How Could the Attack Plan Go Undetected?

The heroes of Peru’s war on terrorism are nicknamed Physicist, Chemist, Eagle 10: They are the men and women of the anti-terrorist division of the national police.

If the often-heavy-handed security apparatus--emergency military rule, fearsome hooded judges--created by President Alberto Fujimori was the club, the special police units were the scalpel.

Formed as terrorist violence swept the nation like a flash fire, the elite detectives immersed themselves in terrorist writings and ideology. They cultivated informants, disguises, archives, surveillance techniques. And they treated their fanatical captives with respect.

Their professionalism paid off with the arrests of leaders of the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. The bombings and assassinations faded away. Fujimori and many others declared that Peru had won the war on subversion with an anti-terrorist campaign that was an international model.

Then last week, a team of Tupac Amaru terrorists invaded the Japanese ambassador’s residence here and shattered the image that was the foundation of Fujimori’s popularity and Peru’s economic recovery. For many Peruvians and foreign observers, the apparent victory over terrorism had justified the authoritarian excesses of a regime that went as far as temporarily shutting down Congress with a military “self-coup.”

So as the hostage standoff at the diplomatic compound entered its fourth day Saturday, people were asking: After years of success, how could a government apparently obsessed with espionage and security forces fail to detect the preparations for a terrorist attack of such magnitude?

“The government believed its own story,” said Fernando Rospigliosi, a noted political commentator. “The intelligence services were occupied with spying on the political opposition . . . and the police apparatus that scored the major triumphs had been dissolved for political reasons.”

Events leading up to the attack suggest that the political regime was distracted and law enforcement had let down its guard, according to analysts.

“The Tupac Amaru took advantage of a relaxation of the security forces,” said Jaime Antesana, an expert on terrorism at a social service agency that works with refugees from political conflict.

In an outward sign of self-confidence, the Fujimori administration in recent months turned its attention to the task of righting past wrongs: A presidential commission has begun the release of hundreds of inmates who were unjustly jailed by secret military courts established in 1992 after Fujimori assumed broad emergency powers with the help of the military.

Meanwhile, infighting claimed the president’s closest civilian advisors, leaving him reliant on the armed forces and on Vladimiro Montesinos, the mysterious unofficial head of the National Intelligence Service, or SIN, whom Fujimori calls the architect of the war on terrorism.

Montesinos rarely appears in public and little is known about his exact duties, but he is widely considered one of the most powerful men in Peru. But he, in turn, was buffeted by allegations that he took payoffs from a drug lord and was criticized for his secretive manner.

And the military clashed with Fujimori last month over its arrest of a retired general who criticized its alleged human rights abuses.

Many Peruvians say the failure to anticipate the Tupac Amaru attack was a glaring intelligence breakdown, suggesting that the espionage service was too busy spying on the retired general, newspaper editors and other political opponents.

“The movement by the Tupac Amaru of people, uniforms, weapons and explosives, the intelligence gathering they did--it had to be hard to miss,” said Gustavo Gorriti, a journalist who has written extensively on terrorism. “If the SIN had the slightest handle on the Tupac Amaru apparatus, they would have realized something important was about to happen.”

Gorriti, a Fujimori critic in self-imposed exile in Panama, is one of the analysts who say that harsh laws and extra-democratic powers granted to the espionage service and military were relatively unimportant in defeating terrorism.

“Although there were military officers who showed great bravery, what didn’t work was the global scheme,” he said. “The political structure based itself on a doctrine of militarization of the government, the centralization of power in the SIN. This created a big bureaucracy . . . whose central objective became the maintenance of its own power.”

Instead, some analysts credit unsung heroes such as the rural militias whose ragged peasant “generals” won pitched battles against the Shining Path in the jungle. And they single out the elite detectives of the anti-terrorist police led by Col. Benedicto Jimenez Baca, known as Physicist. Gorriti calls him “the man who saved Peru.”

Jimenez is now a police attache in the Peruvian embassy in Panama, one of many experts who were distanced from anti-terrorist work because of clashes between the police and the intelligence service.

Jimenez is a bulky and dogged investigator with a black mustache and a shock of prematurely white hair. He is the son of a black construction worker and a Greek immigrant mother.

In 1990, he was a 36-year-old lieutenant who led a special unit of 80 men and women on the daunting mission of capturing Abimael Guzman, the elusive founder of Shining Path. That group’s Maoist rebels were besieging Lima with car bombs and assassinations and using a clandestine network of safe houses and well-heeled collaborators to elude capture. Simultaneously, the Tupac Amaru were carrying out a more selective campaign of bombings and kidnappings.

Fearful of the rebels’ capacity for revenge, the detectives used nicknames. Jimenez the Physicist’s commanders were Marco Mishayiro (Chemist), who became Peru’s foremost expert on the Tupac Amaru, and Antonio Ketin (Eagle 10), chief of the anti-terrorism police division. Together they introduced modern police work in a nation where indiscriminate arrests, torture and death squads were a grim tradition.

Their colleagues derisively called the elite units “The Ghostbusters,” saying they were chasing phantoms.

But Jimenez espoused meticulous intelligence-gathering and a conviction that a democracy must respond to terrorist brutality with restraint and respect for the law. In excerpts of his memoirs published here in September, he called his philosophy “conquest without combat.”

Three years of stakeouts, intelligence analysis and interrogations led Jimenez’s squad on a twisting trail to the second-floor of a dance studio in a middle-class neighborhood of the capital. There they captured the bearded, messianic Guzman--a moment that electrified Peru.

In a grainy videotape of the remarkable scene, Ketin exchanges respectful comments with the seated terrorist leader. Ketin motioned to Jimenez to step in front of the camera and share the glory, according to Jimenez’s memoirs, but the wary Jimenez declined. Afterward, the exultant investigators found bottles of wine in the hide-out and toasted their victory.

The arrest of Guzman broke the aura of invincibility of the Shining Path. During the next three years, the police used similar techniques to catch other terrorists, including most of the ruling cadre of the Tupac Amaru.

At the same time, however, the special police units fell into disarray, according to Jimenez. In his memoirs he laments the “envy, hate and malice” that led to the “disintegration and systematic mistreatment of the agents” of the special units.

Although Ketin was named chief of the national police, his deputies were dispersed: Jimenez went to Panama, and Mishayiro, renowned for keeping a trunk full of valuable documents on leftist subversives, was transferred to the tax police. Jimenez blames a bitter conflict with the intelligence service.

The Tupac Amaru’s spectacular resurgence caught most Peruvians by surprise, not just the government. They thought the group had been crushed by the arrest of leader Miguel Rincon after a desperate gunfight in Lima a year ago.

“It seemed to be a group in extinction,” Antesana said. But during the past year, as Fujimori’s popularity spurred talk about a third presidential bid in 2000, there were warning signs of a generalized terrorist resurgence. Shining Path carried out sporadic attacks this year that caused the government to announce a new crackdown just last month.

And in February, Tupac Amaru sent a videotape to a newspaper in which it mocked the anti-terrorist police, saying their discovery of a guerrilla hide-out was a lucky break. “The version of the government . . . has been totally discredited,” a terrorist leader declared in the video. “The police showed a total ignorance of the use of the house and the number of combatants who lived there.”

The leader shown on the videotape was Nestor Cerpa Cartolini, the audacious terrorist who is the admitted leader of the attack squad barricaded in the Japanese ambassador’s residence.

In the aftermath of the terrorist takeover, it has been reported that the police are building up the special units that were so effective in the past. Ironically, top experts in the anti-terrorism police squad are among the 340 hostages.

In addition, critics of the government call for more sweeping changes and more democratic weapons to be used against terrorism. Human rights activists say the military and intelligence service should be better-controlled. They urge the creation of a pool of highly protected judges who work within the confines of civilian law like the anti-Mafia magistrates of Italy, to replace faceless judges in secret military courts.

The immediate question, Peruvians say, is which of the two past strategies the Fujimori administration will revive to respond to the hostage crisis: force or subtlety.