---
created: 2026-06-13
updated: 2026-09-22
title: Anti-Defamation League
aliases:
  - ADL
tags:
  - Organization
  - CivilSociety
  - Intelligence
  - Surveillance
category: "Private Organization"
summary: "The Anti-Defamation League is a Jewish civil-rights organization founded in 1913 that was found in a 1993 investigation to have run a private domestic intelligence operation gathering files on thousands of individuals and groups."
start: 1913
location: "New York City"
---
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 [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|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 [[Central Intelligence Agency|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.[^1][^2]

### Footnotes

[^1]: Friedman, Robert I. "The Enemy Within." *The Village Voice*, May 11, 1993.
[^2]: Cockburn, Alexander, and Ken Silverstein. *Washington Babylon*. Verso, 1996.