OUR (AND THEIR) MAN IN PERU

LIMA, Peru -- In recent years President Clinton has apologized for the
C.I.A.'s training of death squad leaders in Guatemala and has made public
once-secret files on the killing of leftists in El Salvador, Chile and
Argentina. The aim was to show that democracy and human rights have a new
importance in American policy in Latin America now that the cold war is
over.

But the rise and fall of Vladimiro Montesinos, President Alberto K.
Fujimori's intelligence chief, who recently fled for asylum in Panama with a
helping hand from Washington, suggests that the change in priorities may not
be so great.

Until his recent disgrace, Mr. Montesinos flourished all during President
Clinton's watch. Long after there were credible reports that he was involved
in torture, disappearances, election-fixing and taking bribes from drug
traffickers, the C.I.A. continued to use him as a valued asset. Even the
State Department, which has pushed hard for a democratic opening in Peru,
used him as a go-between in negotiations with President Fujimori.

The experience raises the question of what has changed since the days when
Washington more or less openly promoted the autocratic likes of Anastasio
Somoza in Nicaragua, Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Manuel Noriega in Panama.

In those days, too, there was talk of "democratic values." In practice,
though, those values won out in policy debates only when they converged with
cold war interests - like containing Cuba, overthrowing Nicaragua's
Sandinistas or stemming the rise of Salvadoran leftist rebels. The heyday of
doing business with generals and dictators was the 1950's, 1960's and early
1970's. Then the Carter, Reagan and Bush administrations incorporated the
sponsorship of free elections into their playbooks for keeping leftists out
of power. With confidence in electorates that were not radical, they helped
support Latin America's dramatic emergence from the era of military rule. So
by the time President Clinton was proclaiming his support for democracy, he
was in the morally comfortable position of dealing almost exclusively with
civilian presidents.

Here and there, though, new short-term policy imperatives were also cropping
up. In Colombia and Peru, the drug trade was rising and old guerrilla
movements survived. Tips were needed to locate the newest cocaine traffic
route and to foil terrorist attacks. So there were still temptations (and
rewards) for dealing with the likes of Mr. Montesinos. "The problem is the
C.I.A. people want to collect intelligence and the D.E.A. people want to
show good numbers on interdictions and the human rights argument gets short
shrift," said Elliott Abrams, who was President Reagan's assistant secretary
of state for inter- American affairs. "There comes a point when you have to
say, `I don't care that he is useful because he is a monster.' "

In Mr. Montesinos's case, that point finally came in September, when a
domestic scandal erupted over his involvement in bribing a legislator.
Months before, United States officials say, the State Department had
questioned continuing the American relationship with him because he had
designed the dirty tricks campaign that led to Mr. Fujimori's tainted
election in May. But what finally tilted the balance against him had little
to do with human rights or democracy. By the time the bribery scandal broke,
he had lost the C.I.A.'s sympathy because it had evidence that he was
involved in, or at least knew about, Peruvian gunrunning to Colombia's
guerrillas at the very moment Washington was preparing a push against drugs
in rebel-held areas.

The situation recalled the fall of Panama's General Noriega, who would do
favors for the White House one day and for Fidel Castro the next, until
President Bush finally pushed him from power. Mr. Montesinos, like General
Noriega, also shamelessly flaunted his closeness to Americans in order to
enhance his power at home. In 1998, when another scandal threatened, he
practically ambushed retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, President Clinton's
drug czar, in order to appear on Peruvian television shaking his hand during
an official visit.

According to former Peruvian intelligence officials, Mr. Montesinos became a
paid informant of the C.I.A. in the early 1970's when, as a young captain,
he worked in the office of the prime minister. A left- wing military
dictator was in power, and Mr. Montesinos funneled documents to the American
embassy that detailed Russian arms purchases. He was charged with treason in
1976, and served a year in jail.

Through the 1980's, Mr. Montesinos kept a close relationship with the
American embassy even while serving as the lawyer for drug traffickers. By
the late 1980's, though, his most important relationship was with Mr.
Fujimori; the spy made himself invaluable by leaking the presidential
candidate government polls and then using his lawyerly skills to fix a tax
problem. Years later, Mr. Montesinos even took care of Mr. Fujimori's
divorce.

When Mr. Fujimori took power in 1990, Mr. Montesinos became his unofficial
intelligence chief and soon the C.I.A.'s main liaison. When the C.I.A.
created a counter-narcotics operation in Peru's intelligence agency, it put
Mr. Montesinos in charge. As the man who could coordinate Peru's often
fractious military and police commands, he became invaluable to the American
war on drugs. Between 1994 and 1998, cocaine production and trafficking
shrank sharply, and American diplomats still give Mr. Montesinos grudging
credit in that.

The relationship worked two ways. When terrorists took diplomats and
officials hostage at the Japanese ambassador's residence in 1996, former
American officials say, American officials helped Mr. Montesinos in the
planning of the rescue with advice, satellite imagery and listening devices.

"Undoubtedly the United States benefited in some manner dealing with
Montesinos," said Robert A. Pastor, the top Latin America adviser in the
Carter White House. "But the benefits were outweighed by the costs of being
used by Montesinos for his own purposes and the United States ultimately
being tainted by the relationship."