What the Spy Chief Knows.(Brief Article)

Call it poetic justice. Barely four days after he was captured hiding in Venezuela and whisked back to Lima, former Peruvian spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos found himself in a familiar place: the maximum- security prison that he had personally designed for convicted terrorist leaders. His neighbors included Abimael Guzman and Victor Polay, the leftist guerrilla supremos whose fall in the 1990s helped Montesinos consolidate power. Like them, Montesinos is now little more than an exhibit in the collection of the incoming president, Alejandro Toledo-- examples of the kind of characters who one hopes will not wield influence in Toledo's Peru.

With Montesinos behind bars, the populist president-elect can now focus on his forward-looking message at this month's inauguration. Toledo must pull the economy out of a prolonged recession. But he has also promised his countrymen a new way of doing business. He has vowed to stamp out corruption and establish a truth commission that will investigate human-rights abuses committed during the 10-year rule of exiled president Alberto Fujimori. That has raised hopes of a possible overhaul of Peru's discredited armed forces and the intelligence services under their control. He also promises to respect the law-- including in the Montesinos case. "I don't have a sense of revenge [or] persecution," Toledo said last week on the eve of a 12-day tour of the United States and Western Europe. "Let's wait for justice to be done."

That will take a while. Montesinos attained his heights as de facto chief of the country's National Intelligence Service under Fujimori, who took office in 1990 as a popular reformer in his own right, cracking down on a potent leftist guerrilla movement and imposing market-economy reforms. Over time, of course, Fujimori's iron hand of reform evolved into the familiar Latin American despotism, supported largely by the intrigues of Montesinos. The head spook acquired total control over the intelligence-gathering units of the Army, Navy, Air Force and police with the approval and complicity of the top brass, and by the time of his ouster in September millions of Peruvians openly wondered whether Montesinos exercised greater power than the president himself.

Fujimori resigned in November, after a videotape emerged apparently showing the spy chief bribing a congressman. Fujimori now lives in ...