News-Info-Alerts

Re: US Revisits Speicher Case

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: November 11, 2002

"US revisits Gulf War pilot's case

By Anne E. Kornblut and Robert Schlesinger, Globe Staff, 11/11/2002

ASHINGTON - On the second day of the Gulf War in 1991, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney made a grim announcement. A Navy pilot from Florida, Michael Scott Speicher, had been killed in action when his fighter jet was shot down over Iraq.


Eleven years later, after exhaustively combing the little evidence that exists in the case, Speicher's friends and family insist he is still alive. Even his wife, who remarried in 1992, believes her first husband survived the plane crash, according to her lawyer.

But the saga is more than a POW dispute. As the Bush administration has built its case against Iraq in recent months, Speicher, whose body was never recovered, has suddenly emerged as a controversial symbol of US interests in the region.

Without revealing any new evidence, Navy officials took the extraordinary step last month of reclassifying Speicher as ''missing/captured,'' his second status change in less than two years. President Bush, backed up by Cheney, has incorporated Speicher's disappearance into his list of grievances against Saddam Hussein. Earlier this year, Bush raised the possibility that Speicher might be living as a prisoner in Iraq, describing Hussein as someone ''who would be so cold and heartless as to hold an American flier for all this period of time without notification to his family.''

Yet many intelligence and military officials assert that Speicher is almost certainly dead, and the administration's critics question its motives for revisiting the case as it plans for another war against Iraq. Skeptics note that 23 other servicemen captured during the Gulf War were released at the end of the conflict; Speicher (pronounced SPY-ker,) who was officially declared missing on Jan. 17, 1991, the day Cheney reported his death, was the only member of the US military to go completely unaccounted for in that battle or any military engagement since.

''All the signs that the military has say he's dead,'' said Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA official.

A defense official said the case is more ambiguous. ''There is a conflict between the evidence that says he's alive and the evidence that says he's not alive,'' said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ''It has not been resolved, and it may never be.''

To critics, the Speicher case is ''a pretty blatant example of the cynicism of the Bush administration,'' said H. Bruce Franklin, author of ''MIA or Mythmaking in America.'' Franklin, a former military intelligence officer, accused the administration of ''just rushing around trying to find some cause for war with Iraq that will get some emotional support.''

Even Speicher advocates find the administration's rhetorical involvement in the case wanting.

''I can mention it 50 times in a speech, but if I'm not at the table doing anything about it, it doesn't matter; it's only worse,'' said Cindy Laquidara, a Jacksonville lawyer representing Speicher's wife, Joanne. ''I'm hearing speeches, but I'm not seeing any activity by anybody with a plan to close the issue.''

In a case that has been widely disputed from the start, everyone seems to agree on a few central facts: Speicher, 33 at the time of the incident, a native of Jacksonville, was shot down on the first night of aerial bombing, his F/A-18 plunging into the desert approximately 150 miles southwest of Baghdad. His body was never recovered, leading officials to give his status as ''Killed in Action/Body Not Recovered'' in May 1991. His family moved on, operating on the assumption that he had died. Joanne Speicher remarried, wedding Buddy Harris, a pilot from Speicher's squadron, the following year.

In 1993, a Qatari hunting party came upon the wreckage of Speicher's F/A-18 Hornet. The Clinton administration pondered a secret mission to the site in Iraq to try to determine Speicher's fate, but General John M. Shalikashvili, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, vetoed the idea. He didn't want to risk further American lives ''looking for old bones.'' Instead, the United States approached the International Red Cross and in 1995, a US military investigative team flew to Iraq to examine the crash site.

While the crash site had already been searched, presumably by the Iraqis, it yielded some useful clues. Perhaps the most important was Speicher's flight suit, whose condition appeared to indicate two things. ''The condition of the returned flight suit also indicates that the aviator was not in the aircraft at ground impact,'' according to a 2001 unclassified intelligence community report. Second, the suit's lack of weathering meant it had only recently arrived at the site.

Speicher appeared to have escaped his stricken Hornet, but what happened to him afterward remained unknown.

''We think he survived the ejection but he died afterward,'' one US intelligence official said on condition of anonymity. ''That's the best guess on our part. But the intelligence community's best guess is as good as anybody else's.''

Other friends and supporters of the Navy pilot argue that he probably survived the ejection and was taken prisoner - an argument bolstered by several eyewitness accounts of varying reliability.

In particular, one Iraqi who defected in 1999 has been widely reported to have said that he drove an American flier to a hospital in Baghdad, later identifying the pilot from photographs as Speicher. The defector passed a lie detector test. That account was used by Speicher's supporters in their lobbying campaign to persuade the US government to keep the case alive. Absent evidence he died, many advocates say, he should be presumed alive. Laquidara, the lawyer, goes further, maintaining he's alive. She, too, gets intelligence briefings from the military coordinator handling the investigation, she said, adding that they are ''all consistent with Scott being alive.''

But skeptics question the supposed evidence, starting with the defector's tale. ''It's like many of the stories about POWs that came out of Vietnam, where people who defected wanted to tell a story that would make them of some value,'' said Franklin, the author of the POW book.

Ultimately, Speicher family members, with the help of key supporters in Congress, persuaded then-Navy Secretary Richard Danzig to change Speicher's status to ''missing in action'' in 2001. Advocates say the redesignation was the culmination a of long struggle with a recalcitrant Pentagon. Legislators like Senators Robert Smith, Republican of New Hampshire, Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, and Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, have had to fight for information.

''The real story here is that the United States government refused to tell the United States Senate for years and years what really happened,'' Smith said. ''Nobody's ever been brought to accountability for it.''

But the Speicher family's struggle has taken on fresh importance as the Bush administration has drawn up new plans for war against Iraq. Navy Secretary Gordon England ratcheted up the case's significance last month by reclassifying Speicher as ''missing/captured,'' a designation that ''essentially means POW'' in the American military lexicon, Lieutenant Commander Pauline Storum, a Navy spokeswoman, said.

''I am personally convinced the Iraqis seized him sometime after his plane went down,'' England wrote. ''Further, it is my firm belief that the government of Iraq knows what happened to Captain Speicher.''

Smith, who has been pursuing the case for almost a decade, disputed the notion that the new life given the Speicher case is just an excuse for war.

''It's a credibility issue with Saddam,'' said Smith. ''He's not a credible person. You can't rely on what he says. If he's unwilling to tell the world what happened to an American flier ... why should we trust him to provide unfettered access [for inspectors]?''

Even the best-case scenario has risks. If Speicher returns to Florida after 11 years in Iraqi prisons, he would return to a family that has moved on.

''We're not discussing that,'' Laquidara said. ''Their focus has been to tell me to get him back. No discussion beyond that - just get him back. And you can see the logic behind that: First and foremost, we have to see where Scott is in his mental capacity. ... These are just not things that we should discuss publicly if he is alive.''

Robert Schlesinger can be reached at schlesinger@globe.com. Anne E. Kornblut can be reached at akornblut@globe.com.


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