By ANDRES OPPENHEIMER and TIM JOHNSON
             Herald Staff Writers

             CARACAS -- Cashiered Lt. Col. Hugo Chavez, the former coup plotter who is
             the front-runner in Venezuela's presidential race, has a long history of alliances with
             Venezuelan and Colombian Marxist insurgents, according to intelligence officials,
             senior government sources and a former rebel leader.

             Moreover, confidential Venezuelan and Colombian intelligence reports say Chavez
             controls a secret militia that has allegedly trained with leftist guerrillas in neighboring
             Colombia. And Venezuelan officials claim that Chavez has received help from
             Libya and Cuba to train and organize his grass-roots political organization.

             While U.S. officials have expressed concern over Chavez's longstanding links with
             leftist rebels, they say they have no evidence to support claims that he has Cuban
             and Libyan ties.

             In a telephone interview last week, Chavez denied having had any link to Marxist
             rebels, or getting support from Libya or Cuba. He said the stories were concocted
             long ago by the Venezuelan government intelligence service, known by its initials as
             DISIP, to discredit him.

             ``For the past five years, they have been trying to destroy me politically and
             morally, and have been making up all kinds of things about me,'' Chavez said.
             ``These stories are completely, totally false.''

             In recent weeks, Chavez has been meeting with bankers, industrialists and U.S.
             diplomats in an effort to dispel his image of a hot-headed radical. He has told them
             that his statements against free-market reforms echo Pope John Paul II's speeches
             and that his recent vow to ``fry'' the heads of his political adversaries was merely a
             rhetorical device arising from ``the heat of the electoral battle.''

             But well-placed Venezuelan sources, and a dossier compiled by one of
             Venezuela's intelligence services and obtained by The Herald, portray a different,
             more radical Chavez: a man who has had extensive personal dealings with
             Venezuelan rebels over the years, and whose aides have met with Colombian
             guerrillas at least a dozen times since 1996.

             Chavez's alleged links to leftist rebels would be an anomaly in a region where most
             military officers have traditionally fought Marxism.

             The explanation, according to several current and former intelligence officers:
             Chavez would need the rebels' support to instigate a popular uprising if he decided
             he had grounds to challenge an adverse electoral result.

             ``The people, as people, have never in the history of mankind led a revolution,''
             says Rafael Rivas Vasquez, who was head of DISIP in the early 1990s. ``You
             need vanguard groups to take strategic buildings and rally the people to take to the
             streets.''

             Allegedly sought help

             Rivas Vasquez and three senior Venezuelan officials said in separate interviews
             that Chavez sought help from the Marxist Venezuelan rebel groups Red Flag
             (Bandera Roja) and Third Way (Tercer Camino) in 1992 to back his army
             rebellions with takeovers of strategic buildings and street demonstrations.

             Marxist rebel leaders worked most closely with Chavez's supporters in a Nov. 27,
             1992, coup attempt. The rebellion sought to free Chavez, who had been jailed
             following his first coup attempt earlier that year.

             ``Third Way and Red Flag participated in the second coup attempt,'' Rivas
             Vasquez says. ``The plan was for them to meet at a school behind the Miraflores
             government house. The military was to get there and distribute weapons to the
             rebel groups, so that together they would take the government palace.''

             Third Way leader Douglas Bravo, a barrel-chested veteran Marxist who led an
             ill-fated guerrilla insurgency in Venezuela in the 1960s, confirmed his participation
             in the November 1992 plot in an interview with The Herald in Caracas.

             Bravo, who once headed Venezuela's Communist Party, has been in and out of jail
             over the past three decades. He is now free and makes periodic public
             appearances in Caracas, although intelligence officials claim he still commands
             armed insurgents. Bravo acknowledged that he and Chavez go back ``a long
             time.''

             ``We are friends. We know each other,'' he said. ``He's very intelligent. He's a
             born leader.''

             First meeting recalled

             Bravo formed the Third Way splinter group in the early 1980s. He said he met
             Chavez for the first time in 1981 or 1982. When contacted by Chavez's people
             about taking part in the 1992 coup attempt, he says, he offered his enthusiastic
             approval.

             Chavez and his followers had first sought support from Third Way and Red Flag
             months before the bloody Feb. 4 attack on the presidential palace that nearly
             toppled then-President Carlos Andres Perez, Bravo said.

             But the two groups were shunted aside shortly before the uprising. The Chavez
             camp had obtained information that Third Way had been infiltrated by government
             agents, and quickly severed contacts.

             ``Word leaked out. An official in the navy . . . betrayed the movement,'' Bravo
             recalled.

             Red Flag and Third Way rebels didn't have to sit on the sidelines for the second
             uprising, led by Rear Adm. Hernan Gruber Odreman. This time, officers handed
             out scores of FAL automatic rifles to waiting guerrillas, Bravo confirmed.

             ``The colonels and the lieutenant colonels did indeed give out weapons to the
             people,'' Bravo said.

             `No contact' with rebels

             Asked about the alleged guerrilla participation in the two coup plots, Chavez said
             ``there was no contact'' with the rebels for his Feb. 4 coup attempt. As for the
             second rebellion, he said he has no way of knowing, because he was in jail, but he
             says he believes Gruber Odreman's denials.

             On his relationship with Bravo, Chavez said the two have met ``on two or three
             occasions'' at conferences. Chavez emphasized that Bravo long ago laid down his
             weapons and joined the political arena, and that ``he is a Venezuelan like any
             other.''

             Chavez dismissed claims that he is organizing guerrilla-supported clandestine
             groups to promote an insurrection if he is stripped of victory in December.

             ``As you know, I've been a soldier and I'm respectful of the military institution,'' he
             said. ``It would be unthinkable for me to form guerrilla groups or armed groups
             [outside the armed forces].''

             Former President Perez said in a recent interview that Venezuelan guerrillas had
             ties to the military in the early 1980s. Members of ``extreme left subversive
             groups'' infiltrated the military and by 1983 had created clandestine groups seeking
             to take power, he said.

             When President Rafael Caldera freed Chavez from jail in June 1994, the renegade
             army commander formed a group -- the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement-200
             (MBR-200) -- that he said would sweep him to the presidency through
             democratic means.

             ``You can have the most absolute certainty that Hugo Chavez and the forces that
             he represents will recognize the electoral results,'' Chavez told The Herald's
             Conference of the Americas in a teleconference from Caracas in late September.
             ``I'm a fighter for democracy.''

             Militias in the movement

             But Chavez may be hiding the fact that his MBR-200 movement includes armed
             militias, which have many of the rifles obtained during the second revolt,
             Venezuelan intelligence sources say. The secret militia -- made up of some 200
             cashiered soldiers, former guerrillas and hard-core nationalists, intelligence officials
             say -- has stayed in the shadows as Chavez mounts his presidential campaign, they
             say.

             Many members of the militia are operating along Venezuela's 1,300-mile border
             with Colombia, and have received training from Colombian rebels, according to
             the Venezuelan intelligence documents.

             Chavez visited the region often after he was freed from prison.

             ``These weren't electoral trips,'' one of President Caldera's most trusted advisors
             said. ``He worked actively with collaborators, who maintained relations with the
             Colombian guerrillas.''

             The senior official said Chavez exercised ``very vertical authority'' over the
             militarized unit and oversaw many of its activities.

             According to the intelligence dossier, MBR-200 members trained with fighters of
             the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a 15,000-combatant
             insurgency, and a smaller Colombian force, the National Liberation Army (ELN).
             The dossier alleges the following activities:

               On Nov. 6, 1996, MBR-200 members under the leadership of retired
             Venezuelan army Capt. Gilberto Aguilar Reyes undertook ``civic-military training''
             with FARC rebels near the border town of Guasdualito.

               On Jan. 8, 1997, MBR-200 leaders met with FARC and ELN leaders in the
             restaurant of the Hotel Brisas de Sarare in the same town.

               Nearly two weeks later, 180 MBR-200 members received military training from
             ELN rebels across the border in Colombia's oil-rich Arauca state.

               Regular meetings between MBR-200 members and Colombian guerrillas
             occurred as recently as early February, when ELN guerrillas and MBR-200
             members met at the Tres Islas ranch in the Venezuelan border region of Tachira.

               Chavez was to meet with an ELN leader, Nicolas Rodriguez Bautista, who is
             known by his nom de guerre of ``Gabino,'' in the mountains of Colombia in
             mid-December 1994.

             A top Colombian official who investigated Chavez's contacts with the ELN at the
             request of the Venezuelan government at the time, says the meeting took place in
             1995. The Colombian official, who asked not to be identified for security reasons,
             said, ``I don't remember whether Chavez met with Gabino or with other ELN
             chieftains, but we had pretty reliable intelligence that he did meet with ELN
             leaders.''

             Stories `created about me'

             Asked about his alleged contacts with Colombian rebels, Chavez told The Herald,
             ``This is part of the stories that have been created about me. I have never met with
             the ELN or the FARC guerrillas.''

             Reports of Chavez's ties with Colombian guerrillas began to surface in early 1995,
             when Colombia's weekly Cambio 16 quoted Colombian intelligence officials as
             saying that Chavez met with ELN rebels in December 1994 and that Venezuelan
             Red Flag guerrillas were being trained by ELN rebels in the border town of
             Catatumbo.

             But it is not just Chavez's reported alliances with Venezuelan or Colombian armed
             groups of the left that worry security officials. It is also unconfirmed reports of
             secret connections with rogue Middle Eastern states like Libya, and rumors that
             Cuba may have helped train Venezuelan militias.

             ``I was alerted to this in the United States,'' the senior Caldera aide said, referring
             to the alleged Libyan links. ``They asked me to confirm it with Israeli intelligence
             sources in Caracas.''

             But three well-placed U.S. diplomats said they have seen no hard evidence of
             Chavez getting support from Libya or Cuba.

             ``We've heard all these rumors, but haven't been able to confirm them
             independently,'' one well-placed U.S. diplomat said.
 

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