Vladimiro Montesinos, Peru's disgraced ex-spy chief, today faces his most important trial so far: He could get a 20-year term for arms trafficking.

  BY DREW BENSON
  Associated Press

  LIMA - Former spy master Vladimiro Montesinos faces trial today, accused of masterminding a deal that parachute-dropped 10,000 assault rifles into the
  hands of Colombian guerrillas.

  In a case that reads like a John le Carre spy thriller, men allegedly working for Montesinos posed as Peruvian military representatives to buy Soviet-era
  assault rifles from Jordan that were delivered in 1999 to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

  The full plot -- replete with a stealth Ukrainian flight crew, a French financier and a Lebanese arms dealer known as the ''Merchant of Death'' -- may never
  be revealed.

  POSSIBLE U.S. ROLE

  Sunday, speculation about alleged involvement by U.S. intelligence agents was splashed across the front page of the nation's leading paper.

  ''Vladimiro Montesinos could have had CIA support,'' special investigator Ronald Gamarra told El Comercio newspaper in an interview, adding: ``We don't
  have any hard proof of this, but there are many indications that could prove this relationship.''

  A U.S. Embassy spokesman would not comment on the alleged CIA links until prosecutors presented documents.

  Montesinos, 58, used his post as de facto head of Peru's National Intelligence Service to gain control of the military, the courts, most media outlets and a
  majority of government agencies. Rarely seen in public, his influence permeated a nation already weakened by chronic corruption -- until former President
  Alberto Fujimori's decade-long rule collapsed in November 2000 amid a bribery scandal involving Montesinos.

  Montesinos fled Peru but was captured in Venezuela in June 2001. Returned to Lima, he has since been locked up in a high-security naval prison he helped
  design for Peru's most feared guerrilla leaders.

  Fujimori also fled, taking up residence in Tokyo, where he remains protected from extradition to Peru.

  HIGH STAKES

  With prosecutors seeking a 20-year sentence, this trial is the most important so far against Montesinos. In all, he faces nearly 80 charges ranging from
  corruption to drug trafficking and authorizing murder. Since trials began in 2002, courts have convicted him on four relatively minor corruption counts, with
  sentences served concurrently under Peruvian law for a total of nine years in prison. For the most part, Montesinos has refused to testify, but prosecutors
  hope the prospect of a stiffer sentence will compel him to talk.

  The arms scandal came to light in August 2000 when Fujimori and Montesinos announced that Peruvian authorities had busted a gunrunning ring led by
  brothers Jose Luis and Luis Frank Aybar, both Peruvian army veterans.

  But their version quickly unraveled under skepticism from Colombian and Jordanian officials.

  The Aybar brothers implicate Montesinos as their boss.

  Gamarra told The AP that the Aybars contacted Miami-based businessman Charles Acelor, a French-born naturalized U.S. citizen, in 1998 in search of
  assault rifles. Acelor put them in touch with international weapons broker Sarkis Soghanalian, a Turkish-born Lebanese citizen and 20-year U.S. resident --
  whose long career supplying arms to ex-dictators like Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza and Iraq's Saddam Hussein earned him the nickname ``The Merchant
  of Death.''

  Soghanalian has said he personally negotiated the deal with Montesinos.

  MOVING THE WEAPONS

  The weapons were reportedly bought in three lots and delivered on four flights between March and August 1999 by a Ukraine-registered military surplus
  cargo jet. Prosecutors believe the Colombian guerrillas paid for the assault rifles with money raised by selling cocaine to a Brazilian drug trafficker.

  The original plan had apparently been to sell another 40,000 rifles to the rebels, but Jordan canceled the deal when the CIA tipped it off in mid-1999 that
  the rifles were turning up in the hands of captured Colombian guerrillas, Gamarra said.

  Arms dealers Soghanalian and Acelor maintain that they were merely middlemen who conducted a legal transaction -- a claim prosecutors reject.

  Acelor, arrested on an international warrant in Germany and extradited to Peru in late 2002, is expected to testify.

  Soghanalian is in the United States, Gamarra said. The special investigator said he believes Soghanalian has cut a deal with U.S. authorities to avoid
  extradition.