Anti-Defamation League

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is an organization founded in 1913, originally as an arm of the fraternal order B'nai B'rith, to combat antisemitism and other forms of discrimination. Alongside its civil-rights advocacy it has long maintained a fact-finding apparatus that monitors extremist and political groups.¹

The 1993 Spying Investigation

In 1993 the San Francisco Police Department and the FBI searched ADL offices and exposed a private intelligence operation in which the organization, through the operative Roy Bullock, had compiled files on roughly ten thousand individuals and more than nine hundred organizations, ranging from white-supremacist groups to anti-apartheid and Arab-American organizations. Some of the information had been obtained from a serving police officer, Tom Gerard, a former CIA employee, and, according to Robert I. Friedman of The Village Voice, was passed to the governments of Israel and South Africa. The matter was settled through civil agreements without criminal charges against the organization.¹²