CIA Coverup Followed Another Spy Flight Mystery in Colombia [View All]

[babylonsister]

CIA Coverup Followed Another Spy Flight Mystery in Colombia

By Jeff Stein | November 20, 2008 3:25 PM


Revelations that the CIA misled Congress and the Justice Department about the 2001 downing of a Peruvian plane carrying American missionaries could shake loose still-secret details about another crash in the area two years earlier.

On July 23, 1999, a U.S. Army surveillance plane went down under mysterious circumstances in the mountains of Colombia near the Ecuador border.

The Defense Department's official investigation said that Army pilot Jennifer Odom lost her way in the darkness amid the high Andes. But in the weeks leading up to her doomed flight, Odom had confided to her husband, an Army colonel, that she and the crew of intelligence technicians in the back of her plane, who were supposedly eavesdropping on narcotraffickers, had been "lit up" by radar missiles in the jungle.

As I wrote for Salon.com in July 2000, that led the couple to suspect that the intelligence crew were not targeting drug kingpins, as she had been led to believe, but Marxist guerrillas fighting the Colombia government. Over time, the two became indistinguishable.

But the reason for covering up important details about her death, her husband, Col. Chuck Odom, told me, was that the U.S. was far more deeply involved in Colombia's civil war than publicly acknowledged, with "hundreds of Special Forces people running all over the country."

more...

http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/spytalk/2008/11/cia-coverup-should-prompt-reop.html

Salon article here:

http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2000/07/05/odom/print.html
The Unquiet Death of Jennifer Odom