
Scanning NEWSWIRE (5) Conference 

Date: 07-07-93 (18:52)              Number: 5397 of 5458 (Refer# NONE)
  To: RAY NORMANDEAU
From: nyt@blythe.org, NY TRANSFER NEWS
Subj: ADL:Gerard, Death Squads & the US Police State
Read: 07-07-93 (18:59)              Status: PUBLIC MESSAGE
Conf: NEWSWIRE (5)               Read Type: GENERAL (+)

To: act@blythe.org, actpub@blythe.org, cov@blythe.org, covpub@blythe.org,
Subject: ADL:Gerard, Death Squads & the US Police State
From: nyt@blythe.org (NY Transfer News)
Reply-To: nyt@blythe.org (NY Transfer News)
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 93 14:34:22 EDT

This article split by uuPCB: Part # 1 of 5

To: act@blythe.org, actpub@blythe.org, cov@blythe.org, covpub@blythe.org,
Subject: ADL:Gerard, Death Squads & the US Police State
From: nyt@blythe.org (NY Transfer News)
Reply-To: nyt@blythe.org (NY Transfer News)
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 93 14:34:22 EDT



Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit


[NY TRANSFER NEWS EDITOR'S NOTE -- Those following the ADL spy
scandal will find this investigative article by John Ross a
valuable and very troubling addition to the information revealed
thus far.  It isn't surprising that the evil-doers in the ADL have
cooperated with the Mossad, the CIA, the South African apartheid
regime and the British occupiers of Ireland.  But those forces of
repression have other allies who are closer than you might think
-- as close, perhaps, as your local police precinct.]


SMOKING GUN?
TOM GERARD, DEATH SQUADS AND THE BANALITY OF EVIL

by John Ross

from the Anderson Valley Advertiser, May 19, 1993
(distributed with author's permission)


Just 24 hours after his surprise return from his remote Philippine
hideaway on May 7th, ex-SFPD Intelligence officer Tom Gerard was
free on the streets of San Francisco, his bail reduced and six of
the 11 charges of stealing government documents lodged against
him, mysteriously dropped. At his first court appearance the
following Wednesday, the lanky Gerard dodged the press, entering
and exiting through privileged doors usually reserved for the
judiciary. The rogue cop looked relaxed, a smile that blended into
a smirk edging his mustached lip as he waved to friends in the
Department.

Gerard can afford to enjoy the spotlight, now that it appears he
is cutting a deal with the District Attorney's office that will
guarantee he will never spend one more day in jail for illegally
passing thousands of police files on suspected political
troublemakers to private contractors.

The SF Police elite's delicate handling of Tom Gerard dovetails
nicely with the kidglove treatment the department has consistently
afforded its star spy. Indeed, in January 1985, after Gerard had
completed a 24-month stint as a CIA contract employee in El
Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, during which he is suspected of
having taught interrogation techniques to death squad operatives,
then-police chief Con Murphy personally approved Gerard's
assignment to the Intelligence Division where he was apparently
encouraged to spy on the very people fingered by the death squads
he is thought to have trained.

Tom Gerard's shadowy Central American adventure began in October
1982 when he took leave of the SFPD Vice Squad and signed on with
the Central Intelligence Agency as what he describes as "a bomb
detection and detonation instructor," a knack he picked up, says
SFPD spokesperson Dave Ambrose, while working with the Crime
Prevention Force ("Tac Squad") between 1970 and 1977.

During the early years of the Salvadoran insurgency, many US law
enforcement officers were signed on as civilian advisers to local
police agencies in a US State Department-directed effort to modify
human rights abuses by Salvadoran security forces. As a bomb
expert, Tom Gerard was an asset in a campaign where terrorist
bombings were a deadly factor. His skills at interrogation,
recently praised by former colleagues in the SFPD, would also have
served him well, thinks one former US military "advisor" who was
on the ground in Salvador during Gerard's tour there. "The US
military didn't work interrogation or with the police -- that was
all civilian contracts and The Agency was looking for law
enforcement professionals who had multiple talents like bomb
detection and interrogation. The two went hand in hand: there's a
bombing. You bring in the suspects. You want to interrogate them,"
says the special forces officer who asked anonymity. "It wasn't
all negative -- the Salvadoran police were famous for brutal
interrogation -- our people were there to try and mitigate that,"
adds the military man.

Working out at the privately run Hunters Point Shipyard police gym
he frequented, Tom Gerard repeatedly hinted to gym mates that he
had served the ClA once before his Central American run -- in
Vietnam as an interrogator of suspected Vietcong. Now the contents
of the American Tourister suitcase he inexplicably left behind him
(continued next message....)

Date: 07-07-93 (18:52)              Number: 5398 of 5458 (Refer# NONE)
  To: RAY NORMANDEAU
From: nyt@blythe.org, NY TRANSFER NEWS
Subj: ADL:Gerard, Death Squads & the US Police State
Read: 07-07-93 (18:59)              Status: PUBLIC MESSAGE
Conf: NEWSWIRE (5)               Read Type: GENERAL (+)


This article split by uuPCB: Part # 2 of 5

To: act@blythe.org, actpub@blythe.org, cov@blythe.org, covpub@blythe.org,
Subject: ADL:Gerard, Death Squads & the US Police State
From: nyt@blythe.org (NY Transfer News)
Reply-To: nyt@blythe.org (NY Transfer News)
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 93 14:34:22 EDT

in his prominently marked gym locker leads one to believe that he
practiced such skills during his 1982-84 tour of that war-torn
region. Gerard himself has characterized the materials found in
the suitcase as "the smoking gun" that will tie the CIA to Central
American death squads.

Among the contents inventoried by SFPD investigators are two
documents labeled SECRET, one purportedly a cable from the US
embassy in El Salvador to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia
describing human rights abuses in that country; the other, a
document entitled "Biodata of Nominees To Be Trained In Human
Resources Exploitation (Interrogation) Course," with 13 names
attached (Gerard says the course was conducted at a CIA-run
"prison labor farm" near Williamsburg, Virginia).  Both of the
allegedly stolen documents have been seized by the FBI and
presumably will never be released for public consumption.

Other intriguing finds in the Hunters Point gym locker: a 100-page
looseleaf binder listing names, addresses and telephone numbers of
purported members of the CIA's paramilitary division which once
operated under the rubric "International Activities Division --
Special Activities Group"; ID cards from US embassies in Costa
Rica, Guatemala, and Honduras and the Salvadoran National Police,
the most feared of that nation's brutal security forces in whose
rural outposts, death squad tortures were routinely carried out; a
100-plus-page manual on interrogation techniques with no agency
attribution; one black nylon hood with green drawstrings; 21
eight-by-ten photos of chained and blindfolded men and 21
newspaper articles focusing on Central American death squads,
including one slugged "Police Probe Intimidation of Refugees."
Four manila file folders in the suitcase were marked "D.S," for
the death squad materials they included.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times' Bob Drogin (April
27th) -- the only extend[ed] face-to-face conversation with Gerard
since his troubles began -- the former San Francisco Police
Intelligence Officer said he bailed out of Salvador because what
was going down was "some evil shit...."

Upon his return from the Land of Evil Shit in late 1984, Tom
Gerard re-applied to join the SFPD and after "a routine background
check" that apparently did not probe his most recent employment
record, he was sworn in January 2nd, 1985, reports Ambrose. After
seven months in "Field Operations," working nights and "answering
phones" at 850 Bryant Street "to catch up," Gerard was reassigned
to Intelligence where, despite his shadowy past -- or because of
it -- Gerard went right to work ferreting out opponents of the
CIA-trained death squads in Central America.

* * *

Opposition to the Reagan administration's escalating intervention
in that war-ravished landscape was at a highwater mark when Gerard
jumped back on board.  Solidarity work -- not only with the
peoples of El Salvador but also in defense of Nicaragua's
beleaguered Sandanistas -- was cresting. Moreover, the City had
become a mecca for tens of thousands of refugees, chiefly
Salvadorans, with a flourishing sanctuary movement that had grown
so politically powerful San Francisco declared itself an offlcial
"City of Refuge."

Soon after Gerard was assigned to Intelligence in August 1985,
activists began to notice an upsurge in office break-ins and
surveillance activities. One object was the Committee in
Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). Between 1981
and 1986, 52 FBI field offices around the country assigned agents
to spy on CISPES offices and functions. Phil Josselin, then office
manager for San Francisco CISPES, remembers US mail stops placed
upon donors and a constant stream of suspected infiltrators at
meetings. Significantly, CISPES has five separate file entries on
the tapes police seized from Gerard's personal computer soon after
his escape to the Philippines. Of the 403 entries recorded under
the "Pinko" category -- by far the largest in Gerard's electronic
files -- 80 represent Central American and Latino solidarity
groups, a much greater number than entries for the opponents of
Israeli policy that Gerard and his confessed civilian conferate
Roy Bullock were said to be monitoring for the Anti-Defamation
League (ADL).

During Gerard's tenure at Intelligence, Hari Dillon headed up
"Tecnica," a group that sent over 800 "internationalist"
volunteers to Nicaragua and provided the Sandinistas with $4
million in technical assistance.  After volunteer Ben Lindner's
execution by Contras in northern Nicaragua in 1986 drew press
attention to "Tecnica," Dillon remembers a series of break-ins at
the San Francisco office: "We were being accused by the Reagan
administration of gun-running so we assumed surveillance was
intense." "Tecnica" has a trio of file entries in Gerard's "Pinko"
compilation and District Attorney John Dwyer, who is heading up
the Gerard investigation and who is an old adversary from Dillon's
days as an SF State strike leader, recently informed the activist
that he is one of the most frequently mentioned names in materials
assembled by the ex-cop and Bullock.

(continued next message....)

Date: 07-07-93 (18:52)              Number: 5399 of 5458 (Refer# NONE)
  To: RAY NORMANDEAU
From: nyt@blythe.org, NY TRANSFER NEWS
Subj: ADL:Gerard, Death Squads & the US Police State
Read: 07-07-93 (18:59)              Status: PUBLIC MESSAGE
Conf: NEWSWIRE (5)               Read Type: GENERAL (+)


This article split by uuPCB: Part # 3 of 5

To: act@blythe.org, actpub@blythe.org, cov@blythe.org, covpub@blythe.org,
Subject: ADL:Gerard, Death Squads & the US Police State
From: nyt@blythe.org (NY Transfer News)
Reply-To: nyt@blythe.org (NY Transfer News)
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 93 14:34:22 EDT


In late 1985, Felix Kuri, West Coast representative for the
Salvadoran Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR), then the
political arm of FMLN guerrillas, sensed an increase in
surveillance. An SFPD officer, posing as a member of the press,
had been caught filming a demonstration at the Salvadoran embassy;
FDR offices at 972 Market Street -- where, three years later,
Gerard and Bullock would scavenge Christic Institute garbage --
were broken into; windows were busted out at Casa El Salvador on
Valencia Street and documents, including the mailing list, stolen.
The 90th entry on Gerard's "Pinko" list is (sic): "Casa El
Salvador (mailing list)." Kuri, who is himself listed incorrectly
as "West Coast Representative FMLN" (number 155) worries that
Gerard was passing data on FMLN Bay Area supporters to his death
squad contacts back in Salvador.

Suspicions that intelligence agencies were closely monitoring the
refugees streaming into the country from El Salvador were
confirmed in early 1985 when FBI inflltration of Sanctuary
churches in Arizona was revealed.  Here, in San Francisco,
Catholic Social Services at 50 Oak Street was an important
receiving point for newly arrived Central American refugees. "The
building owner told us someone was going through our garbage,"
reports then-director Rebecca Rauber. "They'd come take a
calculator, rifle through photos but leave the petty cash -- then
come back two weeks later," recalls office worker Barbara Johnson.
"It was eerie...."

By July 1987, after Salvadoran refugee activist Yanira Correa was
kidnapped and threatened by presumed death squad affiliates in Los
Angeles through December of that year, representatives of
solidarity and refugee groups such as CRECE, CARECEN, and CISPES
met to compare notes on security and recorded 23 incidents,
including 13 office and car break-ins. It was at a December 18th
meeting that Tom Gerard's name emerged as a prime suspect.

During that summer, a sympathetic worker had passed along
information that the San Francisco Police Department was using an
office in the Bayview district warehouse where he was employed.
The office was said to be "full of files" relating to solidarity
and refugee groups and the police officer described as a lanky man
with a pepper-and-salt beard and slight potbelly who readily
identified himself as Officer Tom Gerard. During subsquent
conversations with Gerard, the intelligence operative boasted that
he had the aforementioned Casa El Salvador mailing list and even
passed along a surveillance report on a July 19th Nicaragua
solidarity function.  Those who saw Gerard's report say it
included descriptions of the "tacky chic" clothes worn by those in
attendance.  By the fall of 1987, the warehouse office was shut
down and the operation moved elsewhere. Soon after, for what the
San Francisco Examiner recently tagged "unexplained reasons," Tom
Gerard was transferred back to the Vice Squad.

Marc Van Der Hout, an immigration attorney who is active in
Central American solidarity work and who attended the security
meetings, is outraged by the assignment of Gerard to spy on
opponents of the US Central American policy. "We were in lawful
exercise of our first amendment rights," he told the Bay Guardian
in a recent telephone interview. "It is outrageous that a person
who worked for the CIA in Central America should have been
assigned to carry out this investigation."

* * *

In April 1988, Police Chief Frank Jordan signed off on Gerard's
transfer from Intelligence to Vice but the ex-CIA man's interest
in keeping tabs on the "pinkos" did not subside. From 1988 to
1990, Roy Bullock told SFPD Inspector Ron Roth that he and the
rogue cop regularly foraged through Christic Institute garbage.
Christic was then deeply engaged in a ruinous lawsuit, charging
Gerard's former employees at the Central Intelligence Agency with
causing the death and injury to reporters during a 1984 [Eden
Pastora] press conference near the Costa Rican border [with
Nicaragua] that was bombed [...].  "I laughed when I read about
the garbage" says former Christic regional director Robin Young.
"We burned anything that might have contained relevant
information. There wasn't any smoking gun in our garbage...."

Gerard's interest in safeguarding evidence that he had gathered on
radical San Francisco groups surfaced in January 1990 when he
wrote the Police Officers Association monthly "Notebook" that
police intelligence "in no way, shape or form" resembled
intelligence gathered by "the KGB or our own CIA," it was designed
only to "prevent criminal acts," and must be protected from the
prying eyes of the San Francisco chapter of the American Civil
Liberties Union. According to recently received ACLU
documentation, as late as May 1992, Gerard, then a member of the
Gang Task Force, was soliciting an undercover investigation, this
time against "Roots Against War" and "The Revolutionary Communist
Party," just prior to the May 8th "Rodney King Verdict" march that
resulted in more than 580 arrests that ultimately proved
unconstitutional.

But by the end of the 1980s -- with the victory of Reagan-Bush

(continued next message....)

Date: 07-07-93 (18:52)              Number: 5400 of 5458 (Refer# NONE)
  To: RAY NORMANDEAU
From: nyt@blythe.org, NY TRANSFER NEWS
Subj: ADL:Gerard, Death Squads & the US Police State
Read: 07-07-93 (18:59)              Status: PUBLIC MESSAGE
Conf: NEWSWIRE (5)               Read Type: GENERAL (+)


This article split by uuPCB: Part # 4 of 5

To: act@blythe.org, actpub@blythe.org, cov@blythe.org, covpub@blythe.org,
Subject: ADL:Gerard, Death Squads & the US Police State
From: nyt@blythe.org (NY Transfer News)
Reply-To: nyt@blythe.org (NY Transfer News)
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 93 14:34:22 EDT

proxy Violeta Chamorro in Nicaragua and the State Department's
downsizing of assistance to death squads in Salvador following the
Army murders of six Jesuit priests there, Gerard and Bullock were
working more lucrative insurrections. The South African government
shelled out $16,000 for surveillance of African National Congress
supporters in the Bay Area and, of course, the Anti-Defamation
League paid the freight in its zealous campaign to weed out the
supposed enemies of Zionism. Irish nationalists here in San
Francisco have suspicions that Gerard and Bullock had dealings
with the British government -- the seven Irish entries in Gerard's
police files are "just the tip of the iceberg," says local lawyer
Sean McGuffin. Recent revelations of gun-running by San Francisco
police officers through Philippine Airlines' SFO offices, where
Tom Gerard moonlighted as night security chief, suggest an
involvement with elements of the Philippines government -- the
names of 11 Philippino human rights and opposition groups are
listed in the "Pinko" files. Was Tom Gerard also selling names of
activist refugees to the Salvadoran government in the mid-1980s?
Felix Kuri thinks that may have been the case. "I'm wondering
about friends who left here to go back to El Salvador," he related
during a recent Mission District cafe conversation.

In 1988, Father Ignacio Martin Barro stayed several days with
Kuri, now a San Francisco State professor and mental health
worker. In November 1989, Father Barro was dead in San Salvador,
one of six Jesuit priests massacred by US-trained elite troops.
"You know, one of my jobs is to treat people who were tortured by
the death squads," says Kuri, who reportedly was on death squad
founder Roberto D'Aubuisson's hit list. "I want to know if San
Francisco police officers were setting up my people to be tortured
and killed in El Salvador...."

In an interview from his hideaway on remote Palawan Island in
April, Tom Gerard insinuated to the LA Times that he had in his
possession the "smoking gun" that would tie the CIA to Salvadoran
death squads, a long sought-after piece of evidence by those who
opposed US intervention there and one substantiated by the recent
findings of the United Nations Truth Commission.  Gerard's
attempts to blackmail (he called it "graymail") the CIA into
burying the charges against him may well succeed -- once before,
in a federal court proceeding, the Agency stepped in to block
prosecution after Gerard had been called as an expert witness. Now
the former SFPD spy fears that he may be silenced in a more
physical way.

According to Gerard's former supervisor in Intelligence, Captain
John Willet, who is heading up the police department's
investigation and who met the ex-cop when he touched down at SFO
Friday morning, May 7th, Gerard returned from the Philippines
because he feared the CIA has a contract out to kill him. Gerard's
return was so return was so unexpected that DA Dwyer's case
appears to be seriously undermined, Willet told the Examiner's
Scott Winokur and Dennis J. Opatrny.

Does Tom Gerard have the smoking gun that could fatally torpedo
the CIA's already tarnished reputation?  Those who know him sense
a cloak-&-dagger braggadocio that stretches reality to its outer
limits. One gym-mate who pumped iron and climbed the Stairmaster
with the embattled former officer reports that Gerard was always
dropping hints of his shadowy past with an eye to selling his
story for big bucks. "My story is the kind of thing that sells spy
novels," Gerard told the LA Times Bob Drogin. "Here's a guy who
worked for the CIA. Here's a guy who ran a massive spy network.
Here's a guy who fled to a distant Third World Country...."

"He was really just a cop, you know," his old gym partner figures.
"A foot-soldier with a couple of ex-wives or girlfriends or
whatever and heavy mortgages on his apartment buildings. He
moonlighted nights at the airport and worked out at this gym
because it was cheap. Who knows why he left all this stuff in his
locker? To Gerard, all this spy stuff was just a way of making a
few dollars...."

* * *

(This is the unexpurgated version of a piece slated to run in the
SF Bay Guardian. As usual the BG is unwilling to state the charge
that the SFPD knowingly hired a Salvadoran death squad advisor to
spy on the very people the death squads wanted dead.)

-30-

NOTE: John Ross has given us permission to redistribute his
article, along with a request to our readers for financial
support. He has been paid almost nothing by the publications
who've published this material. If you think his research is as
vital as we do, please send us one dollar earmarked for Mr. Ross.
We will send 100% of your donation on to him. Many thanks.
-- NY Transfer News Collective.


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