BY TIM JOHNSON

  LIMA - A State Department cable from the U.S. Embassy once described former Peruvian security chief Vladimiro Montesinos as a ''valued ally in the drug war, but no choir boy.'' Peruvian investigators now believe Montesinos was a traitor in that war.

  As Montesinos languishes in jail, at least nine accused or convicted drug traffickers in Colombia, Panama and Peru have come forward to allege that he collected money for assisting selected criminal drug enterprises, according to reports compiled by prosecutors and congressional investigators who are trying to uncover the extent of his criminal involvement.

  Several of those traffickers say that by the mid-1990s -- when Montesinos was on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency payroll coordinating many counter-drug activities -- he had actually moved from protecting a handful of gangs to a direct role in setting up cocaine-processing operations that smuggled loads of cocaine to Europe and to the Tijuana Cartel in Mexico.

  The allegations come from traffickers with a vested interest in seeking reduced prison terms for collaborating. But some of the testimony has been corroborated by
  other means, criminal justice sources said.

  The testimony links Montesinos directly to at least five major cocaine-trafficking organizations, including a group called ``Los Camellos'' -- the camels -- that sent tons of cocaine to Italy, Spain, Portugal, Bulgaria and Russia from 1995 until 1999, and another group based in the Peruvian port of Pisco that smuggled cocaine to Mexico.

  During the past year, Peruvian prosecutors have traveled around the region to question jailed traffickers with alleged links to Montesinos. At the same time, two
  Peruvian congressional commissions interrogated several underworld figures, sometimes in closed-door sessions in prisons.

  EXASPERATION

  The sessions sometimes exasperated the accused traffickers as they sought to convey what they said was Montesinos' direct involvement in the smuggling of cocaine.

  ''Mr. Montesinos is as much of a trafficker as I am!'' Lucio Tijero Guzmán blurted at a closed-door prison hearing April 8. Tijero is serving a life sentence for drug
  trafficking.

  The Herald obtained transcripts of several hearings, including Tijero's.

  It is hard to overestimate the power that Montesinos wielded under the Fujimori government from 1990 to late 2000, when Fujimori fled to Japan. A declassified 1999 U.S. cable called Montesinos the de facto head of the powerful National Intelligence Service, the ``go-to guy . . . on any key issue, particularly any major
  counter-narcotics issue.''

  With strong U.S. support, the Fujimori government obtained startlingly positive results on the narcotics front in the 1990s. It adopted a policy of shooting or forcing down aircraft suspected of carrying narcotics. From 1995 until 1990, 30 such aircraft were destroyed, curtailing the use of Amazon skies for drug smuggling. In the same period, the government slashed production of coca fields by nearly 60 percent.

  Now, judicial and congressional investigators say that while Montesinos supported U.S.-financed counter-narcotics efforts that reaped impressive results, he also was playing for the other side. They say he helped some traffickers use army helicopters to lift tons of semi-processed cocaine out of the Amazon jungle, and he meddled in the court system to help accused drug lords with whom he was friendly or to throw the book at those who refused to pay him.

  ''Apparently, he had a two-pronged strategy,'' special prosecutor Luis Vargas Valdivia said. ``One was to collaborate with eradication of coca fields and the
  [destruction]) of clandestine laboratories. The other was to support a few criminal organizations,''

  The new allegations raise troubling issues about the Clinton administration's counter-drug strategy in Peru: It achieved good overall results, but did it also give
  Montesinos a silent pass to profit from the narcotics trade? Did the U.S. executive branch keep Congress informed of all it knew?

  DID U.S. KNOW?

  Current Peruvian officials say they don't doubt that Washington was aware of Montesinos' activities. At least five Peruvian witnesses appearing before two panels of Peru's Congress in the past year have said they worked as informants for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and shared all they knew about Montesinos.

  During a closed congressional hearing on June 1, Oscar Benítez Linares, who claimed to be a longtime DEA informant, was asked whether the DEA knew of charges that Montesinos personally authorized illegal cocaine shipments in the early 1990s.

  ''They knew everything,'' Benítez responded.

  Other Peruvian officials noted, however, that the CIA backed Montesinos openly and provided him with $1 million a year.

  ''Montesinos boasted all the time that he worked with the CIA,'' said one senior criminal justice source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ``The DEA never bought into the story [that he was clean].''

  Montesinos, 57, is now imprisoned at a naval base in the port of Callao, near Lima. Some 60 criminal inquiries are pending against him for corruption, human rights
  abuses and for narcotics and arms trafficking.

  A cashiered army captain, Montesinos parlayed a law degree earned while serving time in a military prison into a ticket to the homes of some of the region's biggest
  drug traffickers.

  By the mid-1980s, Montesinos was defending Evaristo Porras Ardiles, a Peruvian trafficker in cahoots with Pablo Escobar, the feared chief of Colombia's Medellín Cartel, which was considered at the time to be the world's most powerful criminal organization. Porras, now imprisoned in Colombia, told prosecutors that Montesinos helped break him out of detention in Lima and later destroyed the court file containing evidence against him of drug trafficking.

  Once free, Porras called Montesinos to his home along the Amazon River and put him on the telephone directly with Pablo Escobar, a key witness said.

  VISIT TO ESCOBAR

  ''A few days later, a Friday afternoon, . . . a Learjet came from Medellín to pick up Porras and Montesinos and they went to Medellín, to the Napoles ranch that belongs to Pablo Escobar,'' José María Aguilar Ruiz, a former Porras confidant, told a congressional commission last year.

  Pablo Escobar was killed in 1993, but prosecutors say his brother, Roberto ''Osito'' Escobar, now serving a prison sentence in Colombia, repeated the story to them recently. He asserted that the Medellín Cartel gave Fujimori's 1990 presidential campaign $1 million.

  Peru has been swept up by criminal probes of the Fujimori era -- which only partly touch on drug trafficking. Sprawling criminal investigations have led to the
  imprisonment of a former attorney general, two Supreme Court justices, four television station owners, a former president of Congress, four other legislators, and 14 generals. The generals include four former armed forces chiefs, including Gen. Nicolas Hermoza Ríos, a key supporter of Fujimori's who has been directly linked to protecting illicit drug operations.

  Montesinos took care to distance himself from direct contact with cocaine gangs, the traffickers said. Traffickers often knew him by code names, such as ''Ruben'' and ''Fayed'' as well as ''Doc'' and ''the Man.'' But they said they soon learned his real identity.

  Evidence now indicates that Montesinos profited from or maintained direct participation in at least five separate cocaine-trafficking organizations, law enforcement and congressional sources said.

  The three biggest groups are identified as follows:

  • El VATICANO: The trafficker known as El Vaticano -- Demetrio Chávez Peñaherrera -- came into the spotlight during a publicized five-month trial in Lima in 1996.

  Chávez, a major smuggler who operated out of Campanilla in the Upper Huallaga area, said Montesinos offered him protection as long as he paid $50,000 for every airplane loaded with cocaine that he moved from Peru. Chávez said that when the fee was raised to $100,000 per flight he refused to pay and was arrested.

  When Chávez made his allegations against Montesinos on Aug. 16, 1996, he was whisked out of court. In a later appearance, a dazed Chávez retracted the accusation. Defenders said he had been tortured.

  Still in prison, Chávez is expanding on his allegations. He told a congressional panel that he met with Montesinos at least three times in 1991 and 1992, and that during that period he coordinated at least 280 smuggling flights from Peru's north-central jungle. He said Montesinos alerted him to pending counter-drug operations in the Upper Huallaga Valley, allowing him to operate with virtual impunity.

  • LOS CAMELLOS: The organization got its name when police discovered 2.3 tons of cocaine in Chincha in April 1999. Each packet of cocaine had a camel stamped on it.

  A Panamanian trafficker, Boris Foguel, imprisoned near Panama City, told Peruvian prosecutors that Montesinos was a partner in the group, which began operations in 1995. Foguel confessed that he was the group's accountant.

  ''More than an advisor, Mr. Vladimiro Montesinos was an integral part of the Los Camellos organization,'' Foguel said in a still-secret court deposition obtained by The Herald.

  ``Montesinos guaranteed for us the transport of coca paste to the laboratory in helicopters as well as the movement of the cocaine aboard boats, camouflaged in legal exports.''

  'According to Foguel, Montesinos was one of four partners in `Los Camellos.' He earned 25 percent [of profits],'' the criminal justice source said.

  Also implicated in the group are Javier Corrochano, a lawyer and personal friend of Montesinos', and police Maj. Eduardo Milla, who was detached to the Montesinos intelligence apparatus.

  • PISCO: Law enforcement sources believe Montesinos made contact with Benjamín and Ramón Arrellano Felix, leaders of Mexico's powerful Tijuana Cartel, through a Colombian trafficker, Omar Penagos Rodríguez, known by the alias ``Larry.''

  A young Peruvian woman, Viviana Elizabeth Rosales, told congressional investigators that Penagos, who was her boyfriend, worked with Montesinos to set up a
  processing laboratory in a cave on a desolate Pacific island about six miles off Pisco, a fishing port south of Lima, to provide Mexican traffickers with cocaine.

  ''This is why we believe Montesinos had his own organization,'' the criminal justice source said.

  Peruvian and Mexican newspapers have reported that Rosales affirmed to prosecutors that the group smuggled at least 18 tons of cocaine to Mexico, which later was sent to the United States.

  Criminal justice sources link Montesinos to two other organizations run by Colombian traffickers -- one managed by Waldo Vargas Arias, known by the nickname ''El Ministro,'' and a second one by Luis Pineda Menjura, whose nickname is ''Trompa de Buque,'' which might be translated as ``Foghorn.''

  DRUG GAINS UNKNOWN

  How much Montesinos may have pocketed from drug connections is unknown. Peru has identified and frozen about $225 million of his assets overseas, but officials say that money has been traced to bribes and kickbacks for arms sales -- but not narcotics proceeds.

  Still unclear is whether an arms deal engineered by Montesinos in 1999 -- in which some 10,000 used automatic rifles were purchased in Jordan, then airdropped in crates to the FARC rebels in Colombia -- was an ''arms-for-drugs'' deal or a straight cash transaction, law enforcement officials say.

  Peruvian prosecutors will travel in a few days to Germany, where one of the alleged brokers of the transaction, Charles Acelor, is imprisoned.

  Acelor was reportedly living in Miami at the time the deal went through.