BARBIE' S AMERICAN CONNECTION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000100370011-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 28, 2010
• Sequence Number: 11
• Publication Date: August 26, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/28: CIA-RDP90-00552R000100370011-0
NEW YORK TIMES
9 I VvLL it.YPEQRED , 26 August 1983
n P1:2
PARIS, Aug. 25 - The Department
of Justice repcrt on Klaus Barbie's
American connection is unsatisfying
and troubling. Air. Barbie is the World
War II Gestapo officer whom the
French call "the butcher of Lyons."
?he U.S. Army hired him as an agent
in Germany after the war, protected
him and enabled him to escape to Bo-
livia in 1951 when the French sought to
my him for war crimes.
. He prospered for 33 years, until a
new Bolivian regime turned him over
to France last February to face a
Lyons court. In the 1960's, the Army
considered hiring him again because
he had developed high-level contacts in
South America, but backed off because
of the risk of embarrassing disclosure.
All this is recounted in the new U.S.
report, accompanied by a message of
"deep regret" to France. But the re-
port leaves a lot of unanswered ques.
tions and misleading implications.
The suggestion that Mr. Barbie was
the only "suspected Nazi war crimi-
nal" clandestinely evacuated to safety
by the U.S. is almost certainly false.
The case of Ferenc Wajda, the Fascist
Minister of Interior in wartime Hun-
gary, was brought to public attention
years ago. And John Loftus, a Boston
lawyer who at one time prosecuted
Nazi war criminals for the Department
of Justice, says the U.S. used dozens of
"rat lines," or escape routes, to help
wanted Nazis disappear.
Mr. Loftus was cryptic in a telephone
interview about his discovery of high.
er-level and much more significant
U.S. involvement with Klaus Barbie
than the report discloses, though it
claims to be definitive. He said some
parts of the record were still classified
top secret, and he is currently trying to
get an account of his own with impor-
tant new revelations cleared for publi-
cation by the C.I.A.
It is surprising that Allan A. Ryan
Jr., author of the Justice Department
report, was apparently unaware of
.this. Mr. Ryan wrote repeatedly that
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Barbie's
American
Connection
By Flora Lewis
he had reviewed all existing records
and consulted all the people alive who
knew about American intelligence's
use of Mr. Barbie. He may simply
have been presumptuous, rather than
deliberately concealing embarrass-
ing facts, because Mr. Loftus believes
"the U.S. is not capable of giving a
complete and truthful account" about
the agents it used in the early postwar
period. "The records have been hope-
lessly mislaid," he says, and he has
now given the Government some tips
on where to find them.
In any case, the Ryan report is not
convincing that knowledge of what it
flatly calls "obstruction of justice" in
the Barbie case was limited to a
dozen or so officers of the Army's
Counter Intelligence Corps, The re-
port itself refers to the "absence of an
inquiry or directive from higher
levels" after the case became a pub-
lic controversy, which suggests seri-
ous negligence if not collusion.
Further, the report is addressed ex-
clusively to the Barbie story. How
widespread was the U.S. practice of
shielding Nazis liable for trial?
Again, Mr. Ryan hints he suspects a
lot more than he says:
"No other nation in occupied Ger-
many - France, Great Britain or the
Soviet Union - is in any position to
criticize the decision to use Klaus
Barbie now that the U.S. Government
has revealed the facts behind that
use," his report says. "Each of those
Governments made essentially the
same decision at the same time: to in-
voke the available resources of the
former German Nazi regime and ad-
vance what each Government per-
ceived to be its national interest."
That is undoubtedly true, but then
why imply that the U.S. has no more to
answer for than Mr.-Barbie? Another,
much broader`and deeper review is in
order. It is * shocking to find that the
U.S. was both prosecuting and secretly
employing Nazi murderers in the im-
mediate aftermath of the war. It is
even more shocking to realize that the
cover-up is still going on, despite the
apparent candor about Mr. Barbie.
And that is why the report is disturb-
ing as well as inadequate. Mr. Ryan de-
nounces the Americans who protected
Mr. Barbee, but calls their behavior
"neither cynical nor corrupt," only
misguided. He believes that "we have
seen the end of the attitude that any-
thing is permissible, including the ob-
struction of justice, if it falls under the
cloak of intelligence." -
He says the reforms of the last dec-
ade should lead intelligence officers to
realize purely operational problems
"cannot be the exclusive concerns.,,
But do thty? There are strong pres-
sures now to undo those reforms, which
never went very far, and give free rein
again to secret agencies without the
"democratic process of accountabil-
ity," which Mr. Ryan found woefully
lacking in the Barbie case.
The argument is that the Russians
always have, still do and always will
use every kind of dirty trick, so the
U.S. must free its agents to match
them. The answer, as the Ryan report
shows in a most narrow way, is that
the U.S. stands to lose much more-
than it gains by subverting itself, vio-
lating its own laws and betraying its
own principles.
STAT
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/28: CIA-RDP90-00552R000100370011-0