For a while after the leak was detected the flights were suspended, partly out of security concerns, but also because of constant equipment failures, she said.

"There were always problems with the planes, they were always messed up," Krueger recalled. "The surveillance equipment. Lights weren't working right. Some stuff with the fuel and the engines wasn't working right. I mean, they were down a lot."

In June of that year, meanwhile, she'd married Ray Krueger, another intelligence specialist in the unit, whom she'd dated for two years.

Then in July the company commander caused an uproar when he announced the crew would be resuming spy missions in Colombia.

"Nobody was even thinking about [going back to] Colombia," Krueger said, "so when he said Colombia, there was a hush all over the room, like, 'What? Why are we going back there?' There was like a whole minute of silence. Then everybody was talking at once, like, you know, 'Why are we going there?'"

The plane's pilot, West Point graduate Odom, 29, was also leery of the Colombian ride-alongs.

"Jennifer said they were always suspect," her husband said. "In that part of the world, they don't know who to trust." The Colombians are supposedly checked out and cleared by the U.S. Embassy, "but a quick background check down there doesn't mean much."

His wife had also quarreled privately with her commander, because the sad state of the equipment would require her to fly alone in Colombia, without the usual pairing with other aircraft. Since she was scheduled to take command of the unit in October, she argued that the unit should stand down and bring the aircraft up to snuff.

"The unit was overworked, undermanned, overextended," said Charles Odom.

"She felt it foolish to deploy simply for a show of force, with one aircraft. Also she felt it was dangerous to fly only one aircraft in a normally three-ship, mutually supporting configuration." Odom pressed for postponing the mission but was overruled. On July 13, she left for Colombia.

U.S. personnel at Apiay shared the base with Colombian air force and army units, who didn't always appreciate the efforts of their mentors. Colombian officers deplored the practice of their counterparts sharing meals with enlisted personnel. The Colombian Air Force commander "was very rude and difficult with Jennifer," a fellow pilot recalled, as well as with other U.S. pilots.

Another source of friction was that the Americans were under orders not to give the Colombians any intelligence they'd gathered on Marxist guerrilla groups while on counter-narcotics missions.

The rationale was -- and remains -- that the U.S. isn't at war with the rebels, only drug traffickers, although the distinction is quickly lost on U.S. personnel. Drugs are to Colombia what secret bank accounts are to Switzerland: the country's principal business, engaging every sector of the economy from transport to insurance. Government officials, army officers, leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitaries alike are entwined in the illicit trade.

Since U.S. policy required that American units maintain the appearance of noninvolvement in the civil war, however, intelligence gathered on rebels during anti-narcotics missions is thus denied to local Colombian commanders, sources said, and instead sent to Washington.

Appearances aside, however, the intelligence eventually got back to the Colombians after it was processed in Washington, via the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, where it was shared with counterparts, at least some of them corrupt.

The system prompted U.S. military advisors in Colombia to avoid the embassy like the flu, according to one Green Beret sergeant. He said his unit, the 20th Special Forces Group, an Army Reserve outfit in Maryland that rotates into Colombia on training missions, avoided sharing mission plans or other data with "the embassy pukes" because they considered the environment insecure. Any useful intelligence they gathered was channeled to their own command at Fort Bragg, N.C., circumventing the embassy.

The Americans' distrust of the Colombians extended to training missions in the field, said the sergeant, who had also seen duty in Haiti and Somalia in the 1990s.

"The SEALs (U.S. Navy special operations forces) won't even let the Colombians on their boats," the sergeant alleged, on condition that his name not be disclosed, "and they're supposed to be training riverines.

"We don't have that choice, because there's a certification process we have to go through." (They must report to Washington that the Colombians have been trained and are aggressively combating drug traffic.) The sergeant said that in the field the Green Berets would camp several hundred meters from their charges because they didn't trust the Colombians, who, in any event, rarely deployed sentries or mines at night.

The Green Berets also suspected that the Colombian major in charge of the 1st Marine Brigade, the unit they were training, was secretly doubling as a right-wing paramilitary leader in league with a drug cartel.

"He completely avoided attacking the cocaine refineries," the sergeant said.

Meanwhile, spy plane crews at Apiay found themselves increasingly involved in a shooting war.

"I was just very uncomfortable about us going down there," said Dawn Smith, an Army spy pilot in Colombia during 1999-2000, "because we were supposed to be [in a condition of] low intensity, period. We were not supposed to be in a high-intensity environment." At night, she said, automatic rifle fire often crackled outside the perimeter. "And it was kind of primitive. They had just a low little barbed wire fence surrounding the grounds, and the place could've been overrun very easily. And we at first didn't even have any weapons."

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