COLUMN ONE : Stalking the Rich for Ransom : An illegal arms depot blast in Nicaragua reveals a far-reaching network of terror--a ring of leftist rebels who kidnaped Latin America’s wealthy.

Operating from this Sandinista sanctuary, the international kidnapers stalked their victims, documented their habits and calculated multimillion-dollar ransoms.

They followed one prominent Mexican businessman to a church Mass for his dead wife; they staked out the homes of others from nearby bus stops and parks. They knew the bank account numbers, quarterly earnings and favorite colors of Latin America’s richest men and women.

“Ignacio Aranguren--he has a lot of money,” the kidnapers observed of the Mexican food magnate. “Very much loved by his family. Would negotiate.”

The ring, linked to at least six kidnaping cases, might have gone undetected had a huge and illegal arms depot belonging to Salvadoran guerrillas not exploded on the outskirts of Managua in May. Secreted along with guns and missiles were the kidnaping files as well as hundreds of passports, equipment for falsifying identification papers and guerrilla propaganda.

Now in the hands of a judge here and subject to the scrutiny of the FBI and police agencies from four countries, the stash revealed a vast kidnaping and weapons-smuggling network run by Latin revolutionaries for much of the last decade.

The staggering collection of documents provides a rare, panoramic look at the shadowy underworld of the radical left, the cooperative relationships among guerrilla organizations and their plots to raise money through ransoms and arms deals.

The network’s tentacles reach far and wide, implicating Spanish Basque separatists, South and Central American Marxist groups and two convicted Canadian kidnapers languishing in a Brazilian prison.

It may also have ties to the World Trade Center bombing in New York, according to investigators.

“This is a real Pandora’s box,” said Judge Marta Quezada, who is in charge of the case.

Passports from almost two dozen countries were found, including several blank U.S. passports--a valuable commodity even in the most advanced terrorist circles.

People appear with multiple identities. One key figure, identified at one point as Julio Aguilar Cruz, turns up in six passports, each with a different name and a different nationality.

The discovery revived memories of the Sandinistas’ recent past, when, as rulers of Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990, they converted the country into a haven for radical leftists from around the world. And it raised questions about the present: The arsenal and the network almost certainly could not have existed without the knowledge of Sandinista officials, diplomats say. They add that the network could still be active.

Its presence in Managua greatly embarrassed the government of President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro. She defeated the Sandinista Front in 1990 elections and professes to have reined in Sandinista intelligence operations and other clandestine activities--claims now cast in doubt.

The greatest political damage is falling on the Salvadoran rebels whose arsenal exploded. They had claimed they disarmed last year as part of a U.N.-brokered peace treaty that ended the Salvadoran civil war. Now that they have been caught in a lie--and as evidence emerges that ties one Salvadoran faction to the kidnapings--the rebels’ efforts to join mainstream politics are becoming increasingly difficult.

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Three blasts shattered the balmy midnight air on May 23.

Moments earlier, several men had begun removing guns, mortars and explosives from a warehouse under an auto repair shop in the Santa Rosa residential neighborhood. The men were loading arms into a red Volkswagen for transport, and perhaps sale.

No one knows for sure why the weapons blew up. No one is sure how many people died--the pieces of flesh recovered in the debris revealed only one blood type. At least two people, though, are missing.

“It was like hell, believe me,” said neighbor Albertina Martinez, whose house was destroyed. Her children were burned, and a grenade launcher landed in what was left of her front yard.

The owner of the auto shop was a Basque who came to Nicaragua in 1982 and obtained citizenship from the Sandinista government in 1990, using the name Miguel Antonio Larios and an Ecuadorean diplomatic passport. Larios disappeared the night of the blast. His car was later found near the border with Costa Rica.

In the first few hours after the explosion, as firefighters battled the flames and police removed the remaining weapons--including antiaircraft missiles--a parade of curious arrived. Among the pre-dawn visitors was Tomas Borge, former interior minister and intelligence czar of the Sandinista government; he reportedly showed up in his pajamas.

Stunned at the magnitude of the discovery, the Chamorro government quickly arrested eight people. One man has been cleared, four others have been linked to the arsenal, and three were found to be onetime members of the Basque separatist group ETA; the three were immediately deported--over Sandinista objections. Two of the men face seven murder counts in pending cases in Spain, including the 1973 assassination of Spain’s prime minister.

The deportees said that in Managua, they had been employed by Borge’s Interior Ministry and obtained Nicaraguan citizenship with Sandinista-supplied false documents.

The long-tolerated presence of the ETA in Nicaragua was only a fraction of a widening tale of intrigue and mystery:

One of the Salvadorans reportedly involved with the arsenal was found murdered in his home with a single gunshot wound in his neck a few weeks after the explosion. And the serial numbers on 16 of the 19 Soviet-made missiles recovered from the arsenal were missing--apparently erased after the weapons were in police custody, diplomatic sources said.

Then there were the documents. Extracted from the concrete pit below the auto shop were detailed archives on 120 of Latin America’s wealthiest families.

There also were 310 passports from 22 countries, immigration stamps from many countries and scores of drivers licenses, Sandinista police gun permits, fake press credentials. There were brand-new political pamphlets belonging to the Salvadoran rebels and detailed descriptions of escape routes through Latin America.

“It was a one-stop shopping center for Latin terrorists,” a diplomat said.

Interpol, the international police agency, has linked six kidnaping cases to the Managua ring and is investigating others. Romeu Toma, an Interpol official, said the kidnaping plots were hatched in a secret 1988 meeting of Chilean, Argentine and Uruguayan guerrillas in Germany.

Toma said one of the cases involved the son of Mexican construction magnate Antonio Gutierrez Prieto. The Managua ring watched Gutierrez Prieto with special care, the documents reveal.

“He is approximately 80 years old but looks much less,” they noted. “He lives on Luz Boulevard, in the Pedregal neighborhood. His house is closed in, with a large wall in front that prevents actually seeing the house. . . . We passed by once or twice a day to take down license plate numbers of the cars parked in front of the house. . . . He very probably has an active religious life: For the second anniversary of his wife’s death, he held a memorial Mass. Two comrades went to the Mass and they saw him. He was with his chauffeur.”

Gutierrez Prieto’s son was abducted and released in 1990 after the family paid an undetermined ransom.

In tidy, handwritten script, the files listed the tycoons’ personal wealth, company holdings and business assets; they traced family trees for three generations for many of the potential victims, plus their physical appearances, personality traits (“Arrogant and bad-humored,” they wrote in one dossier), hobbies and religious traditions.

All of this is contained in 45 bulging files piled on a desk in Quezada’s courtroom. A review of the material shows that it seems to go through most of the 1980s up to June, 1989. But some of the documents are dated as recently as last May.

In excruciating detail, reminiscent of a Ph. D. study, the kidnapers also researched the countries of their likely operations. They noted everything from economic conditions and geography down to the names of Cabinet members and number of army tanks. They calculated their chances of getting away with each operation.

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Throughout the 1980s, the Sandinistas, engaged in a deadly Cold War battle with the United States, welcomed and gave refuge to terrorists, Communists and assorted radicals from Latin America, the Mideast and Europe.

Nicaragua is still host to embassies for Libya, Iran and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Former President Daniel Ortega has visited Libya twice this year, the most recent trip this month.

The well-organized and chillingly efficient Sandinista intelligence apparatus could create whole new identities for political fugitives. They were readily supplied with documents, places to live and, often, jobs.

“It wasn’t even clandestine,” said a former Sandinista intelligence officer who lives in the United States. “They were completely at home.”

Given this coziness, many in Managua believe that the kidnaping ring worked at least with Sandinista permission, perhaps participation. And they fear that with the Sandinista intelligence apparatus largely intact, the network or a similar operation could easily be reactivated.

“The same people who were doing this before are still around,” a diplomat said. “They’re not writing their memoirs.”

Such concerns fly in the face of Chamorro’s claims that she has controlled Sandinista activities. No civilian government official would be interviewed for this story, despite repeated requests to Chief of Staff Antonio Lacayo and Deputy Interior Minister Frank Cesar.

Agents from the FBI and the U.S. State Department came to Managua to inspect the documents. Their interest stems in part from the discovery that one of the suspects in the World Trade Center bombing had five false Nicaraguan passports.

Ibrahim A. Elgabrowny was reportedly holding the passports for El Sayyid A. Nosair, who is serving a prison sentence for crimes related to the 1990 slaying in New York of Rabbi Meir Kahane. The passports bore photographs of Nosair and his family but the names of a family that apparently does not exist in Managua.

A court in April convicted a former Sandinista Interior Ministry employee and five other people in connection with a forgery ring that produced these and other fake passports. The former ministry employee has since been freed.

Nicaraguan citizenship was hastily granted to 890 or so leftists from several Arab countries, Spain and Latin America shortly after the Sandinistas’ upset loss in the 1990 election but before they left office, according to diplomatic sources.

Of special concern to American investigators are the U.S. passports found in the Santa Rosa arsenal. Three are blank, absent even of numbers. This seems to indicate that they were obtained directly from the passport agency in Washington, U.S. officials said. The blank pages are printed with liberty bells, which suggests that the passports date from around 1976.

Sandinista military officials deny they were involved in the kidnap ring and blame it on the Salvadoran rebels, who were given free rein in Managua during their war against U.S.-backed Salvadoran governments. Since the Sandinistas were also fighting forces funded by Washington, they figured they shared the Salvadorans’ goals.

“We turned a blind eye to what the Salvadorans were doing here,” Sandinista army spokesman Lt. Col. Ricardo Wheelock said in an interview.

The Salvadorans deny they were involved in the kidnapings, blaming other leftists who used the same safehouses and gun depositories. Nicaraguan officials, however, believe the vocabulary used in some of the kidnaping files is distinctly Salvadoran.

The history of cooperation among the Sandinistas, the Salvadoran Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), the ETA and the dozens of other radical groups who gathered in Managua through the 1980s is extensive.

According to intelligence sources, it ranged from training in security and urban warfare to sharing expertise in kidnaping--long a common tool for Salvadoran and other Latin revolutionaries seeking to finance their wars or secure the release of comrades.

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Perhaps the most notorious case connected to the Managua ring was the 1989 kidnaping of Brazilian supermarket chain owner Abilio Diniz. More than any other, it seems to illustrate the cooperation among leftist radicals.

Diniz was abducted and held in an underground chamber at a Sao Paulo house by a multinational group of kidnapers who demanded $10 million in ransom. After a week, he was freed by police who engaged the kidnapers in a violent two-day siege.

Emerging from the house, arrested and later convicted were two Argentines, five Chileans, a Brazilian and two Canadians.

The Argentines and Chileans reportedly belonged to guerrilla organizations that have been active in those countries since the 1970s. The Canadians, Christine Lamont and David Spencer, worked for a news agency that fronted for a Salvadoran guerrilla faction, the Popular Liberation Forces, their lawyer said.

Lamont and Spencer lived in Managua for about a year before moving to Brazil in 1989 to work on what they said was a project to help the poor. They have denied any role in the Diniz kidnaping, saying they were duped by the others in the group.

The case has become a cause celebre in Canada as the Lamont and Spencer families campaign to have the pair released. But the Santa Rosa explosion exposed a new battery of damning evidence. This included dozens of fake identifications, personal effects belonging to them and letters left behind for later mailing, as if to help establish an alibi for them.

The Lamont and Spencer families are claiming the documents were planted. Lamont, 34, and Spencer, 30, are in a Sao Paulo prison. In their trial, they claimed that although they lived in the house with the Chileans and Argentines, they were unaware that a kidnap victim was held there.

In a jailhouse interview with Canadian television last year, Lamont and Spencer conceded that they had traveled to Brazil using fake passports but claimed they did so out of concern for personal safety. “We had nothing to do with terrorism,” Lamont said.

The two were sentenced to 10 years in prison.

On appeal, the sentence was nearly tripled, to 28 years.