News-Info-Alerts

Re: Did Navy Pilot Get Left Behind?

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: March 17, 2002

"Journal of Aerospace and Defense Industry News

March 15th, 2002

Defense News

Did Navy pilot get left behind?
by Leona C. Bull - senior staff writer

Sen. Pat Roberts, (R-Kansas), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee has publicly lent his voice to the suspicion that Navy Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher, a Navy pilot shot down over Iraq in 1991, is alive and being held captive.

For more than a decade, the State Department has not been able to get a satisfactory response to there queries about Speicher's fate. Baghdad officials have repeatedly ignored U.S. requests for information about the pilot's fate. Speculation about Speicher has been a hot topic for veterans who have wanted to bring Speicher's remains home to be buried on home soil.

Now, due to the repeated efforts of those who have not forgotten, it looks as though a fresh inquiry made be made.

When the Pentagon changed Speicher's status last year from killed to missing in action, it gave fresh energy to the queries that had been made to date. The change of status was an unprecedented action that put the Pentagon in the awkward position of admitting that possibly an American had been left behind at the end of the Gulf war.

"The bottom line is there is no evidence he was killed when his aircraft was shot down in 1991," Roberts said. "On the contrary, there are numerous reports that indicate he could be alive."

Late last week, at a meeting of the Tripartite Commission, U.S. Ambassador to Kuwait Richard Jones told Iraqi officials: "Iraq continues to shirk its responsibility to answer the many unresolved questions about Commander Speicher's fate."

Sen. Robert C. Smith, (R-N.H.) a member of the Armed Services Committee, said he has been tracking reports on the Speicher case for more than five years. "Unfortunately, we have not yet accounted for Commander Speicher, but I will continue to work with the administration to determine his fate. We must vigorously pursue every lead for the sake of Commander Speicher and his family. We owe him nothing less."

Pentagon officials were expected to brief Congress this week, as a response to a report in the March 11 editions of The Washington Times that said new intelligence information had been uncovered in the last several months indicating that Speicher is alive and being held prisoner in Iraq.
In a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld dated Feb. 14, Roberts said a recent U.S. intelligence community assessment of the case concluded that Speicher "probably survived the loss of his aircraft and if he survived, he almost certainly was captured by the Iraqis.

"This strongly suggests the more appropriate designator or status of POW," Roberts stated in the letter. "I believe the status of POW sends a symbolic message not only to the Iraqis, but to other adversaries, current and future - and most importantly to the men and women of the U.S. armed forces and the American people."

The possibility of an American POW in Baghdad also is complicating U.S. efforts to expand the war on terrorism to Iraq, U.S. officials said.

Roberts said the Pentagon has put together a special team of officials to investigate the case.

Intelligence officials said reports that Speicher is alive in Iraq have been surfacing since 1991, when two Iraqi nationals told the CIA that Iraq was holding an American pilot. The CIA dismissed the information as coming from unreliable sources.

In 1995, Speicher's F-18 aircraft was found and an investigation team went to the site and determined that the pilot ejected before it crashed. Iraq also provided Speicher's flight suit at that time.

Then in 1999, an Iraqi defector reported driving an American pilot to Baghdad six weeks after the war started. That report eventually led to the reclassification of Speicher as missing in action.

Several months ago, the Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA obtained new information from a foreign intelligence service stating that a person who had been in Iraq had learned that an American pilot was held by the Iraqis. The source said the pilot's only visitors were Saddam's son Uday and the chief of Iraqi intelligence.

Some intelligence officials sought to play down the new intelligence information by claiming that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein would not have kept secret the fact that an American pilot was captured and would have used the pilot for propaganda purposes.

Other intelligence officials said Saddam is just as likely to have kept secret its possession of a U.S. prisoner of war. These officials note that Saddam's government held one Iranian pilot as a prisoner of war for 17 years, all the while denying it held any Iranian prisoners of war."