HUNGER FOR DRUGS LED U.S. COLONEL'S WIFE ASTRAY

FORT WORTH, Texas - 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 wouldn't mean much if she were just another coke addict.

But Hiett sampled her brick inside the women's restroom of the
fortress-like U.S. Embassy in Bogota, Colombia, where her husband, Col.
James C. Hiett, was in charge of the Army's high-stakes antidrug operation.

Two years later, Laurie Hiett, 37, is in a federal prison, serving five
years for a cocaine and heroin smuggling scheme so amateurish that
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 here with his wife reveal a story mixing romantic tragedy with
international scandal.

Free spirit cuts loose

Laurie Hiett was a single woman living with her parents when she met James
Hiett in the late 1980s.

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

At the time the pair 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 had to cook - I didn't know how to cook. I had to entertain - I didn't
know how to entertain," she said. "I never fit in."

During Col. Hiett's tours in Fayetteville, N.C., and Panama in the early
1990s, his impulsive spouse found comfort in a fast crowd and hard drugs.
Her partying, once confined to weekends, spiraled out of control.

"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."

Embarrassed, the officer stopped including his wife in military social
events. But they never discussed her dirty little 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.

"I thought, `How could you not see what was going on here?' " she said.
"That's why I did that."

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, supervising
more than 150 U.S. troops training local forces to combat Colombian drug loads.

Kid in a candy store

Even the colonel's wife knew Bogota was a bad idea.

"This is the ironic thing," she said. "I tried so hard not to go."

In court papers, prosecutors insisted that "relevant Army officials were
unaware of the defendant's drug problem."

Laurie Hiett's attorney, Paul Lazarus, says the current U.S. ambassador to
Nicaragua, Oliver P. Garza, then a diplomat in Bogota, saw paperwork
revealing her appetite for drugs. The lawyer also claims that Garza told
Army brass he opposed letting her live in the country that supplies 80
percent of the world's cocaine.

Both sides agree Col. Hiett assured his superiors that his wife was
medicated and stable. She now says she was neither, but "nobody bothered to
follow up on me."

At home, she 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,
beautiful places for dinner . . . I mean, I was like a queen," she said,
snapping her fingers.

Moving to Colombia in the summer of 1998, Laurie Hiett suppressed her dark
side - for a time. But the colonel often was away fighting the drug war,
inviting trouble at home.

"I was bored," Laurie Hiett said. "It seemed like I was by myself all the
time."

So she found a companion: a charming embassy employee named Jorge Ayala, a
Colombian assigned to be her driver. One day, Hiett asked Ayala to take her
to a bar in La Zona Rosa, a red-light district declared off-limits to
embassy personnel.

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 sitting in her Ford
Explorer holding a brown-paper package the size of a videocassette.

"Oh, my God," she said. "Jorge, what is this?"

A few minutes later, she was sneaking a small chunk of the pure coke into
the bathroom of an embassy crawling with Marines and Drug Enforcement
Administration agents.

The supply was so vast that 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 check points 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 marveled.

An all-night binge with her friends, she thought, would be her last; but
once back in Bogota, she told Jorge she needed more. He realized she had
taken the brick on her trip.

"He said, `I knew you did it! I knew you did it!,' " she said. `Now I have
a business idea for you.' "

Amateurs hatch plot

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 a T-shirt, candy, coffee - whatever popped into
her head. She was too wired on drugs to be nervous that she was really
mailing 2 1/2 pounds of cocaine.

Over the next six weeks, Hiett shipped five more packages. In all, 15
pounds of cocaine and heroin made it to New York, where it had a street
value of about a half-million dollars.

How much the conspirators made is unclear, although court papers show
Laurie Hiett received at least $25,000. For a couple drowning in debt
created by her free-spending ways, the easy money was another narcotic.

"I was thinking heroin is such a bad drug," she said, "but I just wanted to
pay these bills."

Laurie Hiett flew to New York City twice in the spring of 1999 to collect
her share, stashing bundles of cash in her luggage. Records show that after
her trips, the colonel bought nearly $13,000 in money orders made out to a
dentist, five credit-card companies and other creditors. She claims he was
too busy and trusting to pin her down on where the money came from.

Springing the trap

By the time the Army Criminal Investigation Division summoned Laurie Hiett
in June, 1999, the case against her was overwhelming.

Her New York connection was arrested and talked. Investigators had found
the customs declarations Laurie Hiett had filled out when she mailed the
packages.

They had found Ayala's name on paperwork in the New York dealer's home.
When they questioned him, Ayala blamed it all on Laurie Hiett. He remains
in a Colombian prison, fighting extradition.

Army investigators say that when Hiett was first asked about the shipments,
she insisted Ayala had asked her to send them as a favor, but that she
didn't know what was in them.

Questioned separately, Col. Hiett denied knowing what his wife was up to.
In private, he 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."

Laurie Hiett surrendered to federal authorities in Brooklyn in August. By
then, her husband had requested a transfer that landed him in a desk job at
Fort Monroe, Va.

Though Hiett pleaded innocent to drug-conspiracy charges, she soon agreed
to tell prosecutors what she knew in a bid to avoid a 10-year prison term.

Shortly after the couple learned they were under investigation, she
admitted, 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 anyway on hotel and credit card bills, and to deposit in bank accounts.
This was, he admitted later, an attempt to launder the cash.

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

Hiett 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
always knew "exactly how to hold me and rock me" whenever drugs left her
drowning in despair.

In one of those moments, she recalled, "I said, `Where's Laurie? Where's
Laurie?' And he said, `Laurie's in there somewhere, and one day she'll be
back.' "

"Here, I'm back," she said, "and I'm in jail."