David Lehrer, regional director of the ADL office in Los Angeles, maintained a secret slush fund used to pay for the ADL's spy operations. He signed checks from the account under the name "L. Patterson" to pay for the clandestine activities.

[Photograph captioned, "IRWIN SUALL ...Shadowy spymaster."]

An ADL official is reported to have claimed the account was used to pay for subscriptions to magazines and newspapers published by groups targeted by the ADL's "fact finding" (i.e. dirty tricks) division.

To date, the New York Times (which promotes itself as America's "newspaper of record") published only a brief, cursory item about the scandal, buried at the bottom of the back section of the newspaper. The "liberal" internationalist Washington Post has not published a word of the scandal.