ARMY WIFE SNORTED COCAINE AT DRUG WAR HEADQUARTERS

U.S. Colonel Had 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Policy About Her Addiction

FORT WORTH, Tex. - The colonel's wife loves cocaine.

You can hear it in her voice -- part party girl, part drama queen -- as she
recounts the time she bought a one-pound brick of the pure stuff. After
snorting two lines, Laurie Hiett says, "I'm like, 'Oh my God, I am so
wired' ... It was this beautiful thing, you know?"

Her escapade would not mean much if she were just another cocaine addict.
But Hiett sampled her brick inside the women's rest-room of the U.S.
embassy in Bogota, Colombia, where her husband, Colonel James C. Hiett, was
in charge of the U.S. Army's anti-drug operation.

Two years later, Laurie Hiett, 37, is in a federal prison, serving five
years for a cocaine and heroin smuggling scheme so amateurish investigators
found her name on shipping records. Her husband will begin a five-month
prison term in January for joining his wife on a drug-money spending spree.

Col. Hiett, 48, has declined to talk to reporters while he waits to see if
the Army will let him quietly retire. But court documents and a prison
interview with his wife reveal a story mixing romantic tragedy with
international farce.

Laurie Hiett said her husband felt his last shred of honour stripped away
when a federal judge in Brooklyn sentenced him to jail last month.
Prosecutors had predicted he would get probation, if only so he could care
for their two young sons.

After the sentencing, the colonel told his wife, he pulled his car into a
rest stop and spent the night there, contemplating suicide.

"My husband hasn't done anything wrong in his life," Laurie Hiett said in
the visiting room in a women's prison in Fort Worth, Tex. As she spoke, she
showed flashes of the vivaciousness that had charmed an older man into
giving her the same devotion he once only gave the military.

The femme fatale of the War on Drugs was a single woman living with her
parents when she met James Hiett in the late 1980s.

The daughter of a Panamanian mother and an American engineer, she worked as
a secretary in the Canal Zone. Into her life walked a man with a spotless
24-year military career, newly assigned to the U.S. Southern Command and
friendly enough to help her fix a broken printer.

"He was so sweet," she said. "And he had his life together."

They married in 1989. Laurie Hiett had experimented with drugs and alcohol,
but not to excess. Still, compared to her by-the-book husband, she was a
free spirit, not cut out for the role of military wife.

"I never fit in," she said. During Col. Hiett's tours in Fayetteville,
N.C., and Panama in the early 1990s, she found comfort in a fast crowd and
hard drugs. In Fayetteville, she taught high school Spanish by day and
snorted away her salary by night.

"I had all sorts of people over to my house who were obviously not part of
the military world," she said. "I had girlfriends who worked for escort
services. I would drive them around to their calls."

Her husband stopped taking her to military social events, but they never
discussed her secret until 1995, when she told him she wanted to enter rehab.

"If it's going to help you, I don't care," she recalls him saying. "So,
high as a kite, I checked myself in." Laurie Hiett stayed clean for a few
months, but her problem resurfaced. So did their domestic "don't ask, don't
tell" policy.

Once, while stationed in Fort Bragg, N.C., a frustrated Hiett taunted her
husband by snorting a line in front of him. He just walked out of the room.

In the spring of 1998, amid the mad mix of self-destruction and denial, the
Army promoted Col. Hiett to chief of the Colombia operation. His wife knew
Bogota was a bad idea. "This is the ironic thing," she said. "I tried so
hard not to go."

Col. Hiett's job was to supervise more than 150 U.S. troops training local
forces to combat Colombian drug lords. As part of a routine screening
process, an Army medical technician reviewed his wife's medical records.
The government says the technician alerted superiors to her history of
mental problems and, because of privacy rules, nothing else. Those rules
prohibited the superiors from seeing the medical records themselves.

Laurie Hiett's attorney, Paul Lazarus, says the current U.S. ambassador to
Nicaragua, Oliver Garza, then a diplomat in Bogota, saw paperwork revealing
her appetite for drugs. He also claims Mr. Garza opposed letting her live
in the country that supplies 80% of the world's cocaine.

In court papers, prosecutors insisted that "relevant Army officials" were
unaware of the problem. They pointed out that in lobbying to take his wife
to Colombia, Col. Hiett never mentioned her addiction.

Laurie Hiett pressed her husband to let her and the boys remain in Texas.
He changed her mind by showing her Bogota. "I had cars, I had security, I
was going to these beautiful parties ... I mean, I was like a queen," she
said. "So then I was like, 'Oh yeah, I'm here.' "

They moved in 1998 and for a while Laurie suppressed her dark side. But the
colonel was often away fighting the drug war, and soon she got bored. So
she found a companion: a charming embassy employee named Jorge Ayala, a
Colombian assigned to be her driver. One day, she asked Ayala to take her
to a bar in La Zona Rosa, a red-light district. There, she asked him: "I
was just wondering if you could get me some cocaine?"

"Of course," she remembers him replying.

She expected a gram, but an hour later she was holding a brown-paper
package the size of a videocassette.

"Oh, my God," she said. "Jorge, what is this?" Soon she was sneaking a
small chunk of the pure coke into the bathroom of an embassy crawling with
Marines and Drug Enforcement Administration agents.

Once behind doors at home, "I proceed to inhale as much as I can. And I
continue to do this, and do this and do this."

Spooked at the vastness of the supply, she decided to deliver it to her old
drug buddies on a visit to the United States with her husband. She carried
the drugs in a carry-on bag. Her diplomatic credentials provided cover.

"I go through about four security checkpoints in Colombia, and the ones in
Miami and make it all the way through with an open pound of cocaine in my
overnight bag," she marvelled.

Once back in Bogota, she told Jorge she needed more. Quickly, he suggested
"a business idea."

They agreed he would buy the drugs, Laurie would ship them from the embassy
and a friend of Ayala's, Hernan Arcila, would receive the packages for New
York City dealers.

On April 13, 1999, Laurie Hiett walked into the embassy post office with a
small package wrapped in brown paper. She filled out a customs declaration
identifying the contents as aT-shirt, candy, coffee -- whatever popped into
her head. She was too wired on drugs to be nervous that she was really
mailing 1.13 kilograms of cocaine. Over the next six weeks, she shipped
five more packages -- 6.8 kilograms of cocaine and heroin worth US$500,000.

Courts papers show Laurie Hiett received at least $25,000, easy money for a
couple drowning in debt created by her free-spending. She flew to New York
twice to collect her share, stashing cash in her luggage. She claims her
husband was too busy and trusting to pin her down on where the money came
from. "I'd say, 'Don't ask me, you don't need to know,' " she said.

For a while, she got away with it. Once, she stashed some heroin in an
embassy video store where she worked. "All my customers were DEA agents,
FBI, and I have this kilo here on the floor," she said. "Wasn't that insane?"

A random search of incoming Bogota parcels by customs agents on May 23,
1999, in Miami would end the insanity. An undercover agent delivered the
intercepted heroin shipment to Arcila's address, then arrested him trying
to slip out the back door. Investigators found the customs declarations
Laurie Hiett had filled out when she mailed the packages, and they found
Ayala's name on paperwork in Arcila's home.

Col. Hiett finally demanded some answers. "Laurie, I need you to look at me
in the eye," he began, as she describes the moment. "Did you ever send a
package to New York?"

"Yes I did. But I didn't know what was in it."

"OK, Laurie, I believe you."

Hiett pleaded innocent to drug conspiracy charges, but later told
prosecutors what she knew in a bid to avoid a 10-year prison term. She
regrets that her words were used against her husband.

Shortly after the couple learned they were under investigation, her husband
joined her on a trip to Florida carrying $11,000 in cash. By then, there
was no denying it was drug money, but the colonel used it on hotel and
credit card bills, and to deposit in bank accounts. It was, he admitted
later, an attempt to launder the cash.

Hiett told a judge that if she had known her exploits "were going to
destroy my husband, I would have never done it ... I'm ashamed and devastated."

She tries to comfort her sons, ages 12 and 8, by telling them their family
"is on an adventure." The boys will live with an uncle once their father
goes away.

And the marriage?

The couple left court holding hands when Col. Hiett pleaded guilty in
April. She said she wants to spend the rest of her life with the man who
knew "exactly how to hold me and rock me" whenever drugs left her drowning
in despair.