Iraq was telling the truth about Speicher all along
Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names
WASHINGTON – Saddam Hussein was telling the truth, this time. The
United States just didn't believe him.
So it took the most powerful military in the world 18 years to find
the remains of the only U.S. Navy pilot shot down in an aerial battle
in the 1991 Gulf War.
Michael "Scott" Speicher's bones lay 18 inches deep in Iraqi sand,
more or less right where a group of Iraqis had led an American search
team in 1995.
The search for Speicher was frustrated by two wars, mysteriously
switched remains, Iraqi duplicity and a final tip from a young nomad
in Anbar province.
U.S. officials often were blinded by the same myopia that tainted
prewar intelligence — the American conviction that Hussein's
government lied about everything. As it turned out, the Iraqis lied,
but sometimes they told the truth.
For more than a decade, speculation swirled that the 33-year-old
Speicher, a lieutenant commander when he went missing, had been
captured alive. That was disproved by the team that found and
confirmed his remains.
"He wasn't captured or tortured," said Thomas Brown, chief of the
Intelligence Community POW/MIA analytic cell at the Defense
Intelligence Agency. Brown, who worked on Speicher's case for 15
years, described to The Associated Press in an exclusive interview how
the threads leading to the pilot got so tangled.
Speicher was shot down by an Iraqi MiG 100 miles west of Baghdad on
Jan. 17, 1991, the first day of the war to drive Saddam's invading
forces from Kuwait. Then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney announced the
pilot's death as the first casualty of the war, but no search and
rescue effort was launched.
When the war ended that March, the U.S. demanded the return of
Speicher's remains. But because of a data glitch, the U.S. erroneously
pinpointed his crash site south of Baghdad.
The Iraqis were puzzled. They knew an F-18 had been shot down west of
the capital. But they followed the botched U.S. coordinates and
searched for Speicher's plane in the south, finding nothing.
The search was soon complicated by the Iraqi discovery of a different
crash site — of a downed Air Force A-10 fighter. The Iraqis brought
the unidentified American A-10 pilot's remains to a Basrah hospital
for safekeeping, labeling them "Mickel" for a clumsy translation of
what might have been the pilot's belt buckle manufactured by McDonnell
Douglas.
Just before those remains were to be handed over to the U.S., Shiites
rebelling against Saddam seized the hospital, forcing Iraqi officials
to make a hasty gamble.
If they didn't turn over the pilot's remains, they would be in
violation of the U.N. resolution ending the war, and the war would not
be officially over. So the Iraqis instead handed over to American
authorities a 4-pound piece of another cadaver and said it belonged to
"Mickel."
U.S. officials already had accounted for the dead A-10 pilot, so the
unidentified remains stumped them. Were they Speicher's?
By May 1991, DNA tests ruled that out. Iraq was being duplicitous, but
the U.S. couldn't figure out what was behind the switch.
Rumors from Hussein's inner circle about the "Mickel" remains began to
morph into whispering that the Iraqis held a live American pilot. The
rumors were picked up by U.S. intelligence.
Two years later, in 1993, Speicher's crash site was found by a party
of Qatari falcon hunters. Brown believes the Iraqis already had
identified the crash site but failed to come forward out of fear they
would be accused of covering it up. So instead, the Iraqis led the
Qatari hunters to the site, Brown said, so they would "stumble" on the
wreckage.
The hunters gave the U.S. Embassy in Qatar a piece of a plane
containing a serial number that matched Speicher's F-18.
U.S. military officials began planning an operation to retrieve
Speicher's remains. The plan was dropped in 1995 when the Red Cross
secured permission from Iraq for a humanitarian search team to
excavate the crash site.
Shepherded by Iraqi officials, the search team was led by a local
Bedouin boy to Speicher's half-buried flight suit. Nearby were
expended flares, part of an ejection seat and pieces of a life raft.
But the searchers found no remains. They left suspicious, convinced
that they had been set up even though Brown now says Saddam's
government was telling the truth about the site.
In January 2001, President Bill Clinton changed Speicher's status from
killed in action to missing, echoing U.S. belief he could be alive. An
intelligence assessment said Speicher probably had survived the crash
and Iraq was either holding him prisoner or hiding his remains.
In the summer of 2002, as the Bush administration prepared to invade
Iraq, new intelligence intercepts suggested Speicher was being moved
between dozens of secret sites inside Iraq.
Before the 2003 invasion, "we were positive we were getting him back,"
said Buddy Harris, a Speicher friend who later married the pilot's
widow. "We were getting ready to go over and meet with him. We had the
whole family prepped, with psychologists ready to help."
At least three different times, based on U.S. government information,
Speicher's relatives thought they were getting him back, Harris said.
Brown believes the Iraqi government was trying to convince President
George W. Bush that Speicher was still alive to protect Saddam from
being targeted when the invasion came.
If that was the motivation, it backfired. Bush used Speicher's case as
more evidence that Saddam had to be ousted. After Bush cited Speicher
in his September 2002 speech at the United Nations, the rumors of
Speicher's movements abruptly stopped, Brown said.
After the U.S. invasion, intelligence analysts searching for Speicher
entered the Hakmiya jail in central Baghdad and dug up the grounds.
They found remains, but none that matched Speicher's DNA.
They did find a jail cell wall that appeared to be marked with the
initials "M.S.S." — and wondered if they had been scratched by the
missing pilot.
The Army dismantled the wall section and sent it back to the U.S. for
testing. That same summer a soldier discovered similar initials and
what appeared to be a date_ 9-15-94 — scratched into an I-beam in a
parking garage in Tikrit. The FBI cut down the beam and sent it to the
Smithsonian Institution for testing.
But the markings turned out to be more false leads. The museum
determined the Tikrit initials were made with a special ink reserved
for Iraqi religious groups — and an American prisoner would not likely
have had access to such sacred ink. While other "M.S.S." markings were
found all over Iraq, the analysts were never able to tie them to
Speicher.
The searchers continued to press every lead. For six years, soldiers
and Marines deployed in Anbar were told to ask people there if they
had heard anything about the missing American pilot.
The instructions finally paid off last July. A sheik told Marines of a
Bedouin who remembered a burial 20 years earlier. The sheik couldn't
recall the exact location, but it was enough for the Marines. They
returned to the old site that had frustrated the Red Cross searchers
and with 100 men, bulldozers and back hoes, they turned over four
football fields worth of desert, 4 feet deep.
The earth yielded another piece of a pilot's flight suit and a jaw
bone. The teeth matched the missing pilot's dental records. Michael
Scott Speicher, who reached the rank of captain because he kept
receiving promotions while his status was unknown, had been there all
along, Brown said.
The U.S. now says the case is closed, but Speicher's family, from
outside Jacksonville, Fla., is still unconvinced that he died in the
crash.
Buddy Harris says the ending is too neat, meant to whitewash the
Pentagon's failure to launch a search and rescue mission in 1991.
"Too many people want to tie it into a nice little bow here," Harris
says. "Their motive wasn't Scott Speicher, it was to get this thing
done."