---
aliases:
- ADL
category: Private Organization
created: 2026-06-13
location: New York City
start: 1913
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.
tags:
- Organization
- CivilSociety
- Intelligence
- Surveillance
title: Anti-Defamation League
updated: 2026-06-13
---

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](/places/san-francisco/) Police Department and the [FBI](/organizations/federal-bureau-of-investigation/) 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](/organizations/central-intelligence-agency/) employee, and was alleged to have been passed to the governments of [Israel](/places/israel/) and [South Africa](/places/south-africa/). The matter was settled through civil agreements without criminal charges against the organization.[^1][^2]

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