HOW THEY DID IT

By Bruce W. Nelan

The Peruvian commandos waited all night under the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima, hunkered down in a winding, steel-braced tunnel complex. Loaded down with weapons, ammunition and body armor, they still had enough room to rest and try to sleep. The tunnels were the work of professional miners, and the troops could walk upright, two abreast, through lighted and ventilated chambers. In the morning, after a final planning session, their officers slipped through nearby buildings and into the tunnels to join the 140 army, navy and air-force special-operations forces underground for the attack. Lieut. Colonel Juan Valer Sandoval, leader of a squad, sat down to write a farewell to the men he had trained with for months. "If tomorrow you read this letter," he began, "it will be because I have already died."

Up above, intelligence officers were listening to the microphones they had smuggled into the residence, tracking the movements of the 14 Tupac Amaru guerrillas and their 72 VIP hostages. The officers knew what to expect: by midafternoon the hostages would be in upstairs bedrooms and the rebels who were holding them prisoner would have started their regular makeshift soccer game in the spacious ground-floor living room. It went just that way. At about 3 p.m. the listeners heard eight guerrillas, including their commander, Nestor Cerpa Cartolini, stash their rifles in a corner and begin a shouting, thumping game. The army flashed the word to President Alberto Fujimori, who was across town at a divorce hearing with his estranged wife Susana. He instantly gave the order to attack. "We knew," he said later, "that it was the moment of minimum risk."

It was still a risk. The assault could have turned into a bloody disaster. But it didn't. It was a triumph--for Fujimori and for his much criticized military. Only 15 minutes after the commandos blasted and shot their way into the building, 71 of the hostages were free, all the guerrillas were dead, and only one prisoner and two soldiers had been killed (another soldier died several days later).

Fujimori had never seen much chance of resolving the standoff peacefully. From the beginning, last Dec. 17, when the rebels seized the embassy residence during a gala cocktail reception, Cerpa had demanded the release of 400 of his comrades who were locked in Peru's harsh prisons. That, Fujimori vowed, he would never agree to. He gave the negotiations a try, if only to mask preparations for the assault. He arranged the promise of safe passage to Cuba for the rebels if they wanted it and appointed Archbishop Juan Luis Cipriani as a special negotiator. After the raid, as the Archbishop expressed his sympathy to the families of the dead, he covered his tear-filled eyes with his hand.

Cerpa had let hundreds of the original hostages walk out the door, but he kept a tight grip on the 72 he valued most: senior Peruvian officials, Fujimori's brother Pedro, foreign diplomats and the Japanese ambassador. The Peruvian President assumed that he would eventually have to fight to get them back. "The talks with the guerrillas weren't going to go anywhere," says a high-ranking Peruvian military official. "As soon as the tunnel and the commandos were ready, so was he." Britain, Germany and Israel offered to help, as did the U.S., but all were turned down. "There are some things we Peruvians can do better than the U.S.," Fujimori told TIME in an exclusive interview conducted late Saturday night. "Compare this with Waco." Although Fujimori had promised to inform Japan before making any military move, he didn't want to risk a leak. Also he wasn't sure the Japanese government would share his resolve. "I'm a person who takes audacious measures," he said. "I take responsibility. Challenges are part of my life."

So Fujimori went it alone. He first set Feb. 15 as D-day for the assault, the military official told TIME. But the February attack was called off because the guerrillas and hostages were shifting positions inside the building and intelligence could not pinpoint them. He then chose a date in early March, which was put on hold after Cerpa either heard the noise of the tunnel construction--the army tried to mask it with martial music on blaring loudspeakers--or was tipped off about the digging. Cerpa halted talks with the government's mediators and moved the hostages upstairs.

After Fujimori set the date for last week's assault, the army managed to smuggle at least 11 listening devices into the residence. Some were tiny, matchstick-size two-way microphones that allowed intelligence officers to communicate with the military and police commanders being held inside. The gizmos were carried into the building four days before the raid by intelligence agents posing as government doctors there to check on the hostages' health. The devices were supplied by the cia, according to the military official, and were concealed in personal items, like books, guitars and thermos bottles, that were supposedly sent in by families. Hostages signaled by opening curtains when it was safe to communicate.

When Fujimori gave the go order last week, the commandos did not attack immediately. They spoke to their colleagues inside, telling them they had 10 minutes to pass the word to the other hostages to get down and take cover. And they had a special request: try to open a heavy, metal-reinforced door leading to the balcony outside the master bedroom. The Peruvians whispered their warnings to the others, including Bolivian Ambassador Jorge Gumucio Granier. The news startled Gumucio, who instantly remembered that the guerrillas had practiced more than 20 times how they would react to a raid--by tossing grenades into the rooms the hostages occupied. Gumucio did not remember later how many minutes he waited for the attack to begin, but he said, "To me it was an eternity." Juan Julio Wicht, a Jesuit priest who had stayed on in the residence despite an offer of freedom, got the word that rescuers were coming in but dismissed it as black humor.

The 126 days of more boredom than terror, of carry-out food and no showers, had undercut the morale of rebels and prisoners alike. But it turned out much worse for the rebels, who had become dispirited and inattentive. "This will never end," one of them complained to a hostage the day before the rescue. "They were most ready for a raid after midnight or at 6 in the morning," says Gumucio. "They never expected something in broad daylight."

Just as the guerrillas playing fulbito (minifootball) were bellowing "Goal!," the floor exploded under their feet. Five were killed instantly, and the others scrambled for their weapons and toward the stairs. At the same moment other plastic-explosive charges blasted more openings from the tunnels into the interior of the residence. Still others blew open on each side of the building's exterior, and one ripped up the back garden. "The whole house shook like cardboard," an army lieutenant says, and smoke billowed into the sky as automatic weapons clattered.

Commandos poured out of the tunnels, firing as they came. On the balcony outside the master bedroom, the attackers found a wooden outer door still locked, though hostages had opened the inner, metal panel. One rebel fired his AK-47 through the wood and killed Lieut. Colonel Valer. Valer's troops then blew the door open with a grenade and stormed in. Foreign Minister Francisco Tudela van Bruegal-Douglas was wounded in the leg as he escaped. The commandos, intercepting guerrillas coming up from the living room, shot them down on the staircase.

In another room upstairs, a rebel shot Supreme Court Justice Carlos Giusti Acuna. Giusti died on the way to the hospital of a heart attack. During a fierce fire fight in which Lieut. Raul Jimenez Salazar was killed, another hostage, Agriculture Minister Rodolfo Munante Sanguinetti, had a close call. A guerrilla dashed into the room where he was hiding with several others and raised his rifle. But he did not pull the trigger. "He just left without shooting or lobbing a grenade at us," Munante recalled. "I got the impression the boy suddenly felt bad about what he and the rebels had done." Fujimori, his voice breaking, praised Jimenez later for his leadership, saying, "He was the first to open the way for his companions."

All 14 guerrillas were killed, and in the aftermath there were charges, or at least suspicions, that some had tried to surrender but were executed. Fujimori stoutly denied he had issued a shoot-to-kill order. "My only order," he told reporters, "was to rescue 72 hostages." That is almost the same thing, of course. Special-operations troops are trained to kill swiftly to keep terrorists from fulfilling their threats to massacre their hostages. Commandos usually warn hostages to lie down because they will be shooting at anyone standing up. When the special troops, wearing gas masks, burst into the thick smoke of the residence hallways last week, they had trouble distinguishing hostages from guerrillas. One hard-charging lieutenant shouted, "Anyone who moves gets shot!" He almost fired at a hostage who grabbed his hand and would not let go.

As the smoke began to clear inside, the commandos organized a parade of hostages on their hands and knees--like a trail of ants, as one of them put it. They crept to the bedroom balcony and down an outside stairway to safety. "I kept my nose to the ground," says Gumucio, "but I knew at that moment that stopping us was the last thing the rebels could do."

True. They were lying in gory heaps around the residence. Each time a commando ran past one of the bodies, an army officer told Time, he would pump another bullet into it to make sure. "Each terrorist must have had 500 bullets in him when it was over," the officer said. "Their heads were destroyed."

Whether Tupac Amaru, which has been operating since 1982, is destroyed is less certain. Fujimori has made the claim before, and was proved wrong by the seizure of the embassy residence in December. Now he is not so cocksure. "They are not necessarily eliminated," he says. "There are other terrorists out there, and we're going to keep a more careful eye on them." If they can, those guerrillas will try to show they are still in business with another attack. "Sure, this is a serious defeat," says the Tupac Amaru's European spokeswoman Norma Velazco. "But it is not over yet." Peru's other, larger terrorist organization, Shining Path, would probably like to stage some other outrage to dim Fujimori's victory.

The President's approval rating jumped to 67% in one poll last week, up from 38% during the hostage crisis. But if Fujimori is to stay there and run again successfully in the election three years from now, he will have to do more than chase guerrillas. He rules with a quiet, icy authoritarianism that will have to soften if it is to make room for the social reforms and additional democracy he has promised. But last week his old-fashioned hardness, the stony style he displayed when he glared down at Cerpa's body on the staircase, unquestionably got the job done.

--Reported by Tim Padgett and Douglass Stinson/Lima

With reporting by TIM PADGETT AND DOUGLASS STINSON/LIMA