U.S. efforts to stop the flow of Colombian cocaine, she complained, including her own nighttime electronic spying missions, hadn’t amounted to "even a speed bump" against the surging illicit traffic. The flow of drugs north had doubled in the past year.

More worrisome, she said, her four-engine turboprop, crammed with sophisticated electronic gear to eavesdrop on cellphones and take infrared photos of cocaine factories, had been "lit up" -- tracked -- by hostile missile radar on recent flights.

That meant only one thing to Odom and her husband, retired Army Lt. Col. Charles Odom, an officer who'd had top secret clearances: Narco-guerrillas in the jungle below had obtained advanced ground-to-air missiles, the kind that emit pre-launch signals a plane like Odom's could pick up. The war in Colombia, the Odoms agreed, had entered a new stage, and Jennifer believed her plane could be blown out of the air at any time.

Sometime after 3 a.m. that same night, Odom failed to make her regularly scheduled contact with an Army Intelligence communications base in Key West, Fla. She and her crew of four Americans and two Colombian liaison personnel had crashed on the side of a steep, unmapped mountain near the border with Ecuador. All were dead.

Thus did Jennifer Shafer Odom, 29, a slim, motorcyle-riding brunet and top graduate of West Point, become the first U.S. military casualty of Washington's "war against drugs" in Colombia. Now, a year later, Congress is sending $1.3 billion in direct military aid to Bogotá, raising the stakes even higher. The measure includes an untold increase in U.S. military and civilian "advisors," on top of the several hundred DEA agents and Green Berets already there, ensuring that Odom won’t be the last to disappear into the Colombian maelstrom.

Indeed, the U.S. is likely to plunge even deeper into the bottomless civil wars of the Andes, where the differences among cocaine traffickers, left-wing guerillas, right-wing death squads and corrupt government troops have become increasingly blurred, and every element -- even the U.S. military, apparently -- has been corrupted by drugs.

As Congress debated the aid package, a Colombian rebel leader said the escalation of military assistance would "throw fuel on the fire" of the nation’s civil war, and threatened to launch missiles against U.S. aircraft. But the family of Jennifer Odom believes that already happened. The Pentagon just didn’t want anyone to know.

Almost a year after Odom died, her family is still seeking answers about what really happened that moonless night in southeast Colombia. The Army classified her death as a "mishap," saying she unwittingly flew the plane into an uncharted mountain even though she was an experienced pilot flying in good weather conditions, in a plane equipped with state-of-the-art, forward-looking radar and navigational aides. Her family suspects she was shot down.

No such evidence can be found in the Army’s thick, three-pound report on the incident, although so much of it was blacked out by censors that answers to the hard questions can't be found in it.

Most disturbing to the family, Odom reported to Col. James Hiett, the top U.S. counter-narcotics official in Colombia. Hiett meanwhile was helping his wife launder the proceeeds of her cocaine smuggling through the U.S. embassy with the help of his chauffeur. The arrest of the Hietts five months after Odom’s death shocked the family and left it wondering whether Hiett or other U.S. officials responsible for sensitive drug interdiction missions could be trusted.

"Jennifer briefed Hiett on her mission on July 14th. Nine days later the crew was dead," says her grief-stricken mother, Janie Shafer.

No evidence has surfaced that Hiett had anything to do with Odom's death. But if the U.S. chief of counter-narcotics in Colombia can’t be trusted, Shafer wonders, who can?

Hiett, who is scheduled to be sentenced in mid-July, could not be reached for comment. His wife is serving a five-year prison term.

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