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. Navy pilot shot down in an aerial battle in the 1991 Persian 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.
But 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.
Thomas Brown, chief of the Intelligence Community POW/MIA analytic cell at the Defense Intelligence Agency, worked on Speicher’s case for 15 years. He described to The Associated Press in an exclusive interview how the threads leading to the pilot got so tangled.
Shot down on the war’s first day
Speicher, a 33-year-old lieutenant commander, was shot down by an Iraqi MiG 100 miles west of Baghdad on Jan. 17, 1991, the first day of the war to drive Hussein’s invading forces from Kuwait.
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 — that of a downed Air Force A-10 fighter. The Iraqis brought the unidentified American A-10 pilot’s remains to a Basra 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 Hussein seized the hospital, forcing Iraqi officials to make a hasty gamble.
If they didn’t turn over the remains, they would be in violation of the U.N. resolution ending the war, and the war would not be officially over.
So instead, the Iraqis 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.
A swirl of whispers and rumors
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. The hunters gave the U.S. Embassy in Qatar a piece of a plane containing a serial number that matched Speicher’s F-18.
Shepherded by Iraqi officials, a Red Cross 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.
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.
President George W. Bush used Speicher’s case as more evidence that Hussein had to be ousted. After the U.S. invasion in 2003, intelligence analysts searching for Speicher entered the Hakmiya jail in Baghdad and dug up the grounds. They found remains, but none that matched Speicher’s DNA.
The searchers continued to press every lead. For six years, soldiers and Marines deployed in Anbar were told to ask people there whether they had heard anything about the missing American pilot.
The instructions finally paid off in July.
Four football fields of desert sifted
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 had 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, a Speicher friend who later married the pilot’s widow, said 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 said. “Their motive wasn’t Scott Speicher; it was to get this thing done.”
