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Spy-guy Bullock wove web of intrigue By Dan Evans Of The Examiner Staff Who, exactly, is Roy Bullock? "I'm really the only fact-finder, spy, whatever you want to call me on the West Coast," Bullock told San Francisco police during a 1993 interview. Despite Bullock's own admission, the Anti-Defamation League bristles at the notion he was a spy. It seems more a dislike of the negative connotations of the word, however, not a dispute that the title is wrong or even misleading. For nearly a quarter of a century, the ADL covered up its payments to Bullock by sending them to Beverly Hills attorney Bruce Hochman, who would then pay the fact-finder. Hochman, who died in August, was a former regional director of the ADL. Records later seized by police show that Bullock was paid $169,375 from July 1985 to February 1993. The 67-year-old informant started working for the ADL in the mid 1960s. During his work for the Jewish civil rights organization, Bullock's spying spanned the political gamut. In addition to the Ku Klux Klan, Bullock also kept tabs on Operation Rescue, Greenpeace, the United Farm Workers and the Jewish Defense League. The art dealer also passed along information about former Republican Rep. Pete McCloskey, Lyndon LaRouche and journalists covering the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. McCloskey, now an attorney in Redwood City, would later lead a nine-year lawsuit against the ADL based on those records. Bullock, in 1993, worked as an informant for the FBI, which began investigating him after agents discovered he was selling information to the South African government. In raid of his home in April of that year, San Francisco police seized a computer that contained thousands of files on liberal Bay Area Jews, Arab Americans, labor groups and rabid right-wing organizations. Two of the people he spied on, Jeffrey Blankfort and Steve Zeltzer, are Jewish. They say they were targeted for their outspoken opposition to Israeli policies in the Gaza Strip. A third person, Berkeley resident Anne Poirier, was spied on because of her work in the anti-apartheid groups in the early 1990s. The three settled a nine-year lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League in February for about $50,000 each. Blankfort and Zeltzer were co-founders of an organization called the Labor Committee on the Middle East. Meetings of the now-defunct group occurred at Zeltzer's Mission District home starting in 1987, and focused on criticism of Israeli policies in regard to Palestinians. Posing as someone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, Bullock gained access to the group, regularly coming to Zeltzer's home for meetings. Zeltzer said he met Bullock at meetings of the Free Moses Mayekiso Defense League, a group working on behalf of the South African labor leader. Curiously, Blankfort first found out that Bullock was an impostor after getting a tip in an anonymous letter from the Institute for Historical Review, an Orange County-based Holocaust denial group. "I find the existence of the organization hateful," Blankfort said of his unknown benefactor. "Even though the source was a pretty ugly one, it was something we had to find out." When he and Zeltzer confronted Bullock with the information at a Mission District cafÈ, Bullock denied the claims. Zeltzer said he didn't believe him, and stopped inviting him to the meetings. It gets into the realm of bizarre, Zelter said, when you see the connection between Israeli interests and South Africa. There were business interests between the two, he said. Both were subject to trade embargos -- Israel from its Arab neighbors and South Africa from, well, just about everyone -- and traded for stuff they couldn't individually get. Publications from the ADL don't address any business ties, but claim the group kept tabs on some anti-apartheid groups, such as the African National Congress, if they thought they were anti-Semitic. What is undisputed is that Bullock sold information about Bay Area activists to the South African government. Bullock told the SFPD that he and former SFPD Inspector Tom Gerard gave the information to an intelligence agent named Humphries. Though he claimed much of the information was from publicly available material, Bullock acknowledged Gerard did run license plate numbers through the SFPD's computer for the South Africans. "That's just real strange," said Zeltzer. "It's like COINTELPRO." |
