For a lawyer, integrity "is everything," says University attorney Allan A. Ryan Jr.

And this week's ruling by Tennessee Judge Thomas A. Wiseman Jr., who was investigating Ryan, a former Justice Department attorney, for allegedly suppressing evidence in the denaturalization trial of an alleged Nazi death camp guard in the early 1980s, gives a public boost to the Harvard lawyer's reputation for integrity.

Throughout the judge's 198-page report to the Sixth Circuit of Appeals, Wiseman frequently notes the "credibility" and "good faith" intentions of Ryan, former director of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI), in the denaturalization trial of John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk, a former Cleveland autoworker accused of being death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible," was extradited to Israel in 1986 and now sits on death row.

However, for all the questions Wiseman's report answers about Ryan's integrity, the report also punches a gaping hole in Ryan's reputation for competence as a Nazi hunter.

In the biggest, most public trial of the lawyer's life, the judge notes, it's very possible that Ryan got the wrong man.

"The possibility of mistaken identity was one we were conscious of all the time," Ryan said yesterday. "We were never dealing with evidence that was totally comprehensive. And that's also a reason we never tried a case on eyewitness testimony alone."

But in December 1991, 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 not Demjanjuk, but another man, Ivan Marcenko.

While these statements did not pertain directly to the question of prosecutorial misconduct by Ryan and others, Wiseman went out of his way to mention them in his report.

"The Soviet evidence, viewed in its entirety, easts a substantial doubt on Mr. Demjanjuk's factual guilt of the central allegation of the denaturalization complaint--that he was Ivan the Terrible of the Treblinka gas chambers," Wiseman wrote.

These revelations reflect more on Ryan than on other Justice Department attorneys from the time for three reasons. First, the Harvard lawyer was the director of the office. Second, he had developed a working relationship with officials in the Soviet government in an effort to obtain documents.

Third, and most important, was that Ryan became a minor public figure as a result of his role in the trial. He published Quiet Neighbors, a book about Nazis living in America, spoke frequently on the issue and even played prose cutor in a mock trial of Austrian president and former Nazi Kurt Waldheim on cable super-station HBO.

Until 1991, his certainty in Demjanjuk's guilt was supreme. "We had eyewitnesses who would place him at Treblinka," he wrote in Quiet Neighbors, published in 1984. "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 has had to back off that statement, and he has been considerably more cautious in his public statements about the case in recent months.

It may be, he speculated yesterday, that the truth about Ivan the Terrible, who brutally killed hundreds of thousands of Jews a half-century ago, will never be known.

The Wiseman report will almost certainly never be the vindication that Ryan seeks. Beyond the question of Ivan's identity, the judge raises too many other concerns about the office that Ryan ran.

In Wiseman's view, OSI was an inefficient, contentious place where mail got misplaced, lawyers feuded, and some attorneys forgot the most basic tenets of any first-year law school course.

"In scientific terms, the prosecutors never attempted to prove the null hypothesis--an alternative hypothesis which is the converse of that in which one believes," Wiseman wrote. "In the Demjanjuk case, attempting to prove the null hypothesis would have led the government investigators and attorneys to look for evidence that someone other than John Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible.

"Ironically, Allan A. Ryan Jr., described this process in his book...'My aim was to follow two distinct lines of investigation: first, to reexamine the existing evidence, both the prosecution and defense; second, to search for any new evidence that would shed light on the truth."

But OSI lawyers, Wiseman writes, weren't subjecting their evidence to this kind of intense inspection and analysis. They weren't challenging the assumptions of their bosses, their witnesses, themselves.

These people answered to Ryan. His answer to this and other criticisms by the judge is to say that some are valid, and some aren't. What's important is that everyone in the office had integrity. Isn't it?

Maybe. Maybe not. For Ryan, the lesson of the case of John Demjanjuk could be this: integrity isn't everything, especially when there's more than a reasonable doubt about the identity of your defendant.CrimsonHarton JioALLAN A. RYAN Jr.