EVIDENCE MOUNTING AGAINST PERU'S SPY CHIEF

LIMA, Peru -- With former spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos on the lam, and
President Alberto Fujimori chased from office, testimony linking Montesinos
to influence peddling, narcotics trafficking and arms dealing is
compounding daily.

Former Prime Minister Federico Salas recounted how he was delivered the
offer to become Fujimori's Cabinet chief last July by a messenger who is a
reputed arms dealer.

And the offer came not from the president, Salas said this past week, but
from Montesinos, the feared intelligence adviser who sweetened the deal
with an offer of a $30,000 monthly salary. That's a sizable sum in a
country where half the people don't earn the monthlyminimum wage of $117.

Then there's the case of businesswoman Matilde Pinchi.

In other circumstances, her story might have been considered a
rags-to-riches success, were it not for the $2 million that she told
congressional investigators she paid to Montesinos to make her tax and
customs problems disappear.

Pinchi, a former street vendor, denied allegations her three import firms
were fronts for Montesinos to launder illicit funds. But she did say she
visited Montesinos frequently at his headquarters, where she saw a constant
flow of congressmen and government ministers passing through.

Congressman David Waisman, head of the legislative investigating
commission, said Pinchi revealed in closed-door testimony that she had paid
Montesinos $90,000 a month for two years. Not everyone called before the
investigation offered dirt on Montesinos.

Former Attorney General Blanca Nelida Colan, a longtime Montesinos
loyalist, denied having any illicit connections to the spy chief.

In 1996, Colan ignored testimony from a high-profile cocaine trafficker
that he had paid Montesinos $50,000 a month in exchange for use of a jungle
air strip to ferry out shipments of cocaine. And she or her underlings
shelved investigations of Montesinos' vast personal wealth twice in the
past three years.

Montesinos has been in hiding since his return last month from a failed
attempt to get asylum in Panama. Congress ousted Fujimori on Nov. 21 on
constitutional grounds of "moral incapacity" and named Valentin Paniagua
interim president.

Before going into hiding, Montesinos reportedly made copies of some 2,500
video and audio recordings that incriminated politicians and military and
business leaders.

It was the Sept. 14 television broadcast of one of those videotapes,
spirited from Montesinos' collection, that signaled an end to his empire
and to Fujimori's decade of authoritarian rule. The tape showed Montesinos
apparently bribing a congressman.

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