Naval Aviator's Status Remains "Captured" After Review
by Aero-News Senior Correspondent Kevin R.C. "Hognose"
O'Brien
Many people wonder what
happened to navy pilot Michael Scott Speicher, but some people
know. Those people are probably either in Coalition custody, or at
large among the Iraqi insurgents, according to a Naval board that
has reviewed Speicher's status. At the end, the panel left the
status alone: Missing/Captured. Navy Secretary Gordon England
agreed, signing off on the panel's recommendations.
So, where *is* Scott Speicher?
Speicher's picture once again is in the news. Confidently gazing
from an official portrait, or grinning out from a snapshot, he's an
unremarkable example, if there can be any such thing, of our Navy
fighter/attack pilots. It's in his blood; his father, Wallace
Speicher, flew for the Navy in World War II.
But he's been in and out of the news since the first night of
the Gulf War, January 18, 1991, when an Iraqi missile brought down
his F/A-18.
Ironically, "Spike" (his personal callsign) was involved in
attacking and suppressing the Iraqi SAM network for follow-on
forces. It's a dangerous job. He didn't return to his ship, USS
Saratoga, and comrades saw an explosion that they interpreted as
the destruction of his plane by a missile.
"He never made contact with search aircraft or elements, and his
precise position remained unknown until the wreckage of his
aircraft was found after the war," Darrel Whitcomb has written.
(Whitcomb, a retired Air Force colonel, is one of the JPRA's
experts on personnel recovery history, theory and practice. He's a
Vietnam combat veteran, and author of two books on personnel
recovery).
The Navy initially carried Speicher as Missing in Action, but
after the end of hostilities in that war, reclassified him Killed
in Action/Body Not Recovered. However, a thorough review in May,
2001, reclassified him again as Missing/Captured.
The US had not found any trace of the missing pilot or of his
plane by the end of the war, and for years thereafter. But they
also had found no proof that he was dead. And the proof that the
Iraqis offered, in 1995, didn't prove the case either way.
Speicher left behind a wife and two young children when he went
down, but humanitarian appeals to the authorities in Iraq, then
Saddam's Ba'athists, fell on deaf ears.
But the US, like most
civilized countries, does not give up on its fallen, and a low-key
search for Speicher or word of him continued. The acronym of the
searching agency changed as it reorganized, from JCRC to JPRC to
today's JPRA (Joint Personnel Recovery Agency), but the
determination to find and repatriate the missing of all wars
continues. While tens of thousands are missing from WWII and Korea,
and thousands from Vietnam, Speicher was the Agency's only case
from the Gulf War.
After referring to Speicher in a recent document, Brigadier
General Anthony A. Cucolo II of the Joint Center for Operational
Analysis stressed, "Personnel recovery is always very much on the
minds of senior commanders.... We will not forget you nor will we
give up the effort to find you."
The fundamental reason that the Navy reclassified Speicher to a
presumed-alive rather than the previous presumed-dead status, Navy
insiders tell us, is that there's no dispositive evidence either
way --and without convincing evidence that he's dead, the Pentagon
will not count him dead. There may be secret evidence as well, but
if that's the case, the keepers of the secrets are keeping them
well.
During the ten years from 1991 to 2001, there had been various
hints from informers and defectors -- persons of no sure
reliability -- that he may have been captured. But in 1995, Iraqis
led American agents to the wreckage of a jet in the desert. Serial
numbers confirmed that it was Scott Speicher's long-missing
F/A-18.
The Iraqis may have believed that this would prove that Speicher
was dead, and made the US stop looking. But it had no such effect:
parts of his jet were there, but no sign of him. His flight suit
turned up --but not in the torn and stained condition it would have
been in if he died violently inside it.
After the capture of Baghdad in 2003, a special Task Force under
a Marine Corps Brigadier General Joseph J. McMenamin searched for
the captives of this war -- all of whom were quickly accounted for
at the time -- and for Speicher. According to Whitcomb, the Task
Force, "mostly intelligence personnel," went "combing through
liberated Iraqi intelligence centers and prisons" but not proof of
Speicher's capture was found.
"The Speicher team exhausted all in-country leads regarding the
fate of Captain Speicher," McMenamin wrote in a statement available
in .pdf format here.
A Board of Inquiry composed of three commissioned or
noncommissioned officers reviews the status of all open recovery
cases every year. Apart from Speicher, the other open case in Iraq
is that of Army Reserve soldier Keith "Matt" Maupin, who is also
carried as Missing -Captured.
Maupin was seized with Thomas Hamill and other Brown and Root
contractors after a convoy was ambushed on April 9, 2004. Hamill
later escaped; Al-Jazeera, which had been cooperating with Maupin's
captors, claims that it has a film of Maupin's murder by his
captors, but Maupin's family and unit members deny the victim in
the video was the man they knew.
Lt Col John D.
Huffstutter, the Commandant of the DOD's Personnel Recovery
Academy, says that there's one lesson to be learned from Speicher's
case: "The importance of accounting for our personnel quickly and
thoroughly cannot be overemphasized."
It's not from lack of effort on our side, but Scott Speicher's
kids have grown into their teens by now. They don't know where
their father is. But somebody in Iraq has to know.
What sort of person would imagine he had something to gain by
keeping such a secret?