By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service

LIMA, Peru--Nothing was as it seemed in the world of Vladimiro Montesinos. Not even his bathtub.

In a modest beach community 20 miles south of Lima, police uncovered the den of Peru's disgraced intelligence chief, a sinister back-room manipulator who
cooperated with the CIA and helped keep president Alberto Fujimori in power for a decade before finally prompting his downfall and exile four weeks ago. Inside
the dilapidated exterior was the lair of a James Bond villain who shopped at Kmart: a luxurious indoor pool, surrounded by fake ferns; a $150,000 satellite phone
and scrambler, atop a white plastic nightstand; and, next to the Danish sauna, a bathtub that rises to reveal an opening into an 80-foot escape tunnel gated at the exit
by steel-plated doors.

Montesinos had always been a man of mystery. But the discovery of the "Dr. No"-style beach hideout two weeks ago heightened the intrigue. Moreover, the
hawk-faced, balding 56-year-old has vanished. Visible nowhere, reported to be in several places at once, he has become one of the world's most wanted men --
sought by authorities to answer allegations that have arisen on three continents linking him to torture, electoral fraud, bribery, money laundering, protecting drug
smugglers and skimming millions from Peruvian arms purchases.

"This rat will not be easy to catch," said David Waisman, president of a Peruvian congressional committee investigating Montesinos. "He is an animal who is very
used to the underworld."

Some say Montesinos is already six feet under here in Peru. One published report claimed that he masqueraded as an airline steward to escape on a commercial
flight to Paraguay. But the most plausible story emerged last week when three of Montesinos's former bodyguards testified about a "fugitive cruise" aboard a yacht
that they said departed Peru Oct. 29th.

In videotaped statements to an opposition congresswoman investigating Montesinos, the men said the yacht -- filled with espionage equipment and eight people on
board, including Montesinos, bodyguards and a sultry female aide -- sailed first to the Galapagos Islands. After Montesinos failed from a hideout there to negotiate
exile in Venezuela, they said, he set sail again, this time to Los Cocos Island off Costa Rica on Nov. 18. The men said they left him there and returned to Peru.

Official documents record the yacht's departure from Peru, and the three men had passport stamps from Costa Rica. Costa Rican officials told reporters that
Montesinos indeed had landed in Costa Rica by boat on Nov. 21, under a Venezuelan passport issued in the name of Manuel Antonio Rodriguez Perez. Someone
using the same passport left Cosa Rica on a private flight bound for the Caribbean island of Aruba on Nov. 23, according to Costa Rican Security Minister Rogelio
Ramos.

Many Peruvians believe, however, that the reports from Costa Rica could be a ruse to throw authorities here off the scent. According to one intelligence source
familiar with the search, Montesinos is right here in Peru, constantly moving and protected by a small band of loyal military officers with state-of-the-art espionage
equipment.

Aided by what his opponents call "a secret army" of allies in the military, police and Congress who continue to support him out of fear or loyalty, Montesinos first fled
to Panama in late September after a videotape showing him trying to bribe a legislator was broadcast on television. He left Panama a month later after failing to win
political asylum and allegedly flew back to Peru on Oct. 23 -- prompting Fujimori to launch a movie-like manhunt with tracking dogs and army special forces.

But just as some question whether Montesinos has truly fled Peru now, others wonder whether Montesinos ever returned from Panama then. Still others wonder
whether it behooves anyone -- including Washington and the current Peruvian government -- to capture the wily operative, who is believed to possess detailed
information on CIA operations as well as thousands of videotapes incriminating Peruvian military officers and politicians.

As Peru's new government tries to unravel Montesinos's web of secrets and foreign investigators delve into his alleged misdeeds abroad, each day brings revelations
about the magnitude of his operations. Investigators in Switzerland, for instance, say secret Montesinos bank accounts uncovered last month contain millions of
dollars from Russian companies. The money has been linked to the sale of MiG fighters and other weapons to Peru and third countries over the past five years, Swiss
and Peruvian authorities say.

Montesinos, who had been viewed by Washington as a vital partner in the war on international drug trafficking, is also under investigation by Peruvian prosecutors for
allegedly extorting protection money from and doing business with the very drug dealers he was supposed to be fighting. The president of a Peruvian congressional
commission investigating Montesinos estimates his ill-gotten gains at $800 million. Moreover, Fujimori's former wife, Congresswoman Susana Higuchi, said last week
that Montesinos had her tortured with electric shocks as recently as last June.

The Montesinos case has sweeping implications for Washington. In the early 1990s, the CIA argued to a skeptical State Department that Montesinos was committed
to Washington's anti-guerrilla and anti-drug agenda in Peru. Until recent years, U.S. intelligence insisted there was no concrete evidence to prove Fujimori's
right-hand-man was up to no good, but many in the new government here question how much of Montesinos's activities the CIA ignored to preserve the bilateral
relationship.

"For Latin America to continue seeing the United States as a role model for democracy, I think we first need to clarify the role the CIA played in supporting
Montesinos," said Diego Garcia Sayan, Peru's new justice minister, appointed three weeks ago by interim President Valentin Paniagua.

Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos was never the boy next door. Born May 20, 1945, in Arequipa, Peru's second-largest city, he was named after the Soviet leader
idolized by his father. After graduating from Lima's Military Academy in 1966, Montesinos embarked on a military career that ended in 1975 after he abandoned his
post, falsified documents, flew to the United States and allegedly sold information to the CIA on Russian-made weapons purchased by the left-leaning Peruvian
government of that era.

Montesinos resurfaced in the mid-1980s as a lawyer for drug traffickers, but he undertook his biggest project in 1990, when he met a bookish university professor
named Alberto Fujimori, who wanted to be president. Montesinos, who had built contacts in Peru's justice system through blackmail and bribes, helped Fujimori deal
with a tax problem that was seeping out to the press, enabling the son of Japanese immigrants to defeat famed writer Mario Vargas Llosa for the presidency in 1990.

In the early 1990s, Montesinos became deeply involved in Peru's successful war against two powerful guerrilla movements, forming a feared death squad known as
the Colina Group, which carried out the 1991 massacre of 15 people in a poor Lima neighborhood and the 1992 killings of nine students and a professor from the
Lima's La Cantuta University.

Although Montesinos was pegged by the CIA as an ally in anti-drug operations in Peru -- at one time the world's largest grower of the leaf used to make cocaine --
the first allegations that Montesinos himself might be involved in the drug trade surfaced years ago. In August 1996, a captured Peruvian drug trafficker named
Demetrio "El Vaticano" Chavez testified in court that Montesinos had been receiving $50,000 in monthly protection payments since May 1991. The next day,
Chavez, seemingly in a daze, recanted.

Col. Oscar Cordova Reyes, an army inspector general in the early 1990s, said in an interview last week that he had denounced officers linked to Montesinos for
working with and protecting traffickers but that nothing ever came of his reports.

"Think about it yourself," Cordova Reyes said. "There were accusations against Montesinos, but it turns out he was the one who received the information. Instead of
investigating the allegations, Montesinos investigated the accusers and destroyed them."

But in September, a videotape Montesinos made of himself bribing a rival congressman to support Fujimori was stolen from the spy chief's fortified office and
released to the press. The uproar, coming so soon after allegations that Montesinos had helped rig May elections in which Fujimori won an unprecedented third term,
was overwhelming.

Federico Salas, Fujimori's former prime minister, remembers the day after the videotape was broadcast. He said Fujimori asked Salas to "suggest" to Montesinos
that he resign. "When I made the suggestion on the telephone," Salas recalled, "Montesinos, who had always been very cordial with me, suddenly barked loudly . . .
that I shouldn't even think about the idea. If I did, he said, 'you will never leave the palace alive.' "

There had always been a question in Peru about who really ruled, Fujimori or Montesinos. In the past year especially, the answer, according to Salas and others, was
that they were "Siamese twins" who ruled jointly. But Montesinos often had the final say.

"It was Montesinos who hired me," said Salas, who was an opposition candidate for the presidency before the May elections. "Montesinos called me, invited me to
his office, and finally, it appears, decided that I should be Fujimori's prime minister. I never even spoke with the president before being named his prime minister."

Even now, Montesinos maintains deep tentacles in Peruvian institutions, officials here say, especially the judicial system, within which numerous judges remain loyal to
him, and in corrupt sectors of the military. Salas and others have questioned the new government's resolve to find him.

"Montesinos has a lot of information on a lot of people," said Salas. "And there are a lot of people who would prefer Montesinos not be found."

Garcia Sayan dismissed that idea. "That the dark hand of Montesinos is still present in Peru is not in question," he said. "But neither is our determination to find him.
Peruvians demand his capture. We owe it to the nation to bring this man to justice."

Special correspondent Lucien Chauvin contributed to this report.