John Ross is an investigative journalist based in San Francisco. He is the author of a report titled "Smoking Gun? Tom Gerard, Death Squads and the Banality of Evil", on the activities of former CIA employee Tom Gerard in Central America and the United States. This interview by JOSE GUTIERREZ is abridged from Revista Farabundo Marti.
Who is Tom Gerard?
Tom Gerard is an ex-San Francisco police officer who was assigned to the intelligence squad during the mid-1980s following a tour of Central America, specifically El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, in which he was a civilian employee of the Central Intelligence Agency teaching bomb detonation techniques and interrogation techniques to police forces in those three countries.
When he was reassigned to the San Francisco Police Department, he was assigned to spy on solidarity and refugee groups from Central America.
His activities were discovered between 1990 and 1992 when he was accused by the FBI of taking a document that related to spying on supporters of the African National Congress in the Bay Area and other places in California.
At the end of that investigation, when the case was about to be given to the court, Tom Gerard resigned from the police force and left the country, settling on a remote island in the Philippines to avoid prosecution. Some months later, in May 1993, Gerard was arrested at San Francisco airport when he flew back into the country.
It was unclear why he had come back, but he suggested it was because the CIA had threatened great bodily harm or death.
In El Salvador from 1982 to 1984, was he a CIA agent working with the Salvadoran army's special forces, the death squads?
He was a civilian employee of the CIA assigned to advise law enforcement bodies in El Salvador — distinct from the military.
Civilian employees who had police background were recruited actively by the CIA from the early 1980s onwards to provide training to the Salvadoran police forces.
It was thought that those personnel would perhaps temper the kind of brutal treatment that the Salvadoran police forces meted out to suspected members of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front or members of the FDR [Revolutionary Democratic Front].
Both the CIA and the State Department thought that they would lose a great deal of support unless they tried to change the way that those police forces were operating.
This is not to say that Tom Gerard played a positive role. As a bomb expert, he was probably involved in teaching Salvadoran police how to take apart bombs, to detect how bombs were made, and as an interrogation techniques expert as well, he was no doubt present at the interrogation of suspected bombers and must have witnessed a great deal of brutality. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times while he was in the Philippines, he indicated that he saw some terrible things in El Salvador, and it was one of the reasons why he terminated his relationship with the CIA after two years.
So, at the very least Gerard was a witness to the torture of suspected members of the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front and the FDR.
What was his main job there?
What we know is that he had a number of skills as a member of a bomb squad in San Francisco, which he was hired to teach the Salvadoran police. He was signed on was to teach techniques of disassembling these bombs and determining who had made them and where did they come from. As an extension of that, he was present at the interrogation of people held for having planted and made these bombs.
When he left the USA, he left his suitcase in a gym locker, and among the articles found there were ID cards from the US embassy in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador and National Police identification cards.
This is an inventory of what was found inside that gym locker: a hundred-page loose-leaf binder listing names, addresses and telephone numbers of members of the Central Intelligence Agency's paramilitary direction, which once operated under the rubric of International Activities Division Special Activities Group; a hundred-page plus 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 Interrogation of Refugees". There were four manila file folders in the suitcase marked DS; we assume that refers to the death squad material which they contain.
Also included in this suitcase, when it was inventoried by the San Francisco Police Department after Gerard had left the country, were two documents labelled secret. One was reportedly a cable from the US embassy in El Salvador to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and described human rights abuses in that country. The other was a document entitled, "Biodata of Nominees to be Trained in Human Resource Exploitation", that is the interrogation course. There were 13 names attached to it.
Gerard later told the Los Angeles Times that the course was conducted at a CIA-run "prison labour farm" near Williamsburg, Virginia. The fact that he actually had a black nylon hood and drawstrings in his bag is another indication that he himself did participate in training torturers if not actually participating in the torture.
Gerard has a great desire to sell his life story to the movies. He considers himself to have been a first-class spy apparently, and he considers that this information that he has left behind, or at least some of the information that he holds, will implicate the CIA in the training of death squad members in El Salvador.
One also assumes that he has allowed some of this information to be revealed in order to be able to protect himself so that he would never be brought to trial for stealing many other documents that he later resold to the government of South Africa and the government of Israel.
So, is he trying to blackmail the CIA with this evidence?
It would appear that way. He was originally charged with 11 different counts of stealing government documents, and they were reduced by half and he has been free ever since. He does not have a trial date. His civilian partner in this activities has never been charged.
Going back to 1982-84 in El Salvador, do you think that the US military had a more direct participation in interrogation techniques than the civilian advisers?
My understanding in talking with US military personnel on the ground in El Salvador during that time was that they never saw the CIA, that the CIA was involved with civilian personnel and with domestic police departments.
The army conducted some interrogation and some interrogation techniques courses, but they were all done through the Salvadoran military, so there were actually two different branches of the same operation, an attempt to Americanise the Salvadoran military during a very bloody period of the war.
This may have been much more of a publicity operation, much more of an attempt to convince the press that the US government was trying to do something to modify the behaviour of the Salvadoran military and the Salvadoran police. I have heard enough stories of the brutalities of the Salvadoran security forces during that period to convince me that their behaviour was not modified by the presence of US advisers and the threat to cut off US aid if that behaviour was not more controlled.
How and when did Tom Gerard begin spying on the US solidarity movement with El Salvador?
Almost immediately upon his return from El Salvador. He returned at the end of 1984, rejoined the police department two weeks later and within seven months, probably earlier, he was officially assigned to work with the intelligence squad. Almost immediately there were a great series of break-ins, robberies and strange phone calls. People were being followed, garbage was gone through in several organisations, so it would appear that the actual surveillance was in full flower by the summer of 1985. He did that for a number of years.
Committees in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) was the victim of a large-scale federal fraud in which many of their offices were broken into throughout the country and evidence gathered for allegedly sending arms to the FMLN.
That investigation was conducted basically under testimony of one person who just lied about CISPES. That person was amply rewarded by the FBI each time he told these lies and his testimony became the justification for this three-year witch-hunt.