PILOT'S DEATH REVEALS NEW TURN IN DRUG WAR

Washington - At 1:30 a.m. on Aug.3, the remains of 29-year-old Capt.
Jennifer J.Odom, U.S.Army, arrived at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The
television cameras, usually present at such events, were nowhere to be seen.
Indeed, the news media were totally absent, and the event went unrecorded.
Nor was President Clinton there to feel the her family's pain.

Capt. Odom, along with her co-pilot and three other crew members, died July
23 when the DeHavill and RC7 reconnaissance plane she was piloting crashed
into a mountain in southern Colombia. The Pentagon says there is "no
evidence" that narco-guerrillas shot down the plane, but adds that the
investigation is continuing. In any event,the five-member crew constituted
the first U.S. military personnel to be killed in the war against the
drug-financed, leftist insurrection subverting Colombia. Jennifer Odom is an
unsung heroine in an unknown war.

The non-stop propaganda machinery during 78 days of bombing Yugoslavia was
mute about the death of Odom,the first American woman pilot killed in
action. The Clinton administration says as little as possible about
Colombia.It never wanted to get involved there,but has been dragged into a
conflict it deplores,and still presses for a negotiated settlement with the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia(FARC). If Kosovo was a liberal's war,
Colombia certainly is not.

Thus, the nation and even most of Congress were unaware that the United
States dispatches aircraft on hazardous duty over FARC0 occupied Colombia.
U.S. planes have been on such missions for years, but what is new is the
DeHavilland RC7s, carrying signal intelligence equipment to eavesdrop on the
guerrillas' highly sophisticated communications system. "This is a very
black (secret) operation," said one military source.

A Pentagon spokesman told me that the Odom plane's principal mission was
"imagery" (taking pictures), but added that signal intelligence equipment
was on board and might have been used. Independent military experts,
however, contend that less technologically advanced aircraft - or, indeed,
satellites - could handle imagery.

The RC7 is configured to tap enemy communications (as it did in helping
Peru's government in 1997 when terrorists seized the Japanese embassy in
Lima). But the lid has been placed on Odom's outfit, the 204th Military
Intelligence Battalion in Fort Bliss, Tex., to bar conversations with the press.

Similarly, military sources questioned the likelihood that Odom's death was
accidental. The RC7's navigation equipment is so sophisticated that it is
hard to imagine an experienced pilot crashing into a mountain without some
provocation by enemy forces below.

Such questions went unasked amid the news blackout of the disaster. The
wreckage was spotted July 25, but the names of the crew were not officially
disclosed until Aug. 2 (long after next of kin had been notified). Pentagon
sources speculated that the high command did not want a female pilot's death
in Colombia to interfere with the celebration of Lt. Col. Eileen Collins'
successful command of the Space Shuttle Columbia. It surely did not. At this
writing, only Newsweek, among the mass media, has published a news report on
the crash.

Thus did the first casualties of Colombia's war go unmentioned in much of
the country. In addition to Capt. Odom, they include her co-pilot, Cap. Jose
A.Santiago, as well as Chief Warrant Officer Thomas G. Moore, Specialist T.
Bruce Cluff and Specialist Ray E. Krueger. Typically, when Republican Rep.
Constance Morella took the House floor Tuesday morning to praise astronaut
Collins, there was no mention of her fellow Marylander whose remains had
arrived at Dover only hours before.

Republican Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, whose district contains Odom's hometown of
Brunswick, Md., reported her family was frustrated by inability to get calls
immediately returned by the Defense Department while the military searched
for John F. Kennedy Jr. Senior military officials later telephoned Odom's
mother. But President Clinton, usually adept in commiserating with tragedy,
said nothing.