Dead or Alive? - Part 5: Hope Reawakens
By LON WAGNER AND AMY WATERS YARSINSKE, The Virginian-Pilot
© January 3, 2002

(At Scott Speicher's high school in Jacksonville, Fla., he's prominently recognized on a Desert Storm honor roll. Steve Earley photos / The Virginian-Pilot.)

In September 1996, the Navy looked over everything it knew about Scott Speicher.

The early reports about the fireball. That he might have lost his survival radio. What they found at the crash site. No blood. No bones. No body. A good ejection.

Then the Navy reaffirmed its May 1991 finding. Once again, Speicher was declared killed in action/body not recovered.

The story might have ended. But just when it seemed there was nothing more to investigate, no more hope that Speicher might have survived, new information began trickling out of Iraq.

Buddy Harris, the ex-Navy pilot who had married Speicher's widow, was assigned a Navy officer to keep him up to date. It seemed like every week or two, Harris would get a call about a rumored Speicher sighting.

Some guy in Canada had been in an Iraqi camp and had been given a Colt .45 pistol that was taken from an American pilot. No, Harris told investigators, Speicher didn't have such a gun, but they checked it out anyway.

Intelligence agents traced the gun and found out that Harris was right. They tracked another pistol that supposedly belonged to Speicher all the way back to World War II.

In another story, an Iraqi doctor was said to have performed a physical on Speicher. Another man said he had seen Speicher's name on a file when he was moving records to hide them from U.N. weapons inspectors.

Many of these leads, like the one about the pistol, were dead ends. Some couldn't be verified. All of them tormented Buddy and Joanne. One day Scott was dead, the next day he had been seen alive.

Meghan and Michael, Scott and Joanne's children, were now 9 and 7. Buddy and Joanne had kids of their own. Whenever they didn't know what to do, they asked themselves a question:

``If Scott walked in today, could we lay it on the line, say `This is what we did' and feel comfortable telling him we had done everything possible to keep our family normal and get him out?''

And they thought they had done what they could.

Then in 1999, they heard a story that changed everything.

In the meantime, Sen. Robert Smith began to wonder about what he had been told after the Red Cross team returned.

He had been assured by the Defense Department's POW/MIA office that there was no evidence Speicher survived his F/A-18 crash. But Smith had sources in the Pentagon telling him otherwise: There's more to it, there's more to it than you're being told.

Smith wanted to believe the officials at POW/MIA, but the more he thought about it the less certain he became: At first, Speicher's Hornet was blown to bits in the sky, then they found it nearly intact in the desert. At first, they said they sent a search team in for Speicher, then it turned out they didn't.

Then, on a day in early December 1997, Smith read a New York Times story that floored him. The Times' Tim Weiner used Pentagon documents and military sources to construct a time line of the handling of the investigation.

Among other things, the story reported that after the Qataris found the aircraft, the Pentagon sent a spy satellite over the crash site. The satellite images ``detected a man-made symbol in the area of the ejection seat,'' possibly the kind of sign a pilot is trained to leave behind when he decides to make a dash for safe ground. The defense department found that the mark did not match Speicher's assigned symbol, but it was definitely hand-drawn.

Days later, Smith fired off two letters. The first he addressed to the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, the office that had shepherded the Red Cross mission. Smith said he was extremely concerned about the article, especially considering what he had been told about Speicher's chances of survival.

He asked for a meeting with Pentagon and POW/MIA officials.

The second letter went to Sen. Richard Shelby, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Smith asked that the committee open an inquiry into all intelligence information that had been gathered on the Speicher case.

``The enclosed article published in The New York Times this past Sunday raises serious questions as to whether both of us may have been misled by the Administration . . . ,'' Smith wrote.

Shelby took it from there.

He contacted CIA Director George Tenet and asked for computer files, documents, memos, raw reports, operational messages, everything Tenet had on Speicher.

He also asked that Tenet explain which intelligence agency considered itself responsible for the investigation.

And in March, Shelby wrote to Tenet again. He wanted a report that consolidated everything they knew about Speicher, from the Defense Intelligence Agency, National Imagery and Mapping Agency (which operates the satellites), Office of Naval Intelligence, National Security Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

This push and pull between senators and intelligence agencies would go on for several more years.

After what he'd read in The Times, Smith wasn't about to let it drop.

In early 1999, a man defected from Iraq with a story that was hard to believe.

About four to six weeks after the air war began, he was asked to drive from Baghdad to another town in Iraq and pick up an American prisoner of war. The Iraqi told U.S. investigators that he had picked up a pilot, still wearing a flight suit. The pilot had no significant injuries, other than a small amount of blood from perhaps being roughed up by the townspeople who captured him.

The Iraqi driver took the pilot to Baghdad and turned him over to military authorities.

Intelligence agents asked the driver to look at a lineup of mug shots. He quickly pointed to Speicher.

They kept grilling him. He passed one lie detector test, then another, then another.

(Sen. Robert Smith, R-New Hampshire, took an interest in Scott Speicher's case and helped put congressional pressure on the intelligence community.)

Throughout 1999 and into 2000, they interrogated him, trying to be certain he was telling the truth.

Maybe he's looking for money, a reward? They gave him a greed test: There's another missing American whose family is offering a big reward. Maybe you saw a guy who looked a little different?

No, the defector stuck to his story.

Intelligence agents determined that the man probably was telling the truth.

The defector's report made sense. Navy data showed that nine of 10 pilots who eject from F/A-18s survive.

And the Iraqis had swiftly tried to find and capture every pilot who was shot down during the war, often succeeding. But if Speicher was taken to Baghdad, what happened then?

Could he still be alive? Would Saddam Hussein, knowing the U.S. government quickly pronounced Speicher dead, keep a pilot in prison indefinitely? Why wouldn't he use the prisoner as leverage, against sanctions, ongoing U.S. air patrols or U.N. weapons inspections?

Investigators didn't have those answers, but they did have some history. In April 1998, Iraq released from prison an Iranian pilot.

Hossein Lashgari's plane had been shot down in southern Iraq during the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War. He was captured on Sept. 18, 1980.

Iraq had held this POW for more than 17 years.

With the defector's story in hand, Smith spent much of 1999 and 2000 pushing Navy officials to back down from Speicher's killed-in-action status. More appropriate, Smith said, would be missing in action.

And he prodded President Clinton to seek an accounting from Iraq.

This new information also thrust Buddy and Joanne Harris into strange territory. If there were the slightest chance that Scott could still be alive, shouldn't they get behind Smith's movement and ask for him to be declared MIA?

They asked themselves that question again: If Scott walked in today, would they be able to say that they'd done everything they could?

The answer had changed. Even though the media crush could ruin the normalcy they'd tried to carve out for their kids, they thought it might also put pressure on the government.

They liked the idea that if Scott were MIA, the State Department might get involved and try diplomatic approaches.

(An F/A-18 Hornet is on display at Cecil Field in Jacksonville, Fla., where Scott Speicher's squadron was based and his family still lives. )

Harris met with Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig. He liked Danzig, how Danzig had stayed on top of the Speicher case, how he had kept the family in the loop.

Danzig, and many others, had one major concern with the status change. Maybe the Iraqis would think the United States was going to come after Speicher. If Speicher were alive, it might get him killed.

Give me a good argument, Danzig said.

Harris had thought about this before, and he had an analogy.

``I look at him like a guy with either cancer or a brain tumor,'' he told Danzig. ``We can keep you living in a hospital, and you'd be drugged up most of the time and have to stay in this hospital.

``Or we can do surgery, and it could kill you or it may set you free to live your own life. And after 10 years, personally, I'll take the surgery.''

Danzig thought that was a good argument for the change. He took the case to Clinton.

It was still risky, and embarrassing.

The government basically would be admitting that Speicher had been classified wrongly for a decade.

News researcher Ann Kinken Johnson contributed to this series.

Reach Lon Wagner at 446-2341 or lon1@pilotonline.com

Reach Amy Yarsinske at 627-0766 or ayarsinske@home.com

IN THIS SERIES:
Introduction
Part 1: Dead or Alive?
Part 2: Presumed Dead
Part 3: A Test of Honor
Part 4: Returning to Iraq
Part 5: Hope Reawakens
Part 6: Missing in Action