Kurt Waldheim, 88, a seemingly colorless diplomat who became
secretary general of the United Nations and president of his native
Austria only to be barred from the United States for suspected
involvement in Nazi war crimes, died today at a Vienna hospital. He
had been treated for an infection since last month.

When Waldheim was put on the Justice Department's "watch list" of
prohibited persons in 1987, it was the first time in U.S. history
that the head of a friendly country had been branded an undesirable
alien suspected of war crimes with the German army in World War II.

He would remain on the "watch list" for the rest of his life -- which
made him an international pariah despite his denials of Nazi
sympathies and the high positions he had held in Austria and at the
United Nations. For most of his six years in the largely ceremonial
Austrian presidency, Waldheim was a virtual prisoner within his
country, shunned by all but a handful of other countries.

The facts about what Waldheim did during the war years were never
clearly established, and there was no clear-cut proof that he
participated personally in murder or other war crimes. But there was
strong evidence that he had concealed his role as a lieutenant
between 1942 and 1945 with Nazi Army units involved in atrocities
against Yugoslav partisans and had lied about his whereabouts during
that period.

Although he was never tried, public disclosures in the mid-1980s
included a secret 1948 finding by the U.N. War Crimes Commission that
there was sufficient evidence to prosecute Waldheim for "murder"
and "putting hostages to death."

In a corollary development, whose validity was never established, a
former Yugoslav intelligence officer charged that the Soviet Union
may have used the information to enlist Waldheim as a Soviet agent
after the war when he was serving in Austria's diplomatic service.
There also was speculation that Waldheim had forged postwar ties with
the Central Intelligence Agency and had worked secretly for the
United States in exchange for the CIA concealing his background.

Except for a few halting and ill-documented attempts to argue that he
was absent from the Balkans during some noted atrocity campaigns,
Waldheim never made any sustained efforts to defend himself. He said
he was unaware of Nazi campaigns to deport the Jews of Austria and
later of Salonika, Greece, when he was stationed there. He also noted
that as a citizen of Austria, forced into union with Germany in 1938,
he had no choice other than to serve in the German army. He insisted
that his service was entirely honorable. Waldheim's most sustained
tactic always was to denounce the charges against him as an attempt
to defame the people of Austria. That had great resonance in a
country that has sought to portray itself as a captive of Germany
forced to aid the Nazi cause. When the charges against Waldheim first
surfaced during Austria's 1986 presidential campaign, public opinion
rallied strongly to his side, and he easily won election as Austria's
first non-Socialist postwar president.

Waldheim was born Dec. 21, 1918, in St. Andrae, a small town near
Vienna. He was one of 11 children in the Catholic and politically
conservative family of a school official in an Austria shorn of its
empire after World War I.

In the late 1930s, as Hitler was moving toward the annexation of
Austria, Waldheim did some military training, enrolled in Austria's
Consular Academy and then in law school at the University of Vienna.
He also became a voluntary member of a Nazi youth group, saying later
he did so not from any innate Nazi sympathies but because he realized
it would help advance his career.

When the war began in September 1939, Waldheim was called to active
service as an officer in the Germany army. He was awarded the Iron
Cross for his service in the invasion of Russia, wounded on the
Russian front and returned to Vienna for recuperation in late 1941.
It was what happened later in the war that would cast such a huge
shadow over the latter years of his life.

But for more than 40 years, that part of Waldheim's career would
remain in the shadows. The public part of his story picked up again
when the war ended in 1945, and Waldheim was recruited into the
foreign ministry of the newly independent Austria. He rose to become
Austria's foreign minister and, after an unsuccessful try at elective
politics, set his sights on the wider world stage.

At the height of the Cold War, the superpower rivalry between the
United States and the Soviet Union dictated that the secretary
general of the United Nations should be someone both governments
could trust. Waldheim, representing a country with an officially
neutral foreign policy and noted for a finger-to-the-wind approach to
decision-making, fit that job description well and was seen as the
best available compromise candidate. In 1972 he began the first of
two five-year terms as U.N. secretary general.

During those 10 years, he was known largely as someone who did his
best to avoid controversy -- so much so that American diplomats
privately considered him uncooperative. At the U.N., he was widely
disliked for showing more interest in the trappings of his office
than its responsibilities.

His most noticeable moment in the public eye came in 1979, when
Muslim militants in Iran seized the U.S. Embassy and took the
Americans stationed there hostage. Waldheim led a U.N. delegation to
Tehran in an effort to secure their release. But, when he and his
retinue were menaced by a mob of angry Iranians, he hastily fled the
country.

After leaving the United Nations, Waldheim returned to Austria to
begin his campaign for the presidency under the slogan "a man that
the world trusts." But he made the mistake of publishing German and
English versions of his memoirs. In the English edition, "In the Eye
of the Storm," Waldheim wrote that after being wounded on the Russian
front, he had spent the remainder of the war years working toward his
doctorate at the University of Vienna.

However, in 1986, representatives of the World Jewish Congress
ascertained that beginning in March 1942 he was posted to the German
high command in Belgrade and spent much of the war as an intelligence
and administrative officer in the Balkans. For much of that time, it
became clear, he was attached to units involved in ruthless attempts
to stamp out partisan resistance through so-called "cleansing
operations" that ultimately took hundreds of thousands of lives
through massacres and large-scale deportations.

Waldheim's response to his failure to mention these facts in his
autobiography was that it would have been "too boring" to repeat
every detail of his wartime service. There is no evidence that
Waldheim participated directly in these campaigns or that he even
sympathized with them.

But it was impossible to escape the conclusion that Waldheim was well
aware of what was going on. At least one of the commanders he served
under was executed as a war criminal, and Waldheim was listed as the
recipient of a high award by the virulently anti-Semitic Nazi puppet
regime in Croatia for service in a "cleansing" campaign in which an
estimated 90,000 Yugoslavs, including women and children, died.

The uproar caused by these revelations forced the U.S. Justice
Department to initiate a year-long investigation of whether
Waldheim's wartime activities conflicted with American law. On April
28, 1987, then-Attorney General Edwin Meese III, prodded by strong
recommendations from within the department, concluded that evidence
existed for placing Waldheim on the "watch list" because of
provisions in the immigration law "prohibiting entry to any foreign
national who assisted or otherwise participated in activities
amounting to persecution during World War II."

Throughout his presidency, about the only places where Waldheim found
himself welcome were neighboring Germany, a scattering of Arab
countries and, somewhat surprisingly, the Vatican. In 1987, Pope John
Paul II, a long-time friend, turned aside widespread criticism to
host the Austrian president on an official state visit. The pope
defended his action on the grounds that he could not refuse an
audience to a head of state from a country with a strong Catholic
tradition unless he had clear-cut proof of the allegations against
him.

Even in Austria, where majority public opinion continued to rally
around him, Waldheim's record continued to be a matter of unending
controversy. When his six-year term ended on July 8, 1992, Waldheim
repeated his frequent assertion that it was unfair to equate members
of his generation with the Nazi regime.

"The majority of them were sent into a war that they did not want,"
he said. "They had to wear a uniform that for many people,
particularly the Jewish people became a symbol for persecution,
misery and death. I have learned how difficult it was for me as a
member of this generation to make clear a contradiction that is
hardly understandable for the generation born later--namely the
contradiction to have rejected this regime from the first hour on,
even though I lived under this regime and wore its uniform."

Waldheim is survived by his wife, Elisabeth, whom he married in 1944,
and their three children, the Associated Press reported from Vienna.

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