Albert ``Buddy'' Harris was already working on it.

Harris, a former Navy pilot himself, worked in the Pentagon for the vice chief of naval operations, Adm. Stanley Arthur. Harris was helping compile a report of all the Navy's missions, every strike flown, every bomb dropped, during the Gulf War.

One day in late 1993, he came across a CIA report stating that Speicher had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile. He called the CIA to straighten that out. He was familiar with the incident, because he knew Spike.

They'd met in Pensacola, Fla., in 1980, when they both were in Aviation Officer Candidate School training to be fighter pilots.

Then Harris went on his first deployment, and his Jacksonville home caught on fire 10 days before he returned. The only clothes he had were those he'd taken with him. Speicher heard what happened and showed up at the ship when Harris got back.

He handed Harris a suitcase of his own clothes.

``Here you go,'' Speicher said. ``You need these worse than I do.''

Harris told the CIA that the Department of Defense had changed its finding about Speicher being shot down by a SAM. It determined that he had, like his squadron commander said, been knocked from the sky by a MiG-25.

The phone conversation shifted to the story about Speicher's Hornet being found. The Qataris' photos had just come in. Harris had become one of the Navy's experts on Desert Storm and was asked to help.

The photos of the Hornet and the canopy made it look like Speicher might have ejected. Harris was told to find out what information originally led the Navy to conclude that Speicher didn't eject.

The idea that Speicher might have ejected was enough to give any service member chills. On any battlefield, in any war, the American code is the same -- no man is left behind.

Could Speicher have parachuted into Iraq? Could he have landed safely, sat in the barren desert and looked to the horizon, expecting rescuers to pick him up?

The clock was ticking.

On July 5, 1994, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a planning order to commander, Special Operations Command, who in turn sent the order to the Joint Special Operations Command in Fort Bragg, N.C.

The order said that, when directed by the president and secretary of defense, JSOC should:

``Conduct military operations to investigate a Desert Storm F/A-18 crash site in Western Iraq to retrieve information and/or recover designated pieces of wreckage to assist in determining the fate of the pilot whose
 remains are unaccounted for.''

Special operations planners started mapping it out. Speicher's Hornet had pancaked onto the desert floor about 100 miles northeast of a Saudi border town named Ar ar. U.S. forces had operated out of Ar ar during the war, and it would be a convenient base from which to send in the covert team.

MH-6 helicopters could fly in from Ar ar with a team of experts to examine the wreckage. They'd have specialists from the Navy's mishap investigation base in China Lake, Calif., someone from the Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii and heavily armed escorts, just in case.

They rehearsed the mission. They went to Fort Bliss, Texas, and drilled it. They made mock-ups of the wreckage. They practiced getting to the site, what they'd do once they got there and how they'd get away.

They figured they could be to Speicher's wreckage in an hour, excavate it overnight and get back to Saudi Arabia by the next morning. If they were discovered and had to get out in a hurry, they could be back in 45 minutes.

The summer flew by. Connolly felt like time was wasting. The Iraqis could happen upon the site any day.

But the covert mission wasn't a sure thing.

A second group in the Pentagon was suggesting a diplomatic route to the site. The U.S. government could go to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which works on MIA issues, and ask it to contact Baghdad.

The ICRC would tell Iraqi leaders about the crash site and ask for permission to take a team to visit it. The diplomatic proposal posed no risk of lives, and many political and military leaders were still shaken over a failed mission just a year earlier in Somalia. Two Black Hawk helicopters had been shot down and 18 special operations soldiers killed.

The ICRC path also offered the added benefit of showing the Iraqis that the United States was playing by the rules.
Military planners thought the diplomatic plan must be a ghost option, a backup for appearance' sake.

Connolly didn't like it. If the United States went in undercover, intelligence agents could be certain that the information gathered was untainted and then use what they found to investigate further.

He also didn't want to tell Iraq about the site. Even if they only gave Iraq the general vicinity at first, wouldn't Saddam Hussein try to find it?

And Connolly didn't like that so much time had passed. He tried to speed things along by warning those involved:

``If it were to become known that we had identified the potential remains of a service member who had died or potentially had died in combat and we were not immediately going in there to assure they wouldn't fall into the hands of the enemy, we would be crucified politically.''

Harris and a couple of other investigators kept looking at the Qatari photos and the satellite images of the wreckage.

The F/A-18's canopy -- the see-through bubble that covers the cockpit -- seemed to be a couple of miles away. When a pilot ejects, small explosives ignite and blast off the canopy. It looked like that's what happened with Speicher's jet.

Those who had looked into Speicher's disappearance early on didn't have wreckage to examine, but they had determined that he did not eject. A big reason was that no one had heard his emergency locator transmitter, or ELT.

A downed pilot's ELT normally emits a ``Whoop, whoop, whoop'' signal that other pilots would hear.

Being a pilot, Harris knew that some aviators liked to have their ELTs disconnected when they flew over hostile territory. They thought the signals, sent over a UHF frequency, made it easy for everyone to find them, including the enemy.

Harris asked a couple of people from VFA-81, but they claimed the squadron had not disconnected its ELTs.

Maybe the ELT malfunctioned, he thought. He checked into that and learned that the beacons have several electronic backups that make them extremely reliable.

Finally, he tracked down VFA-81's maintenance officer. If the ELTs were disconnected, he would have to know about it.

Yes, the beacons were disconnected, he told Harris. Earlier, Harris had been lied to.

``Did you know they didn't go after Scott and look for him because they didn't know this and got no signal?'' Harris asked.

The maintenance officer was stunned. The higher-ups knew that the ELTs had been turned off. That message should have been relayed to those in charge of search and rescue.

``There's just no way,'' he told Harris.

The investigators, too, were shocked. They already had been told about the new Motorola survival radios that were too large to fit into the pilots' pockets. Those monitoring the airwaves during the war would have been listening for some communication from Speicher, but maybe he had no way to signal.

No ELT. No radio.

The reasons they didn't search when Speicher went down had been debunked.

As painful as it was for his friends to ``what if?'' those early military decisions, what they knew now made an almost-perfect case for the covert mission.

Connolly left his office and walked through the Pentagon to the secretary of defense's conference room.

This briefing had been a long time coming. It was now Dec. 23, 1994, a year since Speicher's F/A-18 had been found in the Iraqi desert.

Gen. John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took a seat at the head of a long table. To his left sat his top planner. To the planner's left sat the deputy principal secretary of defense for international affairs.

Secretary of Defense William Perry was to the right of Shalikashvili.

Perry's undersecretary of defense for policy was to his right, and next to him was Connolly.

Aides holding briefing packets, transparencies and flip charts stood against the walls.

None of the planners who worked out the details of the covert mission was there. Connolly thought that was odd. If the chairman or secretary had a pointed question, Pentagon protocol was that only someone directly involved in the planning could answer it.

``This thing's been pre-loaded,'' Connolly thought.

As staffers projected the presentation, page by page, onto the wall, those around the table followed along in their handouts. Connolly's counterpart talked about the diplomatic approach.

One of Shalikashvili's staff laid out the military option. They had done a threat analysis of the covert mission, breaking it down into infiltration (getting to the crash site), actions on objective (working at the site) and exfiltration (getting back to the base).

In each case, chances for success were rated high, and threats were rated low.

It was no sure thing, Connolly knew. When he was an Army Ranger, a dozen people, including the battalion commander, died just during training. Military missions are inherently dangerous, but the odds for this one looked as promising as any.

Still, the longer the meeting went, the more Connolly felt support for the covert mission slipping. Finally, he addressed Perry and Shalikashvili:

``This country has an obligation to go in and find out what happened to this pilot,'' he said.

Then he quoted the fifth stanza of the Army Ranger creed: ``I shall never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy.'' He paused. He sensed the group's hesitation to again expose special operations forces to danger, so soon after the disaster in Somalia.

He took one more shot.

``Mr. Secretary,'' Connolly said, ``I will go out the door of this conference room, I will stand in the hallway and I will stop the first five people who walk by in military uniform, regardless of their gender.

``I will explain to them what the mission is, I will ask them if they will volunteer to get on the helicopters, and I guarantee you that all five of them will volunteer.''

Thank you very much for the comments, Perry said, then turned to Shalikashvili. ``Mr. Chairman, what do you think?''

``Well, Mr. Secretary,'' Connolly remembers Shalikashvili saying, ``I don't want to be the one to write letters home to the parents telling them that their son or daughter died looking for old bones.''

Perry wanted to think about it. He directed the military to keep the covert plan viable. But Connolly knew Shalikashvili's feelings had derailed the military option.

A month later, Connolly got a letter from the deputy secretary of defense.

Perry had chosen the diplomatic path.

Now, the Pentagon would have to tell Speicher's widow that they had found her husband's aircraft. Once they told the Red Cross, the story could become public, and they didn't want her to read about it in the papers. That meant Albert Harris had one more piece of information for those at the Pentagon.

Two years before, Harris had married Joanne Speicher.

Adm. Arthur pulled Harris into his office. He told Harris he wouldn't have been on the investigating team if Arthur had known who he was.

But it was just as well.

Harris remembers that Arthur said he took full responsibility for what had happened to Speicher. Arthur had been in charge of naval operations in Desert Storm. He thought his staff had made serious mistakes.

Now, Arthur said, he was going to do everything he could to make it right.

To get answers.

Everyone hoped the crash site would divulge evidence, clear up the mystery.

They did not yet know that what the Hornet wreckage revealed would only make them feel worse.

 Returning to Iraq
 By LON WAGNER AND AMY WATERS YARSINSKE, The Virginian-Pilot
 © January 2, 2002

The convoy rolled out of Baghdad the morning of Dec. 10, 1995, and headed toward the crash site.

Nine months had passed since Iraq agreed to allow a visit to the wreckage of Scott Speicher's F/A-18, though Baghdad had postponed it three times. A year had gone by since Timothy Connolly urged his superiors at the Pentagon to secretly dispatch a team to the desert.

Two years had passed since Qataris found Speicher's jet.

Only the night before in Baghdad, the International Committee of the Red Cross had given the Iraqis the latitude and longitude of the crash site. But as the team neared the wreckage, Bedouins stood along the sandy path and waved their arms, directing the vehicles to the site.

The United States had sent investigators from the Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, including an anthropologist to help examine human remains. Experts from the Navy's crash investigation unit in China Lake, Calif., also went to the site, along with a medic, an explosive-disposal expert and three linguists.

The ICRC sent four people. The Iraqis sent two people and ordered soldiers to encircle the perimeter of the camp for protection.

The group had left the fertile flatlands and lakes surrounding Baghdad and, just three hours later, stood on a moonlike surface. They were 1,000 feet above sea level, in the desert. As far as they looked, all they could see was sand and a few scattered clumps of grass, shrubs and vines.

Just to the north, trails radiated out from Bedouin camps.

Speicher's Hornet was right-side up. Big chunks of it, easily recognized parts like its engines, lay in a circle no more than 60 feet wide.

Without moving one shovel of sand, military experts knew what that meant.

The jet had lost power, gone into a flat spin and dropped almost straight to the desert floor.

Speicher's jet had not, as first thought, been blown to bits in the sky. Investigators quickly noticed one other thing: The cockpit was missing.

Obviously, others had gotten to the crash site before the Americans.

Investigators started at the nose of the F/A-18 and roped off an area to excavate. It looked to them like the wreckage had been searched by people who knew what they were doing.

A pile of backfill, a mound of sand dug from somewhere else, had been heaped near where the cockpit should have been. Popped rivets lay on the ground nearby. The backfill, the experts thought, was less than a month old.

Components from the Hornet's computer had been removed, too.

As the work near the jet continued, other members of the team formed skirmish lines, spreading out and walking slowly to look for other evidence.

Two thousand feet to the north, they spotted something man-made, a tall arch sitting upright on a sandy knoll. They got closer and saw that it was the frame of the canopy, the transparent shield that covers the cockpit. It looked like Bedouins had stood it on end as a landmark.

To the south, they found one of the HARM missiles Speicher was to drop on the first night of the Gulf War.

A couple of days later, Navy flight mishap investigator Bruce Trenholm got a call on his radio. The other team members had found something a couple of miles away and wanted him to look at it.

He drove north and found the group standing in a circle. One of the Iraqis said a Bedouin boy had found a jumpsuit while herding his sheep.

They told Trenholm it was Speicher's flight suit. Trenholm could see that it was a U.S. NOMEX suit, standard aviator coveralls resistant to fires up to several hundred degrees. He also could see that it had faded from its usual olive color to a more greenish yellow.

He'd have to investigate to make sure it was Speicher's.

Near the flight suit, they found a cluster of pilot survival items: pieces of straps from a parachute, an inflatable raft, a 20 mm shell and pieces of an anti-G suit that a pilot wears to lessen aerodynamic forces.

They found a signaling flare. Someone had tried to light both ends, one for daytime and one for night. The pyrotechnics were still inside the night end, which meant maybe it hadn't worked.

On the team's fourth day in the desert, Trenholm spotted a small item sitting on a rock. Part of it had been sheared off when the jet hit the ground, but he knew what it was: the data storage unit of a Hornet.

If the information could be recovered from it, the DSU could unveil a minute-by-minute mechanical account of Speicher's last flight. 

On their last day in the desert, the team anthropologist and others excavated a rectangular rock pile near the canopy. They thought it might be a makeshift grave.

They dug down several feet but found no remains.

The next day, Dec. 15, the team pulled out. Some of the most valuable evidence would turn up in the weeks to come, as the DSU and the flight suit were analyzed.

But during those five days, team members got a look at what Speicher would have seen if he'd landed safely. Miles of sand in any direction, far from anybody who could help him.

One other thought picked at Trenholm's brain. It was cold. Freezing.

This was December. Speicher was shot down in January.

If it was cold now, in a tent, with plenty of layers and thick sleeping bags, Trenholm knew it would have been bone-cold for Speicher.

A battered flight suit was recovered in the Iraqi desert, and the size of the Velcro left on the suit matched the patch, shown here, worn by members of Scott Speicher's squadron . Photo by Steve Earley / The Virginian-Pilot.

A few weeks later, Tony Albano got a message during a training flight that Trenholm was trying to track him down.

Albano, Speicher's roommate on the carrier Saratoga during the war, by that time was with a squadron in Meridian, Miss. Albano and Mark Fox, another squadronmate from VFA-81, agreed to meet Trenholm at Florida's Cecil Field.

In Jacksonville, Trenholm explained that he had been on the International Red Cross mission to the Iraqi desert, they had found a flight suit and he wanted Albano to look at it and see if he thought it was Speicher's. 

He told them about the Bedouin boy who said he found the suit and that most of the Red Cross team members figured the Iraqis had planted it.

He told them that the legs were slit in the back, like an emergency worker or doctor would cut a suit off someone who was face down. He told them he'd estimated Speicher's height at 5 feet 11 inches, his weight at 168 pounds and his flight suit size at 38 long. The suit was a 38 long. Then Trenholm reached into a paper bag and pulled it out.

The last time Albano had seen that suit, Speicher was wearing it, and they were slapping hands, wishing each other luck on their first wartime missions.

Now, here it was, found lying in the sand, coming out of a bag.

Albano saw that the suit was a little tattered, pockets were missing and the patches were gone. He knew that pilots remove those patches to ``sanitize'' their flight suits before flying into enemy territory.

He looked at Trenholm.

``I'm positive that's his flight suit,'' Albano said.

Then Fox hopped into his car, went to his house and grabbed his old flight suit. A circular patch of Velcro fastener on Speicher's right sleeve matched Fox's ``Sunliners-Anytime-Anyplace'' patch. An oval of Velcro on the left sleeve lined up perfectly with a patch that read, ``F/A-18 Hornet 1000 Hours.''

Trenholm then told Speicher's squadronmates about the condition of the jet, and the canopy and the parachute straps and the life support gear.

Five years after that awful night, there seemed to be even fewer answers.

And the same old question.

``Oh God,'' Albano thought. ``Well, what happened to him?''

Soon after the team returned to the United States, a top official at the Defense Department's POW/MIA office met with Sen. Robert Smith to tell him what the group had found.

Smith, a New Hampshire Republican, was on the Senate Armed Services Committee and had tracked the Speicher case since the Qataris found the wreckage in 1993. Smith's own father was a naval aviator who was killed near the end of World War II, two days before Smith's fourth birthday.

On Jan. 17, during his briefing with the POW/MIA official, Smith heard grave news: The Red Cross team had found nothing to suggest Speicher could have survived.

A few weeks later, the aircraft investigators, life support experts, aviation engineers and anthropologists filed their reports. Their findings colored in a fairly thorough picture of what had happened to Speicher during his final mission.

That picture differed sharply from what Smith had been told.

On Feb. 15, an aircraft mishap investigator at the Navy's Safety Center in Norfolk reported a time line of Speicher's last flight. The information had come from the damaged memory unit the team recovered. Speicher lifted the Hornet off the deck of the Saratoga at 1:36 a.m.

At 1:43 a.m., his jet recorded a code indicating a HARM launch computer failure. One, two or all three of his missiles might have been inoperative.

Two hours later, nearing the target, the jet's computer recorded another code: Speicher's ALR-67 radar warning receiver. The device would have detected threats from air or land. It might have had a minor problem or a complete failure. Speicher could have looked at another gauge to see how well the device was working.

At 3:49, Speicher turned off the jet's autopilot.

Seventeen seconds later, something slammed into his Hornet so hard that it lost power.

Engineers reported that the rocket motors that blast the canopy from the aircraft had burned even marks on its frame. That signaled a good ejection. They determined that the charred paint on the inside of the canopy, and the way the outside had melted, meant that Speicher had been engulfed for about three seconds in a 600- to 700-degree fire.

Speicher would have had second-degree burns on exposed skin, such as the back of his neck. But because of survival vests, the NOMEX suit and his anti-G suit, it would take a fire hotter than 700 degrees and longer than 10 seconds to cause fatal burns.

One of the engineers wrote: ``This pilot was over enemy territory, in extremis situation and sitting in the middle of a hot cockpit fire. Logic dictates that the only way this pilot is getting rid of his canopy is by ejecting.''

Trenholm's report picked up with the ejection.

He determined that the canopy's distance from the wreckage meant that when Speicher pulled the ejection handle, it separated as it should have.

Team members sift the sand beneath the aircraft, hoping to find Speicher's remains. They're wearing face masks as shields against boron fibers in the wreckage Department of Defense file photo.

The flight suit, signal flare, life raft items and anti-G suit materials were all in pretty good shape. If the ejection had failed, Trenholm knew, those things probably would have burned until they were unrecognizable. Up to that point, 58 air crew had ejected from F/A-18s. Six had been injured fatally, and a majority were injured either from the jolt when the parachute opened or from landing.

But most pilots who ejected lived.

Trenholm found out that China Lake, years earlier, had issued a warning about the GQ 1000 Aeronautical Parachute that Speicher was using. Those parachutes sometimes allowed pilots to fall too fast, causing landing injuries.

His report concluded that Speicher probably had been injured either when the parachute opened or during his landing. Speicher's flight suit had some stains, maybe blood, but not enough to suggest that he had serious injuries.

Smith had been told the team found no evidence that Speicher survived.

But no one had turned up any evidence he had died, either.

 Hope reawakens
 By LON WAGNER AND AMY WATERS YARSINSKE, The Virginian-Pilot
 © January 3, 2002

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.

 Missing in action
 The Virginian-Pilot
 © January 4, 2002

Any day now, the call would come.

Scott Speicher's widow, Joanne, and her husband, Buddy Harris, would be told on which day Speicher's status would be changed to missing in action. President Clinton had signed off.

It was early January 2001, 10 years since Speicher's F/A-18 had been shot down over Iraq, nearly as long since the Navy had declared him killed in action.

What was about to happen would make history.

No American service member, from any war, had ever been taken off the KIA list and switched back to missing in action.

Despite being KIA, Speicher's career had flourished: The lieutenant commander who entered the Gulf War had been promoted to commander. The Navy gave Joanne his back pay. Soon after he was listed as MIA, she would
start receiving Speicher's monthly salary of $6,313.

Joanne and Buddy knew the story would stir the media. They'd have to talk to the kids, Michael and Meghan.

They were 1 and 3 when their father was shot down. The couple worried that this would jumble their lives again.

``The worst thing that's going to happen,'' Buddy remembers telling them, ``is that somebody is going to come back into your lives who loves you more than anything else. Having more than one person love you can't be bad.''

Word of the announcement leaked a day early, and reporters surrounded the Harris house in Jacksonville, Fla.

Joanne and Buddy stuck with their plan: They packed up the family and left town for a week.

The Navy announced Speicher's status change on Jan. 11 in a four-paragraph statement. But President Clinton created a frenzy.

``We have some information that leads us to believe he might be alive,'' Clinton told reporters later that day. ``And we hope and pray that he is.

But we have already begun working to try to determine whether, in fact, he's alive, if he is, where he is and how we can get him out.''

Alive? What did the government know? Or had Clinton, 10 days before leaving office, gone too far? Hours later, he tried to temper the statement.

``Well, I don't want to say more than we have,'' the president said. ``All I want to say is we have evidence which convinced me that we can't ensure that he perished. I don't want to hold out false hope, but I thought it was wrong to continue to classify him as killed in action when he might not have been.''

The next day, the story made the front page of newspapers across the country. 

Speicher's squadronmate Barry Hull and Sen. Robert Smith appeared on CBS's ``The Early Show.'' The show's anchor asked Smith why the U.S. government had waited seven years, from the time Speicher's jet was found, to try to locate the pilot.

Smith said he couldn't understand that, either. He said that up until 1998, he had been misled, and he promised to deal later with those who had steered Congress awry. There's not one shred of evidence, Smith said, that shows where, how or even if Speicher died.

``This pilot, if he's alive, has been there for 10 years with nobody looking for him. And that's just plain outrageous.'' 

Hull began by saying hello to his combat buddies: Ammo, Banker, Bano, Bert, Chauncy, Coop, Donor, Hoff, Jonah, Maggot, Mongo, Cong, MRT, Oscar, Polecat, , Spock and Whip.

``And, Spike, if you're out there, we're thinking about you, buddy.''

The anchor asked Hull if he really thought Speicher could be alive, after 10 years.

He didn't think so, Hull said, but he couldn't be sure.

``I believe I read somewhere where the North Vietnamese held prisoners for, held the French prisoners for 20 years. So it has happened before. And there's no assurance that he's dead.''

The question had haunted Hull, his squadronmates, Spike's friends and the government for a decade.

It confounded them more, not less, as each year passed.

Former Pentagon official Timothy Connolly says there is no evidence to support the idea that Scott Speicher was killed during the Persian Gulf War.

Tony Albano may have been the last pilot to speak to Speicher. They were roommates on the carrier Saratoga, about to fly off the ship on their first strike. 

``See you back on deck in a couple of hours,'' he told Spike.

Albano stayed with the Navy and is now a captain. He's commander of Training Air Wing Two in Kingsville, Texas. He's still loyal to the Navy, but frustrated that the service, the Department of Defense and other government agencies only passively pursued finding Speicher at key times.

In his darkest thoughts, Albano thinks Speicher may have been captured and held prisoner for a couple of years. When the Iraqis found out the United States knew what happened, they executed him.

``Saddam Hussein is, from what I understand, he's basically whacked in the head and he's a trophy keeper,'' Albano said. ``That would be my worst thought . . . here's my first capture and that's my trophy.''

One time, Albano offered a more benign theory to a superior. Speicher had a dark complexion, and if he grew facial hair he could have blended in pretty well. Maybe he slammed his head during the ejection, got amnesia and wandered around.

``That's a little bit ridiculous, Bano,'' his superior told him.

David Rowe, Spike's old high school and Florida State friend, doesn't have any theories about what happened. Rowe still lives in Jacksonville and works as an environmental consultant. At this point, he's not even sure what to hope for.

When he first heard that Spike might have ejected, he thought about watching his friend pirouette off that oak tree and dive headfirst into Big Dismal Sink.

``I knew that Spike punched out,'' Rowe said. ``I knew it, I knew it in my heart and soul that he had punched.''

But that leads, ultimately, to the idea that Speicher landed, lived and was captured. Rowe can't stand to carry that any further.

``Oh, that's hurtful. I mean, I want my friend to have survived, but to think what he's been through . . . ''

Timothy Connolly left the Pentagon in 1996 and is waiting on paperwork to allow him to teach middle school social studies. To this day, he is the only deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations who served in one of those services, the Army Rangers.

He's been connected to the military for more than 20 years, so it pains him when new service members ask what would happen if they went down behind enemy lines.

``My view is, right now, that I could not tell you with any degree of certainty that if you are either captured or fall behind enemy lines that the U.S. will go and get you,'' he tells them.

He still thinks the Pentagon blew it when Secretary of Defense William Perry and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman John Shalikashvili refused to covertly search Speicher's crash site. Intelligence agents could have worked the information from the wreckage through their channels and by now may have known what happened.

Over the years, Connolly pieced together his own theory:

Speicher ejected, got hurt and left an evasion symbol near the crash site.

Then he fled. He was captured by Bedouins, who turned him over to Iraqi military forces. Connolly's unit during the war seized an air force base, so he knew that many of the Iraqis were essentially reservists.

He figures the reservists took Speicher and turned him over to regular forces, around An Nasiriyah, where he was put in a hospital.

By the time the leaders in Baghdad found out they had an American pilot, Dick Cheney had already pronounced him dead. With nobody looking for him, they kept him.

Connolly admits his theory is patched together, but:

``That's as good a scenario as anyone could come up with that he had died, which was zero.''

For those who wonder whether Speicher could still be a captive, reports emerged from Iraq just two months ago that make it plausible:

Defectors who had been guards said Iraq had an underground prison, below a grove of trees, betrayed only by an air duct on the surface. They said Kuwaitis captured during the Iraqi invasion 11 years earlier were in the cells.

Bruce Trenholm is still investigating flight mishaps for the Navy. As much as he's tried to move on to other cases, he can't get away from the Speicher investigation.

Every year or two, sometimes more often, government investigators will look him up and start asking questions.

``This thing grew this big head later,'' Trenholm says of the case. ``I don't know what the big deal is. The guy was a lieutenant commander in the Navy, no big deal, just a pilot, just doing his job like every other pilot was, and he happened to get whacked. It's just one of those unfortunate things that happen in war.''

But as hard-edged as the ex-Marine sounds, he, too, is spooked by what may have happened.

Last fall, while on assignment in Maryland, he took a late-afternoon drive toward Point Lookout. He saw a sign outside a restaurant advertising all-you-can-eat crabs for $15 and stopped in.

The waitress spread old newspapers on his table. He looked down at a USA Today from Jan. 21, 1991. There was a front-page story on Speicher. He tucked it away to keep and asked for more newspapers.

Trenholm still thinks Speicher ejected, probably was hurt and likely died of exposure on those cold January nights in the desert. But he doesn't know. He does know this:

``That man deserves, I don't care if it's his toenail, deserves the right to have it buried on American soil, not on Iraqi soil. His family and his kids have a right to say, `My father was buried HERE.' A little mom, apple pie there, but that's the way I feel.''

Trenholm took one of his photos from the crash-site visit down to an aviators' bar in Pensacola, Fla. There on the wall, covered with pictures of jets, pilots and admirals, he hung a snapshot of the team at the crash site.

He wrote on it the name of the mission: ``Operation Promise Kept.''

Whenever he goes to Trader Jon's, Trenholm looks at the picture and drinks a toast to Scott Speicher.

David Rowe was not surprised to find out that his old friend had ejected. But it hurts to think Speicher might have been held captive this long, Rowe said.

Buddy Harris knows he's in a weird position: looking for his wife's ex-husband, who is missing in action.

He started investigating Scott's disappearance before he and Joanne began dating, the two developed a bond, it just happened, he says.

When they first got together, the kids had a blast going through his old photos, shots of Buddy and Scott, Joanne and Scott, Buddy, Scott and Joanne.

Buddy figures he wound up with this role for a reason. He was put in the Pentagon, assigned to that original work group, kept informed for a reason.

``I think I'm the only one that can speak for Scott, because I know him,'' Buddy says. ``Certainly, now at this point in time in my life, I know him better than anybody in the world.

``If I was over there and he had this information, there's no doubt in my mind that he would be continuing to push it and probably doing a better job.''

He avoids speculating on what may have happened to Scott. Until someone turns up evidence that Scott died, he'll press forward assuming that he's alive.

If he finds Scott, he knows there will be a media crush that will probably last for several years. His and Joanne's life, their kids' lives, would not be the same.

The only thing that has saved them from that so far, he says, is that Joanne has refused interview requests all along.

Buddy has decided that it's time to talk, to keep the pressure on. If it's possible, he wants to bring Scott home.

What would his family do then? People always ask.

First, Buddy says, they'd throw a party. The biggest welcome-home party ever. Then they'd figure things out.

Victor Weedn's DNA work continued, and he set up the first military identification program. If a pilot went down today and a foreign country sent a pound of flesh, scientists could quickly compare the flesh's DNA to the DNA of any service member.

The Defense Intelligence Agency last year set up its own unit to investigate missing service members.

In May, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence agreed to formally investigate the intelligence community's work on the Speicher case.

A few months later, after Sept. 11, several of those agencies would be questioned over lapses similar to the Speicher investigation: Did they share information? How good were they at analyzing data? Could they oversee and critique their own work?

To Speicher's fellow pilots and others steeped in military culture, the one thing they can't understand is why the government took so long to react.

When it signed a treaty to end the war, the United States didn't put Speicher's name on a list of POWs. The government didn't officially ask Iraq for information on Speicher until January 2001.

Nor did the military search for him when he went down. And they waited two years to look after finding his jet.

Even the Iraqi government blames the American government for not accounting for the pilot sooner. It claims to know nothing about what happened to Speicher.

Barry Hull says he won't believe Speicher is dead until he sees some evidence. Without proof, he says, ''we still don't know.''.

Sending Americans into combat in a foreign land requires loyalty and faith, from both ends of the pecking order. That's what bothers the pilots.

``That's part of the deal,'' Barry Hull says. ``When I hang my ass out and go across the border, if I get shot down or something happens to me, I absolutely know, there is no question in my mind, those guys are going to do whatever they have to do to get me.

``If they know in their minds I am dead, well, they're probably not going to come get me. If it's three or four years later and they find out something different, they better get over there.

``And we had an opportunity to do it, and we made a conscious decision not to.''

Hull is now commander of a reserve unit, runs Sunliner Tire and Auto Plaza in South Carolina and flies for American Airlines. He's got a successful business, a pretty girlfriend, a good life, he says, and at best Speicher  is sitting in an Iraqi prison.

He has often thought back to that first night of the war. He can pop up one picture like it happened yesterday: sitting in his Hornet at the fueling tanker, looking down into another pilot's cockpit, thinking about the power and maneuverability of one of the United States' hot new fighter planes.

But not just that, the power of the country, to set up a fighting force that far from its shores, to help patrol the world.

He later asked others when they left the tanker, trying to figure out whom he had watched refuel. Eventually, he eliminated everyone he talked to.

That January night, looking into that cockpit, he had gotten his last view of Scott Speicher.

And all the power and agility of the Hornet, all the political and economic might of the United States, didn't help to save Spike. It hasn't helped to find him.

The same question that rattled the Saratoga after that first strike still can't be answered.

Where's Spike?

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. Yarsinske's book on Speicher is scheduled to be published by Penguin-Putnum later this year.

The information used in this story was gathered through interviews with pilots, military investigators and government officials. Facts also were gleaned from hundreds of pages of Defense Department reports, memos and correspondences and media reports. Conversations were written as participants recalled them.

The following people declined interviews: Michael ``Spock'' Anderson; Gen. John Shalikashvili; former Secretary of Defense William Cohen; former Secretary of Defense William Perry; former Secretary of Defense (and current Vice President) Richard Cheney; former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and current Secretary of State) Colin Powell; and Adm. Stanley Arthur.