Fate of Missing Pilot Spans Two Wars

Lt. Barry Hull emerged from his F/A-18 Hornet and climbed onto the deck of the aircraft carrier Saratoga, unhappy with his landing. He knew to expect better when his squadron mate, Lt. Cmdr. Scott Speicher, zoomed onto the ship from the sky over the Red Sea.

Speicher’s landing, of course, would be perfect. He was the best Navy pilot in the squadron.

Cmdr. Michael “Spock” Anderson had led the squad out of the hellfire over Baghdad. Once over the sea, he had radioed the others. All but Speicher had checked in.

Hull didn’t worry at first, he remembers today. They all figured “Spike” was out of range. Hull radioed: “Come in, Spike. This is Skull. Talk to me!” Nothing. So they waited.

It was Jan. 17, 1991, a war with Iraq was beginning, and American planes were in the air. But Speicher, 33, didn’t land that day. He never landed, and he never came home.

They declared him dead at first; the Secretary of Defense said it on live TV. His widow remarried, his children grew. But then doubts began to worm their way in. Odd clues surfaced. A shadowy informant told a story. After a decade, the Pentagon changed its mind: Speicher, it said, was not dead but missing or captured.

Did Speicher tumble from the sky to his death, or did he eject and survive to scrawl his initials on the wall of an Iraqi prison? Did he endure another, more intricate tale that, even now, remains untold?

The questions reached Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, the Oval Office itself. Leads were followed. Half-truths were wrung like damp washcloths. Speculation, hope, dread, cynicism -- all made cameo appearances in the saga of the missing pilot.

Eventually, with another Bush in the White House and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq still an enemy, the story transcended one pilot. Speicher’s case had become something more -- a small part of the rationale for another war.

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In late 2002 and early 2003, as the Bush administration made its case for invading Iraq, Speicher’s name began echoing again in the halls of power. Had Hussein held him captive all these years?

Hussein’s government said no. But Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said the missing pilot -- if he was alive -- was one reason to invade. Bush himself raised Speicher’s presumed capture to the United Nations.

These were only the latest in years of efforts to determine the airman’s fate. But the push didn’t start immediately, friends of Speicher allege. In 1991, Hull says, Speicher “had been left behind.”

On the day Speicher disappeared, the military told his wife that search-and-rescue teams were looking for him, his friends say. But that wasn’t happening, Hull contends, bristling at the memory.

“Part of the deal is that if I go down, by God, it’s your job to come get me,” Hull says. He doesn’t buy the Navy’s belated argument that, without a distress call from Speicher, a rescue mission would have been futile.

He asserts that the Navy knew -- or should have known -- that Speicher’s new radio didn’t fit in its pouch and had probably been blown out of his survival vest when he ejected. Why, he wonders, didn’t the military follow information from an airman who had marked the coordinates of the fireball that investigators later linked to an air-to-air missile fired by an Iraqi MiG?

But as the 1991 Gulf War ended, ephemeral clues to Speicher’s fate planted seeds that would sprout into a fragile culture of hope.

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Tim Connolly was an army captain with the 405th Civil Affairs Battalion during Desert Storm. After the shooting stopped, he told Associated Press, he was summoned to talk to a man who claimed to be a Kuwaiti secret police colonel.

The Kuwaiti said he had been taken to a hospital in Nasiriyah four months earlier after being captured by the Iraqis. There, he said, an American pilot was in the next bed.

The colonel offered to look at photos of captured American pilots. But Connolly said he was told not to bother: With Speicher officially dead, all U.S. pilots were accounted for.

By 1994, Connolly, then a deputy assistant secretary of State, learned of a discovery in the Iraqi desert. A group of Qataris, ostensibly in Iraq on a falcon hunt, had discovered the wreckage of an F/A-18 American warplane. They gave U.S. authorities a metal plate stamped 163470 -- the ID number on Speicher’s Hornet.

A Defense Intelligence Agency satellite pinpointed the wreck site, its coordinates matching those where David Renaud, a Navy flier, saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky the day Speicher disappeared.

Finally, something tangible to work with -- if anyone could get to the place.

Connolly urged an undercover mission to the crash site before the Iraqi government could tamper with anything that might reveal Speicher’s fate.

According to Connolly, a special operations team had a plan: Slip in by helicopter at night, recover evidence and be back in Saudi Arabia before dawn. On Dec. 23, 1994, Connolly made his case to Secretary of Defense William J. Perry.

At that meeting in Perry’s Pentagon conference room was Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who confirmed Connolly’s account. Shalikashvili told Perry: “I don’t want to be the one to write letters home to the parents telling them that their son or daughter died looking for old bones.”

A month later, Perry notified Connolly that he had decided, instead, to ask the International Committee of the Red Cross to arrange with Baghdad for a U.S. team to visit the site.

After postponing the visit three times, the Iraqis escorted investigators to Speicher’s plane, Connolly said. As he feared, the site had been picked over -- either by looters or government agents.

Some items remained: the jet’s data storage unit, fragments of life-support equipment and, later, a flight suit turned over by the Iraqis. But what did these items suggest about Speicher’s fate? Defense Department officials couldn’t agree.

That didn’t sit well with Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.). He pressed the issue, and things began to happen.

To Roberts, the evidence suggested Speicher had survived and might still be a prisoner of war.

Roberts held closed hearings; and on March 27, 2001, his committee released a report reevaluating all the evidence collected over the years. It dismissed the lack of an emergency call from Speicher as definitive evidence that he was dead. Because “press reports” during the war said that Speicher had been killed, “Baghdad probably did not feel compelled” to account for him, the report said.

“Speicher probably survived,” the report added, and if he did, “he almost certainly was captured.”

Weeks earlier, the military, in an extraordinary decision, changed Speicher’s status from killed to missing -- 10 years after he was pronounced dead. Evidence cited in the committee report contributed to the decision.

Then, in October 2002, the military changed Speicher’s status again, this time to “missing-captured.”

Five months later, the United States invaded. Hussein fell. Speicher was not found. In the midst of it all, a man surfaced to talk to U.S. officials. His name was Eduard, and he reportedly claimed he had information that Speicher was alive.

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It was stunning if true: An Iraqi secret-police captain attesting to the pilot’s continuing imprisonment. But for those who had started to believe the memory of Speicher was being manipulated for political ends, the story smelled bad. One of them was Scott Ritter, a former U.N. weapons inspector.

Ritter told Associated Press he had been asked in late 1997 to assist with the Speicher search by adding Hakmiya Prison in Baghdad to the list of sites being inspected for weapons of mass destruction. There, a tantalizing clue turned up: Carved into a cell wall were the initials MSS.

Were they etched by a prisoner named Michael Scott Speicher? Ritter doesn’t think so. The prison walls were inscribed with other initials that meant nothing to the Americans.

Earlier this year, Ritter says, he was made aware of Eduard by a witness to his final debriefing by U.S. authorities. As Ritter tells it, Eduard had come forward as an informant in the months leading up to the Iraq war, claimed to be a captain in the Iraqi secret police, and asserted that he knew Speicher was alive.

Many questions hung over Eduard. He was a Christian, making it unlikely he would have moved in such inner circles. More damning, according to Ritter, was information from a top Iraqi intelligence official arrested in April 2003 by U.S. occupation forces. He told interrogators Eduard was a “born liar” who knew nothing about Speicher’s fate.

Eduard, it turned out, was a phony, Ritter said: His only connection to the secret police was that he once waited tables in their dining room.

Ritter, a controversial figure since he declared his opposition to the invasion of Iraq, thinks someone put Eduard up to it. Most of the evidence pointing to Speicher’s being alive was manufactured by advocates of war, Ritter asserts.

“This isn’t just an accident,” Ritter said. “This was done by people who fully knew what they were doing.”

Among them, he says, was Roberts -- a charge the senator, through a spokeswoman, says is “unworthy of comment.” Ritter also suspects the discredited Iraqi National Congress leader, Ahmad Chalabi, who provided prewar intelligence about the Hussein regime that is now considered unreliable.

Zaab Sethna, a spokesman for the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi, replied that neither ever gave the United States any information about Speicher.

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Today, with more than 130,000 American forces occupying Iraq, Speicher is still nowhere to be found.

“A joint Iraq-U.S. committee has just finished its work on determining the fate of the pilot,” said George Sada, spokesman for interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. “The result of the investigation will be announced by the Pentagon.” He wouldn’t elaborate.

There is talk of making Speicher officially dead again. Hope has dimmed. People have moved on. He has become a footnote to war, a man whose story stopped in the middle -- and whose ending may be forever beyond reach.