In fact, the court and Jackson only learned of the existence of the ballots when Smith Professor of Corporate Finance Gordon Donaldson let slip during his testimony that the ballots were in the Office of the General Counsel.

In his decision, U.S. District Judge Douglas P. Woodlock added a separate section for "Missing Evidence." In that section, he wrote a stinging rebuke of Ryan, all but saying the Harvard attorney lied to the court.

"Not only did defendants fail to turn over the tally sheet during discovery, but defendants counsel misled the court, during a hearing held on February 17, 1988, to consider defendants motion for summary judgment, by representing that all renure 'ballots are routinely destroyed after the vote is taken," Woodlock wrote.

In an interview last week, Ryan said he had thought the tenure ballots had been destroyed until he discovered otherwise. He said he was mistaken, but denied lying.

"I was saying to the court then as I always do what I believe to be true," Ryan says. "I think it was an unfair statement for the court to make."

In December 1991, Ryan was accused of a similar kind of misconduct--suppressing evidence during his tenure at OSI that might have cleared Demjanjuk. The charge was initially leveled by Yoram Sheftel, an attorney for Demjanjuk in Israel, where the alleged Ivan the Terrible now sits on death row.

Ryan vehemently denied the charges on ABC's "Nightline" when Sheftel initially made them. The suggestion still infuriates him today.

Under direction from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio, Judge Thomas A. Wiseman began his probe of OSI's conduct in the Demjanjuk case last fall, and Ryan testified last month. Throughout, however, Ryan has maintained the issue has nothing to do with Harvard when his days at OSI again landed him in the national and campus news.

The Harvard job is, after all, different than the directorship of OSI, when Ryan could share cigarettes with cabinet-level Soviet officials. Now, Ryan spends part of his time working in cooperation with the firm of Melick and Porter in the farm leagues of law--personal injury suits brought against the University.

"The people here--my clients--seem to me among the most thoughtful, human, decent people that I have ever come across," says Ryan. "People at Harvard want to do the right thing."

But Ryan worries that his reputation among his "clients" could be hurt by Wiseman's probe. Integrity for a lawyer, Ryan says, "is everything."

Thirteen years later, Ryan does not regret his choice to go to OSI. He remains proud of the work he did, and says he can't think of anything he did wrong.

"Different aspects of the experience [at OSI] affected me in different ways," says Ryan, but then he emphasizes that he has moved on to a different part of his life. "But my work at the Justice Department and my work at Harvard are not the same thing."