Lt. Cdr. Speicher Crashed in Iraq but was forgotten by his country--Left Behind

Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher's F/A-18 Hornet thundered into the combat zone with nine others from his air wing off the aircraft carrier Saratoga.

Operation Desert Storm had just begun, and this Jan. 17, 1991, U.S. strike was the first against Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces.

After carrying out their mission to attack radar sites, the jets returned to the Saratoga.

All except one.

Speicher, 33, did not come back. Some of the aviators recalled a particularly bright explosion on the run near Baghdad. They thought Speicher was hit by an air-to-air missile and ejected. They hoped he would be found and brought home.

But there was no search for the Navy pilot. No rescue mission. No body brought home. Alive or dead? Ten years, no answers.

The unprecedented change in status reflects the cumulative weight of information and political pressure that has come to bear in the case over a decade.

Many in the military and the highest levels of government believe that Speicher was wrongfully written off right from the start.

Some of his fellow squadron members were shocked that Navy leaders did not launch a search-and-rescue mission soon after Speicher went down.

"My clear recollection was that nobody had thought he had been killed," said retired Cmdr. Bob Stumpf, a decorated fighter pilot who was in VFA-83, the sister squadron to Speciher's.

He flew in the airstrike into Iraq with Speicher.

"My thought was, 'The poor bastard is on the ground evading capture,'" Stumpf said.

"There was no talk that he had been killed. There was no reason to think that."

Yet, Navy leadership decided against any attempt to located the downed pilot.

"The first report was that the plane disintegrated on impact; [there was] no contact with the pilot, we really don't believe anyone survived," retired Adm. Stan Arthur, commander of allied naval forces during the Gulf War, told the CBS News television program "60 Minutes."

Since the crash, experts have speculated that Speicher didn't radio for help because his radio may have been lost in the aftermath of the hit on his jet, possibly during ejection.

JoAnne Speicher, the missing pilot's widow and mother of their two children, sued the radio's maker, Motorola, alleging the product was defective and left him unable to communicate after the crash. The case was settled out of court. JoAnne Speicher has declined all media requests for interviews.

Arthur who did not respond to multiple requests from Navy Times for interviews, also told "60 Minutes" that in retrospect, he regrets the decision to not search for Speicher.

Within hours of Speicher's disappearance, then-Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney told reporters that an F/A-18 Hornet had been lost in the first attacks and the had been killed.

Speicher's official status remained missing in action, but the declaration that he was killed ran contrary to what some aviators on the Saratoga believed.

"We were very surprised the next day when the Defense Department announced that he had been killed. We assumed they had information we did not," Stumpf said.

In fact, the Defense Department was operating on very little information.

Stumpf said that Speicher's squadron commanding officer had him help pinpoint where Speicher likely went down.

"I'm sure he tried really hard to get a rescue mission. But when you're on the ship, 700 miles away, you can only be told to shut up so many times."

"It's such a metaphor for what's wrong with the country today," he said. "It seems to fit with the whole dismantling of the warrior culture. It's unwritten oath that we're not going to leave anyone out there."

Sen. Pat Roberts, a Republican from Speicher's home state of Kansas and member of the State Select Intelligence Committee, said that he believes Speicher's country let him down.

"Without question, we lost one of our own, left him behind," Roberts said.

Roberts and Sen. Bob Smith, R-New Hampshire, have been at the forefront of a campaign to raise the profile of Speicher's case and find the answer to his condition and whereabouts.

On the flight back to the carrier, Speicher could not be raised on the radio.

"I didn't know what had happened. I didn't want to think the worst," Albano said. But Smith said there's strong evidence that Speicher survived the jet crash.

"There is not one bit of evidence to suggest that Speicher perished in his aircraft," Smith said. "In fact, we have strong indications to the contrary that he did at least survive the ejection."

"WE have no indications that he is still alive to day and yet no evidence that says he died."

Over the past 10 years, the trail to the truth of what happened to Speicher has run hot and cold, through intriguing clues and confounding twists.

A few weeks after the war ended, Iraq turned over a one pund package of what it said were Speicher's remains. DNA testing showed that it was not.

In May 1991, the late Adm. Mike Boorda, then the Navy's personnel chief, approved a review board's recommended "finding of death" and Speicher's status was changed from missing to dead.

The case went all but uninvestigated until December 1993, when an official from Qatar stumbled upon the wreckage of an aircraft in the Iraqi desert while hunting for rare falcons. He forwarded pictures to U.S. officials. Serial numbers in the photos matched Speicher's aircraft. The Qatari official said he saw an ejection seat near the site.

U.S. forces planned a covert mission to comb the wreckage. But then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. John Shalikashvilli vetoed the mission as too risky to American lives.

Americans didn't get to the the site for two years, until December 1995, when a Red Cross team and experts from the U.S. Central Identification Lab in Hawaii arrived with Saddam's permission.

They found the site had been tampered with. There was no sign of Speicher or human remains.

It was clear to the team that the aircraft crashed into the ground in one piece.

Accident investigators determined that the pilot had initiated ejection. But there was no sign of the ejection seat the official from Qatar had reported seeing.

Other evidence found was a flight suit, reportedly located by a Bedouin shepherd. The Iraqi escorts refused to allow U.S. investigators to interview the shepherd and suspected the flight suit might have been planted at the site to give the appearance that the pilot died there.

Other "pilot-related materials" about a kilometer away included:
--Six fragments of anti-G suit material.
--An ejection-seat upper-leg fragment.
--Three survival-raft fragments.
--A survival-kit flare.
--A parachute harness fragment.

According to a memorandum dated January 1997 from Lt. Cmdr. Kevin Wilson of the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, or DPMO, the flight suit was "consistent with the one worn by LCDR Speicher" and the survival equipment appeared to have been cut with a sharp object.

There were some blood stains, but none suggesting massive external bleeding, the memo said.

DNA testing on the stains was found to be "inconclusive," said Larry Greer, spokesman for DPMO.

"It was not a definite match," he said. "It was also not a definite exclusion."

"In July 1999, we asked the intel community to conduct an inquiry," Roberts said. "It took 18 months but it happened."

Stumpf says the move was long overdue.

"The Navy and the Department of Defense have been dragging their feet on this. Once we had the wreckage located in '93, that's when we started making the really god-awful mistake of not going in there to investigate the crash site," Stumpf said.

As a result, Roberts pushed for changes to the law that now require intelligence agencies to share all POW/MIA information.

"The system failed, so we had to fix the system, to ensure that all available data is analyzed and that accurate determinations are made," Roberts said.

Roberts said that in the few weeks since Speicher was listed as MIA, new sources have come forward with information.

Though Iraq has yet to formally respond to a recent State Department inquiries about Speicher, the status change sends a strong message, Roberts said.

"Iraq has to know that this will not stand," he said.

Stumpf, who remains in contact with Speicher's family, described them as involved and concerned about the continuing search to discover what happened.