The ADL Spy Probe
From Alexander Cockburn's "Beat the Devil," a bi-weekly
column in The Nation.
May 31, 1993
There have been fears that political pressure might squelch the case against the
Anti-Defamation League spies being built by the San Francisco District Attorney, Arlo
Smith. But the "San Francisco Examiner" for May 11 carried a story by Dennis
Opatrny and Scott Winokur reporting that top officials of the ADL are "the ultimate
targets of the San Francisco district attorney's domestic spying investigation." Such
officials include the ADL's New York-based director of research, Irwin Suall. Meanwhile,
the ADL's strategy is to link critics of its spy operation with neo-Nazis and with the
World Trade Center bombers.
I note here a story on the scandal in "The Village Voice" for May 11 by
Robert Friedman. Since Friedman once wrote "The Nation" complaining I had
credited another reporter for facts he had unearthed, I must say that I have a serious
problem with the way he avoids giving credit to anyone but himself.
Last July, in "Washington Report on Middle East Affairs," Gregory Slobodkin
broke the story of AIPAC's smear operation in a story titled "The Secret Section in
Israel's US Lobby That Stifles American Debate." On August 4, Friedman did a
"Voice" story, "The Israel Lobby's Blacklist." Nowhere in Friedman's
story was it stated that Slobodkin had already published an account of his experiences at
AIPAC.
In his May 11, 1993, piece on the ADL, Friedman was still boasting that AIPAC's
"spy operation was disclosed last summer in the `Voice,'" which it wasn't. And
he never thanks his sources or acknowledges the efforts of people long laboring on the
story, such as journalists in San Francisco or ABC-TV's James Bamford, who discovered the
Benjamin Epstein letter from which Friedman quotes without tipping his hat to the
journalist who got the document first.
In fact, Friedman relies uncritically on the statements of ADL spy Roy Bullock to the
FBI and to San Francisco police, as though they were proven facts. And in the end he lets
off the ADL with a light stroke, courtesy of researcher Chip Berlet, who says the ADL
"is a group whose leaders, at least, consistently defend the actions of Israel
against critics, which ... is entirely appropriate" and "is a group that
maintains an information-sharing arrangement with law enforcement. Again, there is nothing
wrong for a group to do that." Berlet argues that it was some malign synergy between
such ADL functions that led to trouble. In effect, he OK's the ADL's venomous smearing of
critics as anti-Semites and then makes the amazing statement that there's nothing wrong
with illegal acquisition and dissemination of privileged government information about
individuals. This is the basis of the class-action suit against the ADL in California.
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