LONG STORY SHORT
By L. Dean Webb
KLAUS BARBIE AND THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
INTRODUCTION
A. The Reason for This Report
On February 4, 1983, Klaus Barbie was expelled form Bolivia, where he had been living for 32 years, to France, where he was under indictment for crimes he allegedly committed during World War II as chief of the Gestapo.
Within a few days of his arrival in France, charges were raised both in the United States and France that Barbie had been employed by United States intelligence in Germany after the war, and that the United States had arranged Barbie's escape to South America in 1951 after France had requested his extradition. In view of the seriousness of these charges, on February 11 Assistant Attorney General D. Lowell Jensen directed the Office of Special Investigations, Criminal Division, to conduct a preliminary inquiry to determine whether there was any substance to the allegations and, if so, to recommend whether further action by the Department of Justice would be appropriate.
As Director of the Office of Special Investigations, I reviewed records of the United States Army and the Department of State and reported to Assistant Attorney General Jensen that the charges appeared to have merit. In light of the preliminary determination, and the considerable public interest in the allegations, I recommended that a full investigation be conducted.
On March 14, the Attorney General authorized an investigation to determine the relationship between Klaus Barbie and the United States government from the end of World War II until the present. I was appointed Special Assistant to the Assistant Attorney General to conduct this investigation, to report the findings and conclusion to the Attorney General, and to make whatever recommendations might be appropriate.
The report that follows is the result of that investigation. It was delivered to the Attorney General on August 2, 1983. I was ably assisted in the investigation by several members of the Office of Special Investigations, who are identified in the transmittal letter to the Attorney General.
B. The Scope of the Investigation
The goal of the investigation was to determine the truth and report it. To that end, all available records that would shed any light on Barbie and the events in which he was involved were located and reviewed. These records were found primarily in the archives of the United States Army, the Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and in the National Archives. In addition, several other agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the United States Air Force were asked to search their record, and did so with generally negative results.
Investigators traveled to Bolivia and to France to review whatever records or other information might be available in the archives of those countries. While Bolivian officials cooperated fully with the investigation and provided copies of judicial records pertaining to Barbie's naturalization, they reported that other records could not be located and expressed their belief that such records had been lost or destroyed some time ago.
The Government of France provided full access to records in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Justice, including those records gathered in Lyon in preparation for the prosecution of Barbie on charges of crimes against humanity. These records proved very helpful in reconstruction the events described in this report, particularly in Sections I and III. The Justice Ministry declined a request to interrogate Barbie himself, on grounds that the absence of any judicial proceeding in the United States precluded the invocation of the judicial assistance agreement between the United States and France that allows one government to interrogate persons in the custody of the other. The inability to question Barbie himself, however, did not materially affect the findings of the investigation, given the extensive and reliable documentation available from the sources named above.
In addition, some 40 persons who were directly involved in the events covered in the report were interviewed, several of them more that once. (In the 38 years since the end of World War II, many persons who were involved in these events have died, and deaths are noted at various places in the report.) As a general matter, witnesses were cooperative and candid, and many of the interviews provided useful information on background events, working relationships, and attitudes toward the issues of the day. The interviews were distinctly less helpful in reconstruction the events surrounding particular decisions or actions. This is to be expected in investigating matters that happened so long ago; as a result, the description of specific events in this report is based almost entirely on contemporaneous documents. These documents are cited in this report by number, and are contained in a separate appendix to the report.
This investigation received, as it ought to have, the full cooperation of the other agencies involved, particularly the United States Army, the Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency. The staffs of those agencies, and of the National Archives and Records Service, were particularly helpful in assisting the Department of Justice in locating records, many of which, of course, were not filed under the name of Klaus Barbie but under broader subjects. In addition, a great number of files having nothing to do with Barbie were reviewed in order to ascertain the organization, policies, responsibilities and administrative procedures of various government offices during the time in question.
C. Declassification and Sanitization of Documents
The great majority of the documents reviewed in this investigation had been classified when they were executed and had remained classified in the intervening years. The agencies involved, particularly the United States Army, declassified extensive amounts of material so that this report could be released to the public in a complete and accurate form.
As a result, every document that I believe relevant to Barbie's relationship with the United States government is contained in the appendix. These documents have either been declassified or, where necessary, sanitized by the United States Army to protect intelligence sources and methods under Executive Order 12356. This process was undertaken in full consultation with me, and I am satisfied that the sanitizations finally arrived at are justified under that Order. More importantly, I am satisfied that the specific information that remains classified, and thus deleted in the appendix, does not in any way detract form completeness of this report. For example, the names of foreign nationals who provided intelligence information to Barbie form 1947 to 1950 have been deleted, but those names are of little consequence to this report. In addition, specific targets of intelligence operations in which Barbie was involved are also deleted, but they are identified generically in this report by the phrase "French intelligence activities in the French zone," or similar descriptions. That is what is important; to identify the particular activity or individual who was targeted is not necessary to the account of Barbie's relationship with the U.S. government. As this report establishes, the relationship between Barbie and the United States government ended in 1951, and in no case has the identity or action of any United States official, or of Barbie himself, during those years been sanitized.
D. Conclusion
When this investigation began, there was no assurance that the story of the relationship between Klaus Barbie and the United States government could ever be fully determined, because there was a legitimate apprehension that the records might not have survived or, if they had, that they could not all be located. Fortunately, that apprehension proved largely unjustified. As a result, the report that follows, in my opinion, describes Barbie's relationship with the United States government definitively and completely. While questions may always exist as to why people acted as they did, or what motivated them, or how they perceived events as they were happening, the events themselves are fully documented in this report.
In the first five sections of this report, I have taken care to report as fact only those events that are plainly demonstrated by the evidence and are not subject to serious question. I have drawn no inferences and made no assumptions except there clearly identified as such, and in those cases I have set forth the evidence supporting them and, where is exists, the evidence that might fairly justify some other inference. I have used the word "apparently, " or its equivalent, to identify events that very likely happened but cannot be directly documented. The final section of this report contains my conclusions and recommendations, as directed by the Attorney General.
Allan A. Ryan, Jr.
Special Assistant to the Assistant
Attorney General
United States Department of Justice
LONG STORY SHORT