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11/28/2009
Twists and turns snagged missing pilot case
By PAMELA HESS (AP) – 34
minutes ago
WASHINGTON — Saddam Hussein was telling the truth, this time. The
United States just didn't believe him.
So it took the most powerful military in the world 18 years to find
the remains of the only U.S. Air Force pilot shot down in an aerial
battle in the 1991 Gulf War.
Michael Scott Speicher's bones lay 18 inches deep in Iraqi sand, more
or less right where a group of Iraqis had led an American search team in
1995.
The search for Speicher was frustrated by two wars, mysteriously
switched remains, Iraqi duplicity and a final tip from a young nomad in
Anbar province.
U.S. officials often were blinded by the same myopia that tainted
prewar intelligence — the American conviction that Hussein's
government lied about everything. As it turned out, the Iraqis lied, but
sometimes they told the truth.
For more than a decade, speculation swirled that the 33-year-old
Speicher, a lieutenant commander when he went missing, had been captured
alive. That was disproved by the team that found and confirmed his
remains.
"He wasn't captured or tortured," said Thomas Brown, chief
of the Intelligence Community POW/MIA analytic cell at the Defense
Intelligence Agency. Brown, who worked on Speicher's case for 15 years,
described to The Associated Press in an exclusive interview how the
threads leading to the pilot got so tangled.
Speicher was shot down by an Iraqi MiG 100 miles west of Baghdad on
Jan. 17, 1991, the first day of the war to drive Saddam's invading
forces from Kuwait. Then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney announced the
pilot's death as the first casualty of the war, but no search and rescue
effort was launched.
When the war ended that March, the U.S. demanded the return of
Speicher's remains. But because of a data glitch, the U.S. erroneously
pinpointed his crash site south of Baghdad.
The Iraqis were puzzled. They knew an F-18 had been shot down west of
the capital. But they followed the botched U.S. coordinates and searched
for Speicher's plane in the south, finding nothing.
The search was soon complicated by the Iraqi discovery of a different
crash site — of a downed Air Force A-10 fighter. The Iraqis brought
the unidentified American A-10 pilot's remains to a Basrah hospital for
safekeeping, labeling them "Mickel" for a clumsy translation
of what might have been the pilot's belt buckle manufactured by
McDonnell Douglas.
Just before those remains were to be handed over to the U.S., Shiites
rebelling against Saddam seized the hospital, forcing Iraqi officials to
make a hasty gamble.
If they didn't turn over the pilot's remains, they would be in
violation of the U.N. resolution ending the war, and the war would not
be officially over. So the Iraqis instead handed over to American
authorities a 4-pound piece of another cadaver and said it belonged to
"Mickel."
U.S. officials already had accounted for the dead A-10 pilot, so the
unidentified remains stumped them. Were they Speicher's?
By May 1991, DNA tests ruled that out. Iraq was being duplicitous,
but the U.S. couldn't figure out what was behind the switch.
Rumors from Hussein's inner circle about the "Mickel"
remains began to morph into whispering that the Iraqis held a live
American pilot. The rumors were picked up by U.S. intelligence.
Two years later, in 1993, Speicher's crash site was found by a party
of Qatari falcon hunters. Brown believes the Iraqis already had
identified the crash site but failed to come forward out of fear they
would be accused of covering it up. So instead, the Iraqis led the
Qatari hunters to the site, Brown said, so they would
"stumble" on the wreckage.
The hunters gave the U.S. Embassy in Qatar a piece of a plane
containing a serial number that matched Speicher's F-18.
U.S. military officials began planning an operation to retrieve
Speicher's remains. The plan was dropped in 1995 when the Red Cross
secured permission from Iraq for a humanitarian search team to excavate
the crash site.
Shepherded by Iraqi officials, the search team was led by a local
Bedouin boy to Speicher's half-buried flight suit. Nearby were expended
flares, part of an ejection seat and pieces of a life raft. But the
searchers found no remains. They left suspicious, convinced that they
had been set up even though Brown now says Saddam's government was
telling the truth about the site.
In January 2001, President Bill Clinton changed Speicher's status
from killed in action to missing, echoing U.S. belief he could be alive.
An intelligence assessment said Speicher probably had survived the crash
and Iraq was either holding him prisoner or hiding his remains.
In the summer of 2002, as the Bush administration prepared to invade
Iraq, new intelligence intercepts suggested Speicher was being moved
between dozens of secret sites inside Iraq.
Before the 2003 invasion, "we were positive we were getting him
back," said Buddy Harris, a Speicher friend who later married the
pilot's widow. "We were getting ready to go over and meet with him.
We had the whole family prepped, with psychologists ready to help."
At least three different times, based on U.S. government information,
Speicher's relatives thought they were getting him back, Harris said.
Brown believes the Iraqi government was trying to convince President
George W. Bush that Speicher was still alive to protect Saddam from
being targeted when the invasion came.
If that was the motivation, it backfired. Bush used Speicher's case
as more evidence that Saddam had to be ousted. After Bush cited Speicher
in his September 2002 speech at the United Nations, the rumors of
Speicher's movements abruptly stopped, Brown said.
After the U.S. invasion, intelligence analysts searching for Speicher
entered the Hakmiya jail in central Baghdad and dug up the grounds. They
found remains, but none that matched Speicher's DNA.
They did find a jail cell wall that appeared to be marked with the
initials "M.S.S." — and wondered if they had been scratched
by the missing pilot.
The Army dismantled the wall section and sent it back to the U.S. for
testing. That same summer a soldier discovered similar initials and what
appeared to be a date_ 9-15-94 — scratched into an I-beam in a parking
garage in Tikrit. The FBI cut down the beam and sent it to the
Smithsonian Institution for testing.
But the markings turned out to be more false leads. The museum
determined the Tikrit initials were made with a special ink reserved for
Iraqi religious groups — and an American prisoner would not likely
have had access to such sacred ink. While other "M.S.S."
markings were found all over Iraq, the analysts were never able to tie
them to Speicher.
The searchers continued to press every lead. For six years, soldiers
and Marines deployed in Anbar were told to ask people there if they had
heard anything about the missing American pilot.
The instructions finally paid off last July. A sheik told Marines of
a Bedouin who remembered a burial 20 years earlier. The sheik couldn't
recall the exact location, but it was enough for the Marines. They
returned to the old site that had frustrated the Red Cross searchers and
with 100 men, bulldozers and back hoes, they turned over four football
fields worth of desert, 4 feet deep.
The earth yielded another piece of a pilot's flight suit and a jaw
bone. The teeth matched the missing pilot's dental records. Michael
Scott Speicher, who reached the rank of captain because he kept
receiving promotions while his status was unknown, had been there all
along, Brown said.
The U.S. now says the case is closed, but Speicher's family, from
outside Jacksonville, Fla., is still unconvinced that he died in the
crash.
Buddy Harris says the ending is too neat, meant to whitewash the
Pentagon's failure to launch a search and rescue mission in 1991.
"Too many people want to tie it into a nice little bow
here," Harris says. "Their motive wasn't Scott Speicher, it
was to get this thing done."
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National Alliance of Families
11/18/2009
The article, published by the Associated Press, is
the Defense Intelligence Agency’s version of the Scott Speicher case.
Speicher was dead at the crash site. The first
two sentences, of the article, say it all. “Saddam
Hussein was telling the truth, this time. The
United States
just didn't believe him.”
Left out of the DIA version is any mention of a forensic report that
might answer some questions. They would have us
believe the Intelligence Community Assessment in the Speicher Case is
based solely in not believing Saddam
Also questioned is the reference, in the article, to the section of the
wall containing the initials M S S, found in a
Baghdad
prison cell? According to the article the section of
the wall was removed and taken to the
United States
. On June 27, 2003, representatives of DPMO
were asked about this wall during a Q&A at the
Alliance
meeting. We were told the section of the wall
containing the initials M S S was in the
United States
undergoing testing.
A couple of weeks later, on July 7th, Senator Bill Nelson was
photographed examining the cell and the initials on the wall.
A member of Nelson’s staff confirmed the cell was intact when
Nelson examined it. You can read about this at www.nationalalliance.org/gulf/infomis.htm
If that section of cell wall was brought to the
U.S.
, the question is when did that happen?
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