THE BARBIE CASE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000100370025-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 28, 2010
• Sequence Number: 25
• Publication Date: August 18, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/28: CIA-RDP90-00552R000100370025-5
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0> Ply ~..~. ;.;~ WASHINGTON POST
18 August 1983
The Barbie base
T HE APOLOGY was necessary, and long over-
due. But when the U.S. government delivered
it to the French a few days ago it was done prop-
erly, without hedging and without evasion. Equally
important, the government has now given the
country an authoritative account of the whole
strange and repellent story: how the U.S. Army
shielded a Gestapo officer,, Klaus Barbie, wanted
for war crimes in France, and broke American law
to get him-lb Bolivia. The candor and balance of
that report is a credit to the Justice Department
and particularly to its principal author, Allan A.
Ryan Jr.
Attorney General William French Smith ordered
the report last winter after Bolivia returned Mr.
Barbie to stand trial in France for crimes commit-
ted when he was chief of the Gestapo in Lyons.
Soon after the war, Mr. Barbie came into contact
with the U.S. Army's Counter Intelligence Corps,
.which was trying to build up a network of inform-
ants in Germany. The Ryan report shows that Mr.
Barbie remained an employee of the CIC from
early 1947 until he was on the boat to South Amer-
ica nearly four years later. The CIC knew that he
was a former Gestapo commander. But Mr. Ryan
concludes that, for the first couple of years, the
CIC had "no reliable indication" that he was guilty
of war crimes. That is a defensible judgment, al-
though a generous one in view of the Gestapo's
In any event, things changed in 1949. Agitation
in Lyons to locate Mr. Barbie led, to newspaper sto-
ries that the CIC could hardly have missed. In 1950
the trial of an accused French turncoat made it
dramatically clear with, whom they 'were dealing.
The CIC went into a panic. It feared the embar-
rassment of being seen to harbor a war criminal,
and even worse, by this time Mr. Barbie knew a-
great deal about CIC operations. Under question-]
ing from the U.S. High Command in Germany, the
CIC officers lied and denied knowing where Mr.
Barbie was. On this painful point, Mr. Ryan is ex-
plicit. As rapidly as they dared, they then provided
Mr. Barbie and his family with fake documents'
and got them out of Europe.
The intelligence officers who hid Mr. Barbie are
condemned by this record of moral negligence on a
grand scale. It needs to be said, unfortunately, that
this case was not isolated. At a time when the
United States was doing much in Europe that was
magnificently right, an easy and naive acceptance of
too many people who claimed to be anti-communist
-and never mind what they were doing before 1945
-was the weakest part of the record.
Mr. Barbie has now outlived by 39 years a great
many French men and women who fell into the
hands of the Gestapo at Lyons. He has lived all but
the last half-year of that time in freedom. The
United States is responsible for his evasion of the
charges against him. But the belated investigation
of this case serves a highly useful purpose.
Mr. Ryan, at the conclusion of his report, notes
that it never seemed to occur to those CIC officers
that, in concealing Mr. Barbie from their own gov-
ernment, they were breaking the law. "The only evi-
dent concerns were operational ones," Mr. Ryan ob-
serves. "If the reforms of the past decade lead an in-
telligence officer faced with a similar choice in the
future to realize that these cannot be the exclusive
concerns, and that he is accountable under the law
for the choices he must make, then we will have ac-
something worthwhile."
STAT
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/28: CIA-RDP90-00552R000100370025-5