News-Info-Alerts

Re: The Last POW

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: April 19, 2003

"The Last POW
He Was Shot Down in '91 and Declared Dead. Today the Pentagon Is Not So Sure.

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 came to the funeral. A funeral without a body. There was the grieving widow, Joanne, who had married him at this same place, 71/2 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 Gulf War, a Navy pilot shot down on the first night of the attack, his F-18 crashing into the Iraqi desert below. It was Jan. 17, 1991. The next morning, during a televised news conference, Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney reported that the first night of strikes had involved a "single casualty." It was, he clarified, "a death."

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 Central Intelligence Agency 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 that Speicher was dead. And there now was enough evidence to indicate that 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, missed, mourned and hoped for Speicher over the past 12 years. For his family, which has pushed the government to reassess Speicher's case -- and long hoped for this mission to find him. For the high school friends who formed the Free Scott Speicher association last spring, and now jump at the ring of their cell phones, desperate for news. For the fellow pilots who feel angry -- betrayed, almost -- that no rescue mission ever took place, that their military never went looking for the guy they knew, from his Navy call sign, as Spike (the family name is pronounced "Spiker"). For Navy Capt. Mark I. Fox, who headed to the Gulf, to this war, still holding onto memories of his friend, the one he last saw on that fateful night in 1991.

And for his neighbors, his teachers and his fellow citizens of Jacksonville, who have hung signs, plastered bumper stickers on fire trucks, held rallies. Prayed.

"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."
Time Passes, Stands Still


He would be 44 now. His children, babies when he shipped out in August 1990, are now teenagers. His wife remarried -- a decision she made at a time when everyone still believed her first husband was dead -- and her new husband, who has his own history with Speicher, has been leading the push to find out what happened to him.

His father has passed away. At the church where he taught Sunday school, red pansies and white snapdragons bloom at the base of a memorial to him, one marked with an American flag. 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 the man 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 beautiful kids. He was admired.

Now those same friends wait and hope. It is a Tuesday night, in the middle of the war, and they are gathered around a low table in a hotel lobby, one of their trademark bumper stickers ("Free Scott Speicher" on a background of red, white and blue) in front of them. They have formed an organization: They have business cards, ranking officers, monthly planning sessions. They are talking about Speicher when their cell phones and beepers go off in quick succession.

MSNBC is reporting that a POW has been rescued. Alive.

There is a rush for the hotel bar, for the big-screen televisions. Channels are changed, baseball games disappear from the screen.

"We've been on pins and needles since this war started," says Nels Jensen, noting the distracted, anxious faces of his friends.

It is complicated for them, this war. They didn't embrace it simply because it might bring them their resolution. It's not that they are opposed to it, either -- no one is saying that. But they see other soldiers taken prisoner, see bombs falling on the country where Speicher might still be, and it makes them shudder.

"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 ("alphabetical order, you know," he explains) and who still has the postcard he received from the Gulf, one Speicher posted a few days before his plane went down.

"But if we don't get Scott Speicher back alive, it's a tragedy."

"And even more so," Debbie Isaac adds, softly, "if he ends up getting killed during all this turmoil, after surviving for so long. That's the sad part."

There is a buzz in the room. Jessica Lynch's face has flashed up on the television screen. For the group, there is a mixture of disappointment and elation, a sense of relief that one family's pain is over, mixed with their own nagging frustration.

"We couldn't expect it would be him," Isaac admits.

She is worried, they all are, that someone in Saddam Hussein's regime might use Speicher now as a pawn. But the recent safe return of seven more POWs -- all in relatively good health -- is a comfort. Their release came after a tip from local Iraqis. And that is the greatest hope that Speicher's friends now hold out -- that he, too, is being held somewhere and, now that Hussein's regime has been toppled, someone will come forward with the information.

"We're just so glad to get these other people back, too," says Stafford, who was again anxiously watching the news last Sunday morning, waiting for the rescued POWs to be identified. "And we're still holding out hope for Scott. We believe, very strongly, that he was alive before this all started."

They all grew up here, in a part of town thick with military families. Several had fathers who were Navy men. They remember sitting in the classroom, seeing a chaplain and an officer come to the door, take away a classmate to deliver some bad news.

They can't help but think of the Speicher children.

"My dad was gone for six months," Isaac says. "But he came home. Their dad has been gone for 12 years."

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 wanted answers. They wanted accountability. So the group staged rallies, came to Washington to march under a "Free Scott Speicher" banner, distributed the bumper stickers, contacted local media.

"If you know Scott, you can't give up," Stafford says. ". . . We may not get the answer we want, but we're not going to stop until we get one."
A Backup Steps Forward


He wasn't supposed to go. Not on that first mission, not that first night. Speicher was the spare, the guy who hovered in the background, and went into action only if something went wrong with one of the other planes.

He went to his commander and begged. He was persuasive.

"The last time I saw Spike, he was manning up for the flight in which he was lost," Fox wrote in a recent e-mail from the aircraft carrier USS Constellation, his memories of that night still strong. "He had gone out of his way to fly on that particular strike."

There were two formations of five planes each involved in the mission. Stumpf was in Speicher's sister squadron. He remembers being en route to his target, the sky lighting up with surface-to-air missiles.

"Then there was one flash that appeared to be brighter," Stumpf says. "It sort of lit up everything."

Then it sank to the desert floor.

Stumpf didn't know what it was. But when he got back to the USS Saratoga, his carrier, and heard that Speicher was missing, it all came together.

"At that point, I assumed he was on the ground, that he ejected, and he was either being rescued or in the process of evading the enemy while waiting to be rescued," Stumpf says.

Within 24 hours, his commander was in his stateroom, asking for his coordinates when he saw the flash. It made sense to him. They were trying to pinpoint where to go looking for Spike. Most pilots who eject from that type of plane survive.

"They're supposed to go," Stumpf says. ". . . They should have gone."

It is, after all, the military code: No one gets left behind.

Only it isn't that simple. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War -- when there were so many losses on search-and-rescue (SAR) missions -- the military had become much more careful about launching them. On that night, the commander says, he had to weigh issues such as communication, geographic locators, any evidence that the pilot survived the crash and, above all, the prospects of a successful mission against the level of risk to the officers who would be deployed.

There was no communication from Speicher, no radio contact. (However, it was later determined that the type of radio Speicher had been issued did not fit into his flight suit pocket and likely would have been lost during ejection.) No signs of light as search planes flew over the area. Geographic locators were iffy -- they had the information from Stumpf and other pilots but couldn't spot any wreckage on the ground. And Speicher's wingman reported he had not seen an ejection before the plane was hit.

Adm. Stan Arthur was the man who had to make the call. The prospects for a successful recovery mission -- and the prospect that Speicher was even still alive -- were too slim, he decided, and the risks that would be taken by a SAR team were too great.

"It's one of those decisions where you don't like to do it, you don't want to do it, but it's the right decision," Arthur says. "And even today you know it's the right decision. But knowing what you know now, it just makes it all the tougher to realize that everything wasn't exactly as we thought. Or doesn't appear to be."

And so he, too, waits and hopes. And remembers.

"Never a day goes by," he says, his voice heavy.
Finding Peace, Then Love


When her husband's plane went down over Iraq, Joanne Speicher was a 31-year-old mother of two small children -- Michael, then 3, and Meghan, a year old. She had met Scott at Florida State University, married him in 1983. She was a Navy wife, living in a gray ranch house in a southwest Jacksonville neighborhood where it is routine for residents to look up and see planes coming in for a landing at the base a few miles away.

It was Jan. 18, one day after the war began, when Joanne heard the knock on the door. There was an officer, bearing news. A week later, a telegram arrived via Western Union:

"It is with much regret that I confirm the missing in action status of your husband LT Michael Scott Speicher," read the missive, all in capitals. "He is being listed in this status because his aircraft failed to return following combat action against the forces of Iraq on 17 January 1991. Efforts to locate him have been unsuccessful."

By then, though, the words -- "missing in action" -- held little hope. He was dead, the government had said so. Joanne had questions about what exactly had happened to him, of course. But she had told her children that Daddy wasn't coming home.

When the war ended and the POWs were repatriated, Speicher was not among them. The government didn't ask for him; it asked for remains. The ones the Iraqis turned over, officials would later learn, did not match Speicher's DNA. On May 22, 1991, after an official review of the evidence available at the time, the Navy officially declared Speicher "killed in action, body not recovered."

That summer, in the only public interview she has given on the subject, Joanne told Ladies Home Journal that she believed that her husband had died instantly that night, when his plane exploded in midair. Believing that made it possible for her to go on.

"I'm at peace," she told the magazine in the June 1991 issue. "I feel like it's over, and he is in a better place. I would have been angry if he died in a car crash. This was his life, and Scott wouldn't have wanted it any other way."

Over time, she fell in love again.

His name was Albert Harris, but he was known to everyone as Buddy. He had been Scott's closest friend, a fellow Navy pilot. Devastated by Speicher's death, Harris began spending more and more time with the Speicher children, playing the role of surrogate father. And, as he would tell NBC's Tom Brokaw in an interview in February, "the light kind of came on around the same time as to the possibilities."

They married on July 4, 1992, 18 months after Speicher's plane went down. Asked by Brokaw how people felt about the situation, Harris admitted there were moments when he and Joanne had doubts, but their friends were encouraging.

"They thought it was great," he said.

Together, they had two children, and all four siblings started to go by the last name Speicher-Harris. They moved into a new home, alongside Doctor's Lake, with a basketball hoop out front and big, leafy trees to shade the lawn. They were their own family now.

Then Harris began to get word of intelligence reports casting doubt on Speicher's death -- or, at the very least, on the assumption that he had died when his plane had been hit. And he and Joanne began to wonder: What if Scott is still alive?

It was, of course, a terribly awkward situation. But, as Harris has said publicly a few times, they both felt that they needed to do everything they could to find answers and, perhaps, bring Speicher home. There was a need to put public pressure on the government to resolve the situation, to give them answers, and to do that, they needed to get Scott's story out there. But, from the beginning, Joanne had been fiercely protective of the family, particularly her children. The marriage and the delicate situation it had created made the desire for privacy only stronger.

Still, they hired an attorney, Cindy Laquidara, a family friend who took the case without charge. She facilitated their contact with the Defense Department and the media. Harris gave some interviews, as did Joanne's nephew, Richard Adams. At times, the delicacy of the situation was extraordinary. When Harris was asked how he and his wife would handle it if Scott returned safely, he told Brokaw, "My blanket answer is we're going to have one heck of a 'welcome home' party, and we'll go from there. We'll -- we'll work it out."

And even though the public scrutiny hurt, the family did what it could to keep Speicher's story alive.

Now, though, the search for Speicher is finally happening. The government is seeking answers with resolution a priority. And, once again, the family has asked for privacy. All interview requests are being denied, Laquidara says.

"They made decisions to get on with their lives based on what the government told them," Stafford says. " . . . But I can tell you they both love Scott very much, and they've been working hard to bring him back.

"I can't imagine the problems that it's caused them," he continues, "and I don't know what's going to happen" if Speicher comes back. "And I don't care. That's not my business. It's really nobody's business."

Stafford's voice is rising now, clearly inflected by the struggle he knows the family is facing -- and his desire to protect them from outsiders who will want to muck around in their personal lives.

"The story is," Stafford says, "that we left a guy behind over there and he's suffered in prisons for over 12 years and he needs to come home. The government needs to wade through its mistakes and problems and correct [them]. And we all need to leave the family alone."
The Case for Hope


"This is a human drama of gargantuan proportions," says Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.). "The fact that those children were told that their father was dead, and then years later the Department of Defense changes his status to missing in action, then changes his status to missing/captured -- you can imagine the trauma that that family is going through."

In 1993, the wreckage of Speicher's plane was found. In 1995, the Defense Department, along with the Red Cross, which had negotiated with the Iraqi government for permission to enter the country, went to the site to hold an official investigation. They found part of the plane's seat as well as Speicher's flight suit, clearly put there recently because it did not appear weathered by four-plus years of exposure in the desert. They determined that he had ejected from the plane and survived.

Then came the intelligence reports. Iraqi informers who claimed to have seen an American pilot at different times, in different locations. It was difficult, if not impossible, to determine the veracity of the claims.

Then, in 1999, an Iraqi defector told intelligence officers that he had driven an American pilot to Baghdad early in the war. He picked out Speicher's picture. He passed lie detector tests. Of all the reports, one official now says, this was the one that most caught their attention, because it seemed the most credible.

Politicians got involved. Then-Sen. Bob Smith from New Hampshire was an early advocate. Later, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) took up the cause. Then Nelson. They wrote letters, demanded hearings.

In 2000, "60 Minutes II" did a damning investigation, exposing mistakes in the Pentagon's handling of the incident and highlighting evidence that indicated Speicher might be alive.

And in January 2001, the Navy -- faced with what one official called "an accumulation of evidence" that Speicher might be a POW and absolutely none that indicated his death -- changed his status.

Two months later, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence received a report on Speicher. "We assess that Iraq can account for LCDR [Lt. Cmdr.] Speicher but that Baghdad is concealing information about his fate," said an unclassified CIA summary of the analysis. "LCDR Speicher probably survived the loss of his aircraft, and if he survived, he almost certainly was captured by the Iraqis."

Roberts now says that "people should be court-martialed" over the way Speicher's case was handled, but he also recognizes that now is not the time to place blame.

"I don't think a hindsight, 20/20, finger-pointing exercise will really help Scott right now," Roberts says. "There will be enough time for that once we get him on the tarmac."

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

It is stories like that one that keep hope alive for everyone from Speicher's family to Speicher's friend Fox, whose ship, the Constellation, was ordered back to home port just a few days ago, the major fighting now over. In his e-mail, Fox said that he still thinks about Speicher, still prays for him. He also keeps a "Free Scott Speicher" bumper sticker in his stateroom.

He may have gone off to fight another Gulf War, but a lingering ghost from the first haunts him still.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company"