In stark contrast, no U.S. military planes could be found to look for Odom and her crew mates in Colombia. Two days passed before their crash site was even located by a Colombian plane, and four more days passed before U.S. Embassy personnel rappeled down from hovering helicopters to pick through the wreckage and retrieve the bodies.

Through all this, the families waited in agony for definite word of their loved ones' fate. When it finally came, low-ranking officers called. The Pentagon, meanwhile, tightly held the names and addresses of the crew from the media.

The families of Odom and the other casualties were also given constantly conflicting dates and times for when the caskets would arrive at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Only the last-minute intervention of U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, who represents Odom's rural western Maryland district, allowed her husband and family to get there on time.

No senior White House officials were on hand to greet the arrival of the crew's flag-draped coffins at 1:30 a.m., in sharp contrast to the high-profile, prime-time attendance of U.S. presidents when other American personnel have been killed in service abroad. Attorney General Janet Reno, a civilian, did attend. The solemn ceremony was closed to the media.

"It was almost as if they didn't want us to be there," Odom’s grieving mother said last week as she sat in a living room darkened by drawn shades and filled with mementos of her only daughter's achievements in 4-H Club, high school and West Point, where she graduated in the top quarter of her 1992 class. Outside, a searing hot breeze ruffled the family's corn fields.

There is no joy in this house, a plain white clapboard bungalow in the rolling farmland of Maryland. The Shafers are simple people, farmers, American Gothic. They don't understand why their daughter was mixed up in Colombia, an undeclared war. They can't fathom why they were treated in such a dismissive, even hush-hush way by the Pentagon.

Shafer and her son-in-law, Charles Odom, suspect that the White House and Pentagon deliberately played down the crash of Jennifer's top-secret "Dash-7" to dampen speculation about the full extent of U.S. military intervention in Colombia's civil war, which is "much bigger" than commonly thought, Odom asserted, with "hundreds of Special Forces people running all over the country."

"We're pretty involved down there," Odom said, "and we don't want to let people know how deeply we're involved. And that FARC" -- the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the main Marxist guerrilla group fighting the government -- "may have shot that plane down."

"Every time they came back from a mission," Odom recounted, "there'd be small-arms bullet holes on the fuselage or the tail. I asked her about it, and she said, 'It's a dangerous place. We're always getting shot at and lit up (by guerrilla radar).'

"It wasn't Colombian government radar," Odom declared. "It was a missile lock."

In congressional testimony last March, the commander of U.S. forces in Latin America, Gen. Charles Wilhelm, said intelligence sources were reporting the presence of ground-to-air missiles in the rebels' inventory, including U.S.-made Redeyes and Stingers and Russian Sam-16s, all available on the black market. Only the newest models emit pre-launch signals that a target plane can pick up.

That was alarming enough. But a bigger point went unremarked: If Jennifer Odom's DeHaviland-7RC aircraft was detecting missiles, that meant the U.S. Army had either drifted over the line from tracking narcotics to gathering intelligence on the rebels, or that the cocaine cartels and the guerrillas had now become inseperable. Either way, the U.S. was taking sides in Colombia's civil war, a shooting war, without the American public's knowledge, understanding or approval.

"We have no choice right now but to believe that they crashed," says Adam Isacson, who follows the drug war for the Center for International Policy, a liberal think tank in Washington. "But they were intercepting communications at night -- not your traditional counterdrug mission. And the only communications you intercept when you're flying over Putamayo are guerrilla communications."

In a statement last year, FARC's commander neither claimed credit for nor denied the rebels had shot down the plane. But he warned that the U.S. was risking more casualties if it chose to interfere in Colombia's civil war. FARC and two other leftist groups hold nearly half the country.

To maintain the appearance of noninvolvement in the civil war, U.S. Army policy mandates that intelligence on FARC not be turned over directly to their Colombian counterparts, but sent up through channels to Washington. Only then is it passed to the Colombian army.

The Central Intelligence Agency has "hundreds" of officers in Colombia, Isacson and others said. Companies like DynCorp, in Arlington, Va., have been hired by the Pentagon to deploy at least 200 more former U.S. special warfare types to Colombia, and hundreds more, along with advanced U.S. helicopters, are expected shortly with passage of the new military aid bill.

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