Ryan came to the department in January 1980, and two months later he became its director. In between, he travelled to Moscow, where he established contacts in the Soviet government that became very important and highly controversial. Demjanjuk supporters suggested OSI lawyers were the dupes of a Soviet Union out to get Demjanjuk, who grew up in the Ukraine.

"Demjanjuk's supporters have always said the Soviet Union was out to get him," Ryan said in an interview this week. "But to what end? Demjanjuk was not a prominent leader. He was not an outspoken anti-communist."

The Soviets provided the most incriminating piece of evidence against Demjanjuk the identification card from Trawniki.

In his 1981 denaturalization trial, Demjanjuk did not deny that the picture on the identification card was of him. And five Treblinka survivors testified that both the picture on the card and the picture on Demjanjuk's visa application were photos of Ivan the Terrible.

During the four-week trial, Demjanjuk acknowledged lying on his immigration papers, saying that he was in the Red Army and had been taken prisoner by the Nazis. The alibi seemed shaky to the court, and he was stripped of his citizenship.

In his 1984 book, Quiet Neighbors, Ryan describes the hatred and resentment with which he watched the trial.

"As much as I loathed John Demjanjuk, I resented him more, with his impassive silence, his callous, almost bored, demeanor as he faced his accusers, his careless and demonstrably false alibi," Ryan wrote.

Later, Ryan added, "In his smug silence, Demjanjuk is the Nazi mind, telling us something: I did it once, and got away with it. I won't explain how or why, for if I did, you might understand it a little better than you did before, and learn to recognize it when it rears its head again."

After numerous appeals, Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 to stand trial for murder. He was convicted and sentenced to death in April 1988. The Israeli Supreme Court has yet to rule on his appeal.

"This has been 16 years of sheer hell for my family," says Demjanjuk's son-in-law Ed Nishnic, who has gone $100,000 in debt trying to clear his father-in-law's name.

But in December 1991, Demjanjuk supporters got their first big break in the case. More than two dozen statements from other Nazi death camps 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 another man, Ivan Marchenko.

Yoram Sheftel, Demjanjuk's Israeli lawyer, took this evidence and immediately went on the offensive against Special Investigations and Ryan. Appearing with Ryan on ABC News' "Nightline" on December 23, 1991, Sheftel charged that Ryan had known the guard statements were in OSI files when Demjanjuk was denaturalized.

"I was facing a frame, and this material was deliberately suppressed from me by the Americans, the Soviets and the Israelis," Sheftel told a national television audience.

The charge still infuriates Ryan. Ryan says he knew nothing of the statements, and he testified to that effect under oath last week in Boston.

But it is a difficult trick for Ryan, a man who had publicly boasted about his Soviet contacts and access to Soviet government records, to explain how Justice Department investigators could have not come across these guard statements. In an interview Monday, Ryan speculated the statements might have been stuck somewhere in the inefficient Soviet archive system.