Operation Just Cause ...for as long as it takes
by Marilyn Grote
History has been made in the POW/MIA issue. Now we have a MIA from the Gulf War. Michael Speicher's status has been changed from KIA to MIA. In April 2000 CBS reported a possibility of a POW from the Gulf War. This was my first hearing of this fact and it has fascinated me since then. The Speicher incident is full of just plain slop on the part of our Government. This cannot be allowed to continue – but it does.
SPEICHER, MICHAEL SCOTT
Other Personnel in Incident: (none missing)
Source: Compiled by Homecoming II Project 09 March 1991 from one or more of the following: raw data from U.S. Government agency sources, published sources, interviews. Update by the P.O.W. NETWORK.
REMARKS: OPERATION DESERT STORM
SYNOPSIS: Scott Speicher was raised in Kansas City. When he was in high school, the Speicher family moved to Jacksonville, Florida. Scott continued his education at Florida State University, receiving a degree in accounting and management.
Speicher went on to join the U.S. Navy and receive flight training. During the Mid-East Crisis, Speicher was one of 2,500 airmen assigned to the USS SARATOGA in the Red Sea. Speicher was part of a fighter squadron and flew the F18 "Hornet" fighter/bomber.
On January 18, 1991, Speicher's aircraft was hit by an Iraqi SAM (surface-to-air missile) and crashed during the first Coalition offensive of the war dubbed "Operation Desert Storm." Initial reports by Defense
Secretary Dick Cheney stated that Speicher had been killed. One military source said reports indicated the aircraft had "exploded to bits" in the sky, apparently having suffered a direct SAM hit. Iraqi officials soon announced the capture of American pilots. It was originally believed the chances of Speicher's ejection were slim, but the books were not closed on Speicher. He was the first American to be listed Missing in Action. Most recent media reports indicate that he was probably "confirmed killed." Although Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney has said Speicher was killed, he is still officially listed missing in action.
The Methodist church in Florida where Scott Speicher has been a Sunday School teacher has held prayer and candlelight vigils for his safety. They have not given up hope that he is still alive. In the first days of March 1991, the Iraqis released 21 American POWs. Scott Speicher has not yet been released.
Those who recall the abandonment of American POWs in World War II, Korea and Vietnam are watching carefully, determined that men like Speicher will be returned alive, or fully accounted for, before American troops leave the Middle East when hostilities cease.
Scott Speicher and his wife Joanne have two children, a daughter, age 3, and a son, age 1. All live in Jacksonville, Florida. Speicher's father, Wallace Speicher, was a Navy pilot in World War II.
As of May 1997, Michael Speicher is still unaccounted for. His status, Missing in Action, changed to KIA shortly after his incident. Although the USG has excavated what they believe to have been the plane's crash site, no remains were found. The USG also stated, prior to the excavation that all men were accounted for.
Name: Michael Scott Speicher
Rank/Branch: Lt.Cdr./US Navy
Unit: USS SARATOGA
Age: 33
Home City of Record: Jacksonville FL
Date of Loss: 17 January 1991
Country of Loss: Unknown
Loss Coordinates:
Status: Missing in Action
Acft/Vehicle/Ground: FA18
Ted Sampley
Lt. Cmdr. Micahel S. Speicher: Expendable
There is no chance Lt. Cmdr. Michael S. Speicher survived, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney assured the American people within hours of the Navy pilot's failure to return to the aircraft carrier Saratoga on the night of Jan. 16, 1991. He was last heard from over Iraqi flying northeast toward Baghdad
Speicher, 33, of Jacksonville, Fla, was the first U. S. pilot shot down in the Gulf War. He left a wife, a 3-year-old daughter and a 1-year old son.
On Jan. 18, 1991, less than 48-hours after Speicher became missing, the Pentagon said his single-seat FA-18 Hornet fighter-bomber was shot down by an Iraqi surface-to-air missile. The plane "exploded to bits" in the sky after being hit.
"Evidently, pieces of the plane were strewn all over the Iraqi landscape and Speicher's wing mates saw it happen," the official said.
So, if Speicher and his aircraft "exploded to bits" all over the Iraqi sky in 1991, why, in December 1995, did a Pentagon team go to Iraq on a secret mission to look at the wreckage of Speicher's fighter end to search for his remains?
The search mission, which was led by the International Committee of the Red Cross and undertaken with the approval of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, found the wreckage virtually intact and upside down.
Pentagon spokesman Bev Baker said the U.S. team, which conducted a weeklong excavation and search of the site, found "no human remains" in the wreckage or around the crash site.
Evidence is now surfacing indicating that Speicher parachuted from his plane, landed safely, was alive on the ground and later captured. These revelations have the Pentagon scrambling for cover. Naval intelligence is now saying they were never sure why Speicher's plane disintegrated in midair. They now conclude he either had a freak midair collision with an Iraqi MIG-25 or that the enemy plane shot him out of the sky.
Pentagon officials told the press in December that a parry of hunters discovered the crash site of Speicher's Navy FA-18 two years ago and that as a result, a U.S. spy satellite photographed the crash site. Intelligence officials conveyed the images to the POW/MIA office at the Defense Department. Secretary of State Warren Christopher contacted the Red Cross in Baghdad and requested its assistance.
"Not exactly," a Capitol Hill source familiar with the case told the U.S. Veteran Dispatch.
"A couple of years ago, Naval Intelligence picked up a story that Speicher had survived the shoot down and was captured by the Iraqis," the source explained.
"As a result, Pentagon intelligence went back and looked at old satellite imagery of the Speicher crash site which was in a wasteland far from civilization. Beside Speicher's ejection seat located on the ground several miles away from the wreckage of the aircraft' the analysts found the image of a two-letter Escape and Evade (E and E) symbol used by downed pilots to indicate they are alive and want to be rescued.
"They also checked the debriefs of other pilots who had been shot down and released from Iraq. They may have even re-interviewed some of the former prisoners. One pilot said he was told by his Iraqi captors that 'the guy in the FA-18 shot clown on the first day is on the run and we're going toe catch him," the source said.
When asked if it was true that the Pentagon had satellite imagery of Speicher's ejection seat and E and E code, Baker said "The Pentagon does not discuss intelligence reports." She said it was still the position of the Department of Defense that Speicher was killed in action, body not returned, and that pilot observation remained the basis of that conclusion.
The U.S. government's rush to declare Speicher dead is a glaring example of the Pentagon's secret policy of writing off military personnel who become captured or missing during a conflict as "expendable."
As servicemen and women start falling into the hands of an enemy, the Pentagon simply declares them missing in action and denies all knowledge of Americans being captured. If some of the missing are resumed alive at the end of hostilities, it is a plus for the Pentagon. For those who are not returned, it is easier for the Pentagon to close the book by declaring them killed in action, body not returned.
Even after Cable News Network (CNN) reported Iraq's minister of information saying that American pilots had been captured and that reporters would be allowed to meet with them, the Pentagon denied knowledge of any Americans being captured.
"We know of no American prisoners of war," Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly, operations director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said when asked by reporters if Iraq were holding any U.S. prisoners of war.
Only after video interviews of allied POWs were broadcast on Iraqi television and later in the United States did the Pentagon officially declare that the Iraqis were holding U.S. prisoners.
It was nearly two weeks after 20-year-old Army Spec. Melissa Rathbun-Nealy and 23 year-old Amy Spec. David Lockett disappeared before the Pentagon officially declared them missing in action.
The Pentagon had held the two absent without leave (AWOL) despite eyewitness accounts from American servicemen who saw them being captured and reports that a captured Iraqi soldier had said he helped transport two Americans, a white female and a black male (Nealy is white and Lockett is black.) to Basra, a key Iraqi command center north of Kuwait.
Nealy's father, Leo Rathbun, took matters into his own hands and appealed directly to Saddam Hussein asking him to acknowledge his daughter as a prisoner of war.
Rathbun told The Grand Rapids Press that he did not want his daughter forgotten if a peace plan calling for the release of all prisoners were to be signed.
"The Army has not recognized Melissa as a POW and if the war ends, I believe the Bush administration would ignore the problem of MlAs and POWs just as previous administrations ignored the MIAs and POWs still thought to be held in Vietnam," Rathbun said in the interview.
Neither the U.S. nor Iraqi governments officially acknowledged that Nealy and Lockett were prisoners of war until they were released in February 1991.
Is Speicher alive? There certainly is evidence that he was alive after being shot down and in the absence of credible evidence proving him dead, all Americans must demand his immediate release.
Dozens more like Speicher are missing as a result of the war with Iraq and only the Pentagon knows exactly how many.
The Pentagon has always lied to the American people about U.S. servicemen known to be captives of an enemy. The lying is as deadly for the captured and missing as an enemy bullet and it is time for it to stop. We must demand that our government be absolutely honest and accurate in accounting for our missing servicemen.
Otherwise, those brave men and women now serving our country in Bosnia will also be treated as expendable, abandoned to the enemy and allowed to disappear.
That is exactly what happened to Lt. Cmd. Speicher and many unfortunate U.S. servicemen captured in Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam and in the Gulf.
CBS News | The First Casualty
CBS NEWS BROADCASTS
The First Casualty
A Downed Gulf War Flier
Labeled 'Killed In Action'
But What Really Happened To Him?
(CBS) On January 17, 1991, the first night of the Gulf War, Lieutenant Commander Michael Scott Speicher was shot down over Iraq. He became the conflict's first American casualty. But there's one problem: There is no evidence that he is dead. Bob Simon reports.
Speicher is the only American unaccounted for from the Gulf war. When Speicher was officially declared killed in action in May of 1991, the U.S. military had never even looked for him. Somewhere in the arid, desolate desert of western Iraq, Speicher's F-18 crashed in darkness two hours after the war began. Speicher was one of the best pilots on the aircraft carrier Saratoga. He wasn't supposed to fly on the first mission of the war but he refused to be left behind. "When it just came down to flying the airplane, there was nobody like Spike," says Barry Hull, another pilot in Speicher's squadron.
On January 17, Hull, Speicher, and 32 other pilots took off at 1:30 a.m. from the USS Saratoga in the Red Sea. They were supposed to suppress enemy air defenses west of Baghdad. It was a very dangerous mission. "The closer we got to Baghdad the more impressive the light show over Baghdad became," recalls Bob Stumpf, who was flying two planes away from Speicher. "It was just an incredible anti-aircraft barrage."
Eight minutes from the target, a huge flash in the sky startled Stumpf. He assumed the blast was a missile, but he didn't think that any planes had been hit. The fighters continued toward the target and dropped their bombs. As they turned back toward the Saratoga, the pilots checked in over the radio. Speicher didn't check in. The pilots returned to the Saratoga just before dawn without him.
During their intelligence debriefings on the ship, Dave Renaud, who had been the closest pilot to Speicher, reported seeing explosions five miles away, in Speicher's direction, at the same time Stumpf had witnessed that large flash in the sky. Renaud reported the plane had been blown to bits. He even drew a little circle on his map where he thought he had seen the fireball. "The first report was 'airplane disintegrated on impact; no contact with the pilot; we really don't believe that anyone was able to survive the impact,'" says Admiral Stan Arthur, commander of all Allied Naval Forces in the Persian Gulf.
A few hours after the first mission had returned to the ships, Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney held a press conference in Washington. On the basis of one account of a flash in the night sky and 12 hours of radio silence, Secretary Cheney declared Speicher dead. To Stumpf, the pronouncement seemed premature.
Why did Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney declare Speicher dead in the first hours of the Gulf War when there was no evidence to support it? Cheney declined to comment. Admiral Arthur says that because the Navy wasn't sure where Speicher had gone down, no search and rescue mission was launched. But the captain of the Saratoga personally told Speicher's wife Joanne "every effort continues to be made to locate Scott." A week later, Speicher's commanding officer sent this message to Joanne, "All, repeat, all, theater combat search and rescue efforts were mobilized."
On March 7, 1991, right after the war, Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams assured Americans the military would continue to look for every missing soldier and flier. When the POWs were released at the end of the war, Tony Albano, who was Speicher's roommate, was sent to Saudi Arabia in case Speicher was among the prisoners being freed. He didn't see Speicher.
Weeks later, the Iraqis sent a pound and a half of flesh to the Americans, claiming it was the remains of a pilot named Michael. Speicher's first name was Michael and there was no other Michael among the missing. One DNA test and the case would be closed forever. Then things got strange. That spring, Victor Weedn, a forensic pathologist, tested the flesh. He said it did not come from Speicher. Were Saddam and the Iraqis trying to hide something, or had they just made a mistake? Apparently no one asked, because the next day, May 7, the Navy began the process of officially declaring Speicher KIA. "I was a little surprised at that because our test report didn't show that he was dead," Weedn says.
Joanne Speicher was asked to sign off on this decision. She thought all search efforts had been exhausted, so she agreed. While most of the country was celebrating its victory, a private memorial service was being held in Arlington National Cemetery. There was no body. Speicher's case was closed.
Then in December 1993 an Army general from Qatar came to the western Iraqi desert, 150 miles southwest of Baghdad. He and his party were hunting for rare falcons when they stumbled across an American F-18.
The condition of the nose suggested the plane had not disintegrated in the air. The Qatari took pictures, and pieces of the plane, to the American Embassy in Doha, the Qatari capital. The photos and a piece of radar equipment were sent to Washington, where a check was run on the serial numbers. The results stirred the Pentagon. Nearly three years after the Gulf War, Speicher's jet had been located. The pictures showed that the canopy had come down away from the plane; this indicated that the pilot had tried to eject. The Pentagon went back and checked the satellite imagery it used to track Scud launches during the war. It found a crash site, with the outlines of a jet in the sand - Speicher's F-18. The crash spot was right where his fellow pilot had said it was. But despite three years of assurances, no one in the U.S. government or the military had ever bothered to look for Speicher's plane. Says Arthur: "You get this sinking feeling that there's something really wrong here, that you missed something."
Part II Years Later, Search For Flier Continues Is He Alive In Iraq? Investigators Will Now Try To Find Out
(CBS) In April 1994, Admiral Stan Arthur, who sent Michael Scott Speicher into battle, wanted to launch a covert mission into Iraq to check out the crash site. But some Pentagon policy officials were concerned about casualties. They wanted to ask Saddam for permission to go to the site under the Red Cross flag.
This approach enraged those who wanted the mission. "You don't preserve your options when you essentially announce to the Iraqi government that you know that you found a crash site, and you found something at the crash site that might lead you to conclude the pilot is alive," says Tim Connolly, who was then the deputy secretary of defense in charge of special operations as well as a Gulf War veteran with a Bronze Star. "Because if, in fact, the pilot is alive and being held by the Iraqis, the pilot isn't alive anymore." Connolly also wanted to launch a covert mission.
Classified documents show that the chance of success for a secret mission was considered high. Connolly says that the area was very sparsely populated. At a meeting in December 1994 in the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense William Perry and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvili, decided how to approach the site. Connolly argued his case at the meeting. "I closed by saying, 'I will go out the door of this conference room and I will stand in the hall, and I will stop the first five people who walk by in military uniform, regardless of service or gender,'" Connolly recalls. "'I will explain to them what we are trying to do and ask them if they will get on the helicopter. And I will guarantee you that all five will get on the helicopter.' And then I shut my mouth. And the chairman said, 'I do not want to have to write letters home to the parents to tell them that their son or daughter died looking for old bones.'"
The Pentagon nixed the covert mission. General Shalikashvili would not talk to us about his decision.
On March 1, 1995, Saddam agreed to allow American experts to visit the crash site. But because of what Baghdad called 'unforeseen bureaucratic delays,' the Americans didn't visit for nine months. When the U.S. team got there, they found the site had been tampered with. The cockpit was missing. The Iraqis had gotten there first. But the Americans found a plane that had not disintegrated in the sky. They found the canopy, which ejects with the pilot, about a mile from the aircraft. Spent flares and parts of a survival kit also were located. There was not a bone or a drop of blood or a trace of Michael Scott Speicher anywhere.
But toward the end of their six-day search, the Americans found a tattered flight suit. Albano, who has examined the suit, thinks it is Speicher's. There were definite signs Speicher could have survived an ejection. But when the crash team returned the Pentagon said that there was no evidence that Speicher had survived. In fact, the investigators reported that the crash site provided no evidence Speicher had died. The Defense Department now grudgingly acknowledges this. "I don't believe we have any evidence that he's dead," says Connolly. But if Speicher survived the crash, why didn't he send a rescue call on his radio? Pilots are repeatedly drilled on the importance of keeping their radios with them at all times during crashes. It is the key to getting rescued.
Minutes before Speicher took off, the pilots had been given new radios. These radios were larger than the previous models, and didn't fit in the vest pocket that had held the earlier models. Even before the mission, the size of the radios worried Ted Phagan, who was in charge of the pilots' radios. "As the pilots are walking out I'm telling them, 'you're gonna lose this radio if you have to eject,'" he recalls. Phagan thinks Speicher lost his radio when he ejected. (By the second launch, Phagan had fixed the problem with a new flap.) By mid-1996 even General Shalikashvili wrote to the CIA expressing his misgivings about Speicher's status. Speicher is still listed as 'Kil led In Action.' But with mounting evidence that he survived the crash, and without any evidence that he died, U.S. intelligence agencies are launching a new search. Investigators aren't ruling out the possibility - slim though it might be - that Speicher could be alive in Iraq.
American investigators say an Iraqi defector who had recently escaped to Jordan told them that in the first days of the war, he had driven an American pilot from the desert to Baghdad and the authorities. The pilot, he says, was alive, alert, and wearing a flight suit. The defector pointed Speicher out in a photo lineup, and passed two lie detector tests.
The head of the Iraqi Air Force, General Khaldoun Khattab, says that Iraq freed all the prisoners after the war. "It's possible he was seriously injured after he ejected from the plane, and there are lots of wolves in the area," Khattab says. The case may never be solved. Admiral Arthur is tormented by the question of what happened to the flier. "My worst fear was what happens if someday he shows up in Baghdad on a TV screen and it's a surprise to everybody," says Arthur. "How would you explain that?"
Navy Changes Status of Gulf War Pilot
By ROBERT BURNS
.c The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - In a highly unusual move, the Navy has changed the status of Lt. Cmdr. Michael Speicher, shot down in an F-18 fighter on the opening night of the 1991 Gulf War, from killed in action to missing, officials said Wednesday.
Navy Secretary Richard Danzig notified the Speicher family of the decision Wednesday, according to officials in the office of Sen. Bob Smith, R-N.H., who has long challenged the Pentagon's official ``finding of death'' for Speicher. The officials discussed the matter on condition they not be identified. Pentagon officials confirmed the information.
Pentagon officials said Danzig acted because of substantial evidence that Speicher may not have died in the crash.
``It's substantial in nature, in the totality,'' one official said. He would not elaborate. The official said the State Department sent a new diplomatic note to Baghdad demanding that the Iraqi government tell all it knows about Speicher's fate.
Last March, Smith and Sen. Rod Grams, R-Minn., asked Danzig to change Speicher's status to missing in action, reflecting evidence of doubt about whether he survived the crash. Smith met with Danzig again Dec. 20 on the matter, officials said.
In a letter dated Dec. 18, Sandy Berger, President Clinton's national security adviser, told Smith a recent intelligence assessment ``has stimulated a high-level review of this case - several new actions are under way and additional steps are under intense review.''
Berger's letter, which was provided to The Associated Press on Wednesday, did not specify what actions were contemplated.
Speicher, of Jacksonville, Fla., went missing when his Navy F-18 Hornet was shot down on Jan. 16, 1991, in an air-to-air battle with an Iraqi fighter. He was the first American lost in the war and the last still unaccounted for.
The late Adm. Mike Boorda, then the chief of naval operations, approved the official ``finding of death'' on May 22, 1991. That action changed his official status from missing in action to killed in action.
In September 1998, after efforts by Smith and Grams to learn more about what U.S. intelligence agencies knew of Speicher's fate, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was given a classified chronology of the agencies' activities on the matter.
``We strongly believe that the information contained therein supports the request we are making of you with this letter,'' Smith and Grams told Danzig in a letter last March. They did not cite any specific evidence, which is classified secret.
The senators said they were informed March 12 by the Defense Department's POW-Missing Personnel Office that its position on whether the available evidence indicates Speicher perished in the crash of his plane is, ``We don't know.''
Smith and Grams have said before that Pentagon officials initially told them evidence had not been found to indicate that Speicher could have survived the crash. However, in May 1994 - more than three years after Speicher went missing - Pentagon officials indicated in a secret memorandum that a U.S. spy satellite had photographed a ``manmade symbol'' at the crash site earlier that year. Some military officers said they interpreted the symbol as a sign that the Navy pilot might have survived the crash.
Speicher was the only American killed on Iraqi territory whose remains were not recovered.
A plan was devised in 1994 to conduct a covert operation into Iraq to search the crash site for clues to Speicher's fate, but it was scrapped in December 1994 by Army Gen. John Shalikashvili, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The general ruled the risk of casualties was too high to justify the secret mission.
In 1995, U.S. crash site specialists from the Defense Department, working with the International Committee of the Red Cross, entered Iraq with President Saddam Hussein's permission. When they got to the crash site they found it had been excavated, The New York Times reported in December 1997.
