News-Info-Alerts

Re: Case Resurfaces for Missing Pilot

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: April 17, 2003

"Case resurfaces for missing pilot

Rescue of POWs gives hope for new leads on fate of Navy flier

JENNIFER FREY Washington Post

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -They said goodbye to him nearly 12 years ago, here at Cecil Field, now home to corporate jets and commuter airlines.

It was a naval air station back then, Scott Speicher's home base. Hundreds went to the funeral. A funeral without a body. There was the grieving widow, Joanne, who had married him at this same place 7 1/2 years before. His fellow pilots. His two small children. His father. His friends.

He was, the story went, the first U.S. serviceman to be killed in the Persian Gulf War, a Navy pilot shot down on the first night of the attack, his F/A-18 crashing into the Iraqi desert below. It was Jan. 17, 1991.

Yet more than a decade later, as Americans are buoyed by the televised images of prisoners of war safely rescued in another Iraqi war, a special joint unit from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency is trying to solve the mystery of Scott Speicher.

In January 2001, prompted by an accumulation of evidence acquired over several years, the Navy took the extraordinary step of reclassifying Speicher as missing in action.

Last October, his status was further changed to missing/captured. There was, the Navy determined, no evidence to show Speicher was dead. And there now was enough evidence to indicate he could still be alive, a prisoner of war.

"The objective is to find out whatever we can about what happened to him," says one U.S. official with knowledge of the mission, which also involves recovering information on Kuwaiti soldiers missing since the first Gulf War. "We think the Iraqi government knows what happened. Our goal is to find out precisely what they know."

So these days, this war, have blurred into one long moment of truth for those who have loved, mourned and hoped for Speicher over the past 12 years. For his family, which has pushed the government to reassess Speicher's case. For the high school friends who formed the Free Scott Speicher association last spring. For the fellow pilots who feel angry that no rescue mission ever took place, that their military never went looking for the guy they knew as Spike (the family name is pronounced "Spiker").

"I think that there will be an accounting for him, whatever it is, in the very near future," says Bob Stumpf, a retired Navy officer who flew with Speicher the night of the crash and saw the flash in the sky when his plane was hit. "There's no doubt in my mind that we'll know, finally, what his fate is."

Speicher would be 44 now. His children, babies when he shipped out in August 1990, are teenagers. Joanne remarried -- when everyone still believed Scott was dead -- and her new husband has been leading the push to find out what happened to him.

His father has died. At the church where Speicher taught Sunday school, red pansies and white snapdragons bloom at the base of a memorial to him. At Arlington National Cemetery, there is a marker with his name.

Since his file has been reopened, he has been promoted twice and is now a captain.

He is remembered, though, as he was 12 years ago. Speicher went to his high school reunion three days before he left for the Gulf. He was, friends say, the envy of the class: a handsome, talented pilot with a beautiful wife and kids.

Now those same friends wait and hope. They all grew up here, in a part of town thick with military families. They started the organization after hearing more and more news reports suggesting that Speicher may not have died, news reports that dominated class reunion discussion. They staged rallies, marched on Washington, contacted media.

"There are only two scenarios and, regardless, we'll know what happened," says Jim Stafford, who used to sit next to Speicher in high school and who still has the postcard that Speicher sent him a few days before his plane went down. "But if we don't get Scott Speicher back alive, it's a tragedy."

It may seem somewhat incredible that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein would have had an American pilot in captivity, tell virtually no one, hold him -- and not kill him -- for years. But that's exactly what he's done in the past. In April 1998, in an exchange of prisoners between Iran and Iraq, Saddam released an Iranian pilot, Hussein Raza Yashkuri, who had been captured 18 years before, at the start of Iran-Iraq war."