Delaying Justice for 33 Years

By Maureen Dowd

How "the Butcher of Lyon" got secret U.S. help and protection

When the first accusations were made last winter that the U.S. Government had employed and protected Lyon Gestapo Commander Klaus Barbie, Allan A. Ryan Jr. began checking into Army records. As head of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which tracks down Nazi war criminals, Ryan was accustomed to false leads and painstaking detective work. This time, however, the chief U.S. Nazi hunter quickly recognized the shameful secret buried in the sheaf of memos. "After a few minutes with those files," he recalls, "it was obvious the charges were serious."

To Attorney General William French Smith, Ryan proposed a full-scale probe into the U.S. ties to Barbie, "the Butcher of Lyon" accused of the execution of 4,000 people and the deportation of 7,000 Jews living in France to concentration camps during the German occupation. The remarkable 218-page report of Ryan's five-month investigation, involving 200 interviews around the world, was released last week: it confirms that the Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) hired Barbie as a spy in Germany after World War II and for four years hid him from the French, who were eager to prosecute him. In 1951 his Army protectors helped Barbie escape to Bolivia, where he prospered and traveled as a free man until last February, when a new Bolivian regime turned him over to France. Ryan's report concluded that the Army was guilty of an "obstruction of justice and an unlawful act." Said Ryan: "Justice delayed is justice denied. We have delayed justice in Lyon for 33 years."

Along with a copy of the report, the State Department sent a formal note to the French embassy in Washington two weeks ago, expressing "deep regrets" over the U.S. role. In France, where Barbie, 69, awaits trial in a Lyon jail, the official reaction was brusque. "Although frank, the U.S. report leads one to deplore the practices that allowed the Nazi criminal to avoid justice for a long time," said Max Gallo, a spokesman for President Franc,ois Mitterrand.

According to Ryan's report, the Army's use of Barbie began in the confusing aftermath of the war, as American attention shifted from defeating the fascist foe to a more subtle ideological battleground. While the CIA was in the process of being established, the Army was faced with the daunting task of assembling an effective ring of European informants to spy on Germany as well as on the Soviets and the other occupying powers. For help, the Army turned to veterans of Hitler's police and intelligence services, like Barbie, whom the CIC placed in a safe house in Augsburg in Bavaria. Barbie then set up a valuable network of informers who infiltrated Soviet and French intelligence operations and the German Communist Party.

Barbie had in fact been more than just another Nazi: he was the Butcher of Lyon, the Gestapo barbarian who had used acetylene torches on prisoners' feet to get them to talk. France was desperately trying to find him. As the issue roiled, the Army intelligence unit at Stuttgart held a meeting on May 4, 1950, and there, Ryan says, made "a calculated and indefensible decision" to continue to use Barbie but to conceal that fact from its superiors. Thus the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, John J. McCloy, reported back to the French that the Army did not know Barbie's whereabouts.

Ryan says that the half a dozen CIC officers involved in the cover-up rationalized their decision by saying that if Barbie were arrested, he would compromise American counterintelligence. As the cries for Barbie's scalp grew more insistent, the Army plotted his escape. They used an underground channel called the rat line, operated by a shadowy Croatian priest named Father Krunoslav Draganovich. The priest helped dissident Croatians to flee and, for exorbitant fees, procured International Red Cross passports and South American visas for Soviet defectors and endangered U.S. Army intelligence sources.

Barbie, traveling on a passport identifying him as "Klaus Altmann," left Genoa, Italy, in March 1951 with his wife and two children on a ship bound for South America. From then on, the report said, the U.S. had no official contact with the ex-Nazi. Says Ryan: "They just kissed him on the cheek and said goodbye."

Remarkably, the Army twice debated reactivating Barbie in the mid-1960s as part of a new intelligence operation it wanted to set up in South America. But so emphatic were the objections of the CIA that the Army dropped the idea. Barbie visited the U.S. on business twice, in 1969 and 1970. As an executive with a state-owned shipping company, he held a Bolivian diplomatic passport. That in turn entitled him to a visa from the U.S. embassy in La Paz. Since the name Klaus Altmann did not appear on the Immigration and Naturalization Service's lookout list, he entered and left the U.S. with no difficulty.

Ryan believes that the initial decision in 1947 to employ Barbie was "a defensible one." While the CIC knew of Barbie's Gestapo past, it was not officially informed that he was a war criminal until 1949. (Some Paris-based experts on the case remain skeptical of the CIC's early innocence, saying that Barbie's reputation was known in 1944.) Only two of the six CIC members involved in the Barbie operation are still alive.

Barbie's case is expected to come to trial in Lyon next year. The matter is now officially closed in the U.S. But Ryan hopes that its lessons of moral and legal accountability will endure. "It is not naive to believe that we have seen the end of the attitude that anything is permissible," Ryan summed up in the report, "including the obstruction of justice, if it falls under the cloak of intelligence.''

-- By Maureen Dowd Reported by David J. Lynch/Washington and Tala Skari/Paris

With reporting by David J. Lynch, Tala Skari This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.