Los Angeles Times discloses LAPD intelligence detective leaked disbanded Red Squad's files to Western Goals Foundation

On August 12, 1983, the Los Angeles Times reported that LAPD intelligence detective Jay Paul was under internal investigation for allegedly leaking files from the department’s Public Disorder Intelligence Division (PDID) to the Western Goals Foundation, a private anti-communist organization founded in 1979 by retired Army general John K. Singlaub, Congressman Larry McDonald, and intelligence operative John H. Rees. An internal LAPD investigation confirmed that Paul kept PDID files at his home garage in Long Beach. PDID itself had been formally disbanded by the Los Angeles Police Commission and City Council on January 18, 1983 – five months before the leak became public – after City Attorney Ira Reiner proposed dissolving the unit on January 17, citing its history of surveilling political groups. Paul was suspended over the leak but later reinstated with back pay after LAPD determined his conduct had been sanctioned by his own supervisors.

Western Goals, per reporting cited by the Militarist Monitor project (successor to Right Web/PRA’s Right-wing research archive), obtained computer tapes said to list 5,000 to 6,000 groups and individuals – material both John Rees and Jay Paul separately stated had come from LAPD files that were supposed to have been destroyed. Fifty-one plaintiffs subsequently sued Western Goals in California alleging the files had been obtained in violation of their privacy rights; when a grand jury ordered Western Goals staffer Linda Guell to surrender the organization’s records, Western Goals appealed before eventually complying after negotiating immunity from prosecution. Western Goals also drew information from corporate sources, including Exxon and Security Pacific Bank, though the extent and nature of that material is not detailed in sources located for this entry.

The episode sits inside a broader pattern documented in Max Felker-Kantor’s academic history of the LAPD, which cites both the January 1983 disbandment and the Jay Paul/Western Goals leak in its account of the department’s Red Squad-era intelligence operations and their unraveling. A separate lawsuit, CAPA et al. v. Gates et al. – filed in 1978 by the Coalition Against Police Abuse, the Citizens’ Commission on Police Repression, and the ACLU over PDID’s surveillance of political organizations generally, and eventually representing 23 organizations and 108 individual plaintiffs – settled for $1.8 million in early 1984, producing what LA Times reporters Roxanne Arnold and Joel Sappel described as a consent decree leaving Los Angeles with the country’s “toughest police-spy rules.” Sources located this session do not establish that the CAPA suit and the 51-plaintiff suit against Western Goals were the same litigation; they are documented separately and should not be conflated.

What is and is not established here: the documented function is a conversion – police intelligence files, collected under public authority and ordered destroyed following the department’s own post-Watergate-era disbandment of its political-surveillance unit, instead reached a private ideological organization’s computerized database, reportedly through one detective who kept files at home. No source located this session documents an official statement of intent – LAPD’s own findings characterized Paul’s conduct as sanctioned by his supervisors, which raises an open question about how far up the chain the leak was authorized or tolerated, but that question is not resolved by the sources gathered here and is not asserted as an answer.

Sourcing tier, stated honestly: this entry’s most specific facts – the August 12, 1983 disclosure date, the January 17-18, 1983 disbandment dates, the Jay Paul home-garage detail, and the 1995 reinstatement account – trace to two Los Angeles Times news articles (Sappell, Aug. 12, 1983; Merl, Jan. 11, 1995) that were identified and dated via Wikipedia’s footnote apparatus but NOT independently located and read at latimes.com or via the Wayback Machine this session; a guessed latimes.com archive URL returned an HTTP 404. The Felker-Kantor academic history is cited at the page level (pp. 260-261, 269) via the same footnote apparatus but was not independently opened. The Militarist Monitor page (which itself cites a 1985 National Reporter article, the 1986 book Inside the League, and a 1987 Group Research Report – none independently read this session) was fetched and read directly. CourtListener and general web search were rate-limited/exhausted for the balance of this work session (shared quota across parallel workers) and could not be used to independently pull the CAPA v. Gates docket or the Western Goals 51-plaintiff suit; SourceWatch’s Western Goals page returned a Cloudflare Turnstile block. This entry should be treated as tier-2 (Wikipedia-mediated citation trail to real, dated news reporting and an academic monograph) rather than tier-1 primary-document verification, and the LA Times articles and Felker-Kantor pages remain flagged for direct, independent confirmation.

Names sourced vs. omitted: Linda Guell is named as the Western Goals staffer subject to the grand jury order by the Militarist Monitor page (a source read directly this session), which itself cites a 1987 Group Research Report not independently located this session – her name is retained on that single tier-2 chain, not corroborated by a second source, and is not placed in the actors field for that reason (kept to the body text only, attributed to the source that names her). No other individual named in circulating summaries of this episode – additional Western Goals staff, specific plaintiffs in the 51-person suit against Western Goals, or specific plaintiffs/officials in CAPA v. Gates beyond Ira Reiner (whose disbandment role is independently attested by both the LA Times citation trail and Felker-Kantor) – is introduced here, because no source located this session names them.