LIMA, PERU -- Hours after Marxist guerrillas stormed the residence of the Japanese ambassador here Dec. 17, taking scores of hostages, President Alberto Fujimori quietly ordered his military commanders to select several hundred of their best troops and begin training them at a secluded naval base for a rescue operation.
By Douglas Farah
"Four months ago, this group did not exist," said one source familiar with the group's training at the naval station on the island of Fronton, just off the port of Callao. "There were only officers, no enlisted men, the best of the best forces, thrown together to learn a whole new type of operation. And they proved to be among the best in the world."
The story of the group, pieced together from interviews with active and retired military officers and public statements by Fujimori and others, is one of the proudest chapters in the history of Peru's military. The operation was, according to military analysts, an almost perfect marriage of skilled intelligence-gathering, patience and meticulous military training. The size of the unit was chosen to give the commandos a 10-to-1 force advantage.
"This was a select group that worked silently and with great discipline to carry out their assigned mission," said Gen. Nicolas Hermoza, head of the Peruvian military's Joint Command. "They needed the best intelligence and, through hard work by the intelligence services, had the necessary information to make their mission successful."
Eduardo Gamarra, a Latin American terrorism expert at Florida International University, said one key to success was Fujimori's patience and willingness to wear down the hostage-takers psychologically while taking time to adequately plan the assault.
"A less patient government might have tried to go in right away, and that could have been disastrous," Gamarra said. "They waited until they had the intelligence and the proper training, and then did a superb job."
Some Peruvian sources acknowledged privately that they received technological help from the United States and specific hostage rescue training from British and Israeli specialists. But they expressed resentment at any perception that the Peruvian army could not carry out such a sophisticated operation without foreign guidance.
U.S. military officials have strenuously denied any Pentagon role in the raid. The CIA has declined comment.
But the Peruvian sources said the United States provided a RU-38A Twin Condor airplane to overfly the residence. The special missions surveillance craft is capable of photographing a building, gauging the thickness of its walls, measuring body heat to determine the number of people inside and compiling a host of other details crucial to planning a raid.
"There was help with technology Peru did not have for the intelligence side, but the rescue was made in Peru," said a retired intelligence officer familiar with the operation. "It was Peruvians who carried out the sophisticated raid to take the residence, and Peruvians who carried out the rescue operation. We have 15 years of fighting a brutal internal war. We have more experience than almost anyone in the world. Why do people assume we learned nothing?"
The special unit began its training by late December, sources said, using a full-scale plywood mock-up of the Japanese residence on the naval base, parts of which were put off limits to those without the president's direct authorization. Initially, only Fujimori, his intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montecinos, and Hermoza were told of the existence of the group, besides those soldiers plucked from their units.
About half the special forces were drawn from the navy's special commandos, known as Special Operations Forces, who were trained by U.S. and Israeli forces and are roughly equivalent to the U.S. Navy's Seals. About a quarter were drawn from the army's Special Forces Directorate, similar to the U.S. Army's Rangers, and a quarter from the air force's Special Forces Group.
Because of fear of reprisals by remnants of the Tupac Amaru and other violent organizations, only the two soldiers killed have been identified. The others have been ordered not to talk to the media.
All three special forces units had gained valuable combat experience in Peru's brief 1995 border war with Ecuador. They also had years of fighting not only the Tupac Amaru, but also the far larger, more vicious Maoist Shining Path rebel group.
While they routinely carried out the most difficult missions of the war against the guerrillas, however, they had virtually no experience in hostage rescue techniques.
By the end of December, according to knowledgeable sources, Fujimori and his intelligence chiefs had decided to begin building a series of tunnels under the residence to be used for the raid. The rescue operation was named Chavin de Huantar, for a pre-Incan Peruvian archaeological ruin made up of a sophisticated series of interlocking stone tunnels.
A group of 60 people, including 24 miners, were brought in to build the tunnels, Fujimori told wire service reporters in interviews Friday. He said the men worked in three shifts, 24 hours a day, to build 190 yards of tunnels, 10 feet deep, moving 200 truckloads of earth. The walls were lined with wood to prevent cave-ins, and the tunnel floors were covered with carpeting to muffle the noise.
Fujimori also revealed that periscopes were used by those in the tunnel to observe the Tupac Amaru guerrillas and help choose the moment of attack.
When especially heavy digging was being done, the army paraded tanks around the residence or blasted martial music. Even so, in early March the rebels denounced the building of the tunnels, breaking off the stagnated negotiations with the government but inexplicably taking no new precautions against attack.
Instead, in a move that baffles analysts here, the hostage-takers chose to move their captives to the second floor, rather than leaving them on the first floor, where they would have been at greater risk and acted as a greater deterrent against an assault.
The rescue training included not only repeated mock assaults of different types, against guerrillas in different possible defensive positions, but also practice in emerging from tunnels. Because the exact thickness of the walls, floors and ceilings was known, the amount of C-4 plastic explosives necessary to blast the entry holes without blowing up the hostages could be calculated with great precision.
The main weapons used were Israeli-made Uzi and German-made MP-5 submachine guns, both compact, rapid-fire automatic weapons designed for close combat.
"The training was rigorous, so tough that they could have stayed in the tunnels for days," said the retired intelligence officer. "On top of their special forces training, they were put through physical hell so they would be able to put up with anything."
While the commandos trained, the state intelligence office, which had captured most of the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru leaders in recent years, began to work up extensive psychological profiles of the known guerrilla combatants inside the residence. Terrorism experts said the intelligence was good in part because the military was able to slip listening devices into the compound and establish communications with at least one of the hostages. This helped Fujimori determine the correct moment for the attack. The intelligence operatives also detected that the guerrillas were growing slack in security. Just 18 days before the assault, sources said, a group of guerrillas, including the two top commanders, began daily indoor soccer games precisely at 3 p.m., and would play for about an hour. That meant their routine left most of the guerrillas unarmed, in an easily identifiable location, which greatly simplified the planning of the rescue operation.
Last Sunday night, with the tunnels complete and analysts agreed that the guerrillas were vulnerable, Fujimori decided to prepare the attack.
The countdown for the attack began Monday at 6 a.m. For the next 33 hours, the commandos were scattered through the five tunnels along the north and east sides of the residence, waiting for the word to attack. At 3:27 p.m. Tuesday, the commandos, knowing precisely where each hostage and guerrilla was, set off their plastic explosives, blowing holes in the walls and floor, as most of the guerrillas played soccer in the first-floor reception hall. Sixteen minutes later, the storming of the residence was complete and the rescue operation was over. CAPTION: Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori on Thursday toured tunnel used in raid on Japanese ambassador's residence. Miners were recruited to dig the tunnels. CAPTION: In a cemetery near Lima lies the grave of Tupac Amaru rebel Nestor Cerpa Cartolini, who led the December assault on the Japanese ambassador's residence. CAPTION: Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, at the National Palace in Lima on Friday, displayed a specially made periscope used by the special forces troops in tunnels during Tuesday's mission to rescue the hostages.
