Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Soon after World War II had ended, CIC learned that an organization of former SS officers was planning to infiltrate and take over the political administration of the American and British zones in West Germany. A former Nazi on CIC’s payroll infiltrated the group and gave CIC a list of its members. Sitting near the top of that list was Klaus Barbie. Fearing a rebirth of Nazism, CIC set up Operation Selection Board to sweep through West Germany and arrest members of the neo-Nazi group. Selection Board operatives would neutralize known and suspected war criminals by delivering them to Nuremberg for further investigation and prosecution.

Barbie escaped Operation Selection Board’s dragnet by jumping out of a window during a raid. He made his way to Memmingen, a small town sixty-five miles west of Munich. Robert S. Taylor, a CIC agent working in Memmingen, got a tip from one of his Nazi informants that Barbie was in town and would make an excellent CIC asset.

Taylor knew that Barbie was a major target of Operation Selection Board. What should he do? Hand him over to Nuremberg or hire him? Taylor took the dilemma to his superior. Although both men knew that Barbie had headed the Gestapo in Lyon, they decided that he would be more valuable as a full-time, well-paid informant than as a convicted war criminal. So they hired him and gave him a highly sensitive assignment. Spy on French and British intelligence operations and provide a list of communists who had infiltrated them.

Barbie was so good at his job that Taylor and his boss informed CIC headquarters that Barbie was working for them and producing a stream of valuable information. The news tied both the tongue and the hands of CIC headquarters. Barbie had become the proverbial man who knew too much. If CIC handed him over to Nuremberg for prosecution, he could severely damage its clandestine operations and compromise its spy network of former Nazis. Imagine what would happen if the British and French learned that their American ally had infiltrated their intelligence operations.

Meanwhile, former French Resistance fighters were coming out of the shadows and describing to the French media how Klaus Barbie had tortured them and their colleagues in Hôtel Terminus. What followed was a Keystone Kops chase across Western Europe. German and French police began knocking on doors and plying their informants for information about Barbie. The French government asked the U.S. government to help find the infamous Butcher of Lyon. And unaware that the military already had Barbie, the State Department issued an order to find and arrest him for extradition to France.

CIC watched the chase from the sidelines.

In January 1950, three years after Barbie began working full-time for CIC, the French press reported that the Butcher of Lyon was living openly in Munich in the American zone. An embarrassed and nervous CIC quickly hid him, like Otto von Bolschwing hid Viorel Trifa after the failed coup in Romania, until it could sneak him out of Germany.

Soon after the war—perhaps even before the war officially ended—British and American intelligence agents were running a “ratline,” or underground railroad, from Austria to Italy, and from Italy to Central and South America. They used the ratline to plant spies around the world. Father Krunoslav Draganovic, a Croatian Ustashi colonel working out of a Croatian seminary in the shadow of the Vatican, handled the ratline paperwork for the Allies.

CIC paid Father Draganovic, a Franciscan friar, fourteen hundred dollars to provide a set of documents for Barbie, his wife, and two children. They included travel papers from Vienna to Genoa, Red Cross passports, and visas to Bolivia, all under the name of Altmann. Draganovic did a steady business with the British and Americans—no one knows how many hundreds of former Nazis he helped escape—and he used the profits to fund his own “Vatican Ratline,” which specialized in finding safe havens in South America and the Middle East for his fellow Ustashi war criminals.

Draganovic completed the Barbie paperwork in ten weeks and Klaus Altmann and his family sailed from Genoa in March 1951. Case closed. Barbie was free and on his own. Only a couple of CIC officers and Father Draganovic knew where he was.

Allan Ryan finished his OSI report in August 1983. He managed to convince Attorney General William French Smith to release the report, Klaus Barbie and the United States Government , to the media, arguing that it was important for the integrity of OSI investigations that its boss, the Department of Justice, be open and honest.

Secretary of State George Shultz invited the chargé d’affaires of the French embassy to his office, where he presented the diplomat with a copy of the Ryan report and a note expressing “deep regrets to the government of France.”

Ryan’s strategy worked. When the New York Times received a copy of the Klaus Barbie report a few days later, its editorial page was bursting with national pride. “How rare it is for a proud and powerful nation to admit shabby behavior,” it said. “The admission of blame the United States made… first to itself and then to France, goes far to redeem national honor.”

Ryan quit OSI soon after the release of his report to teach, practice law, and write a book, Quiet Neighbors , which described his work with OSI, including a chapter summarizing his Barbie investigation. Missing from Ryan’s book was any mention of George Parker and his memo expressing doubt about the wisdom of prosecuting John Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible.

While sitting in a jail in Missouri, John Demjanjuk, along with his children, who were holding vigil outside the jail, staged a hunger strike. The government unlocked his cell after eleven days. Martin had been right. The immigration court had no authority to open a deportation case against Demjanjuk while the denaturalization order was under appeal.

The Demjanjuk family decided to replace John Martin. Were they unhappy with the nondefense he had mounted before Judge Battisti? Did Martin ask to be replaced? If so, perhaps he was tired. He had worked on the Demjanjuk case for two years. Perhaps he wisely concluded that immigration law is tricky and he lacked the experience to navigate it.

The Demjanjuks asked their friend and financial supporter Jerome Brentar for advice on whom to hire. Brentar, the probable anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, who had testified in Demjanjuk’s behalf before Judge Battisti, turned for advice to his friend Edward O’Connor, the former deeply compromised DPC commissioner who had also testified for Demjanjuk. O’Connor volunteered his son Mark.

Like John Martin before him, Mark O’Connor was a fiercely dedicated lawyer who didn’t trust any document supplied by the Soviet Union. If he had any neo-Nazi or anti-Semitic leanings, they would not show up in the courtroom or during media interviews. Unlike Martin, who had been a county prosecutor, O’Connor had limited courtroom experience—he called himself just a country lawyer—and less than a nodding acquaintance with the complexities of immigration law. And like Martin, he wasn’t eager to take on the controversial case. A tearful phone call from Demjanjuk’s older daughter, Lydia, made him think it over.

“It took me almost six months to decide,” he later recalled. “I visited John and his family. I talked it over with my family and I finally made my judgement: ‘In my mind, this is not the man.’”