Nazi-Hunting Attorney Ryan Faces Questions of Conduct

University Attorney Allan A. Ryan Jr. is one of Harvard's best lawyers. He's represented the University in a number of high-profile cases, and he's done so with immense skill and integrity, lawyers who've faced him in court say.

This year, however, Ryan's past caught up with him, and his sterling reputation got soiled.

From 1980 to 1983, Ryan was the director of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, an elite legal unit charged with finding and prosecuting Nazis living in the United States.

One former Nazi who Ryan prosecuted, a Cleveland autoworker named John Demjanjuk, turned out to be the infamous Ivan the Terrible, a guard at the death camp in Treblinka, Poland.

By interviewing survivors and procuring evidence that included an identification card from Trawniki, where the Nazi SS trained death camp guards, Ryan identified Demjanjuk as Ivan. He was sure he had the right man. Perhaps too sure. "We had eyewitnesses who would place him at Treblinka," Ryan wrote in his 1984 book, Quiet Neighbors. "I put the two photos side by side and studied them for a long time. You son of a bitch, I thought. We've got you."

Ryan's office successfully revoked Demjanjuk's citizenship, and in 1986, Demjanjuk was deported to Israel to stand trial. Demjanjuk now sits on death row, awaiting the results of his appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court.

But in late 1991, though, more than two dozen statements from other Nazi death camp guards were released by the Soviet Union. In the statements, the guards, who were tried and executed by the Soviets between 1944 and 1961, say Ivan the Terrible was named Ivan Marcenko.

Demjanjuk's Israeli lawyer, Yoram Sheftel, went on ABC News' "Nightline" with Ryan and accused the Harvard attorney of supressing crucial evidence in order to "frame" his client. Ryan denied that charge then and he denies it now.

The new evidence, however, planted the seeds of doubt in the minds of the judges of the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Last year, they appointed Tennessee judge Thomas A. Wiseman to conduct an investigation of Office of Special Investigations' handling of the Demjanjuk case.

One Friday in January, Ryan took the day off from Harvard and testified before Wiseman in a Boston court. A report by Wiseman will go to the Sixth Circuit for review this month.

Ryan believes there may be an explanation for the Soviet evidence. It's possible, he told the Harvard Gazette in January 1992, that Demjanjuk was known by his mother's name, Marcenko, At Treblinka. And he has doubts, he says, about the significance of 40-year-old evidence from death camp guards who are now dead.

But it is not easy for Ryan, who boasted in Quiet Neighbors about his access to Soviet documents, to explain how he may have missed this key evidence. Now, Ryan has backed away from his previous statements about Demjanjuk's identity--statements he made with certainty.

Asked in a February interview if Demjanjuk is Ivan the Terrible, Ryan would only say: "That decision is in the hands of the Israeli Supreme Court."

Ryan says Quiet Neighbors only represents his thoughts at the time he wrote it. He reviewed the book, along with many decade-old papers and records, to prepare for his January testimony before Wiseman.

He says he's thought a lot about his past, and he doesn't understand where he went wrong. "Now that it is all brought to light," Ryan says, "I don't see anything that I did that I would have done differently."