The Anti-Discrimination League (ADL), for instance, only poses as a human rights organization. It has at least sometimes functioned as an intelligence organization working on behalf of a foreign state.
Back in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, at the height of the anti-Apartheid movement, the Israeli government was a firm supporter of the racist faction of Afrikaaners. The Israeli government even offered nukes to the white supremacist South African government for use on its African neighbors if they became too uppity. It appears to have instructed the ADL in the US to spy on anti-Apartheid activists, who were engaged in a boycott, divest and sanctions campaign against Praetoria. Many of the same groups were also involved in pro-Palestinian activities.
The ADL in the San Francisco Bay area carefully compiled files on 10,000 Americans and 600 organizations. One ADL secret agent leaked the files on the anti-Apartheid activists, and South Africans in political exile, to the Apartheid government, with potentially dire consequences for any of them that the South African secret police could get hold of.
It is worth noting that President Barack Obama gave his first political speech, in 1981 on the Occidental campus, against Apartheid. Maybe he ADL has a file on him somewhere.
Jeffrey Blankfort reports, based on the dossier of ADL activities ordered released when it lost the suit the activists brought against it, that “The ADL supplied confidential information to foreign governments that it obtained from police and federal agencies in the US.”
One of the people on which the ADL was spying, the non-violent activist Alex Odeh of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, was assassinated in 1985; (there is no evidence of a connection).
