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Us hunts 91 pow { April 24 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/iraq/chi-0304240299apr24,1,1883302.story?coll=chi%2Dnews%2Dhedhttp://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/iraq/chi-0304240299apr24,1,1883302.story?coll=chi%2Dnews%2Dhed
U.S. hunts POW of '91 war
By Christine Spolar
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published April 24, 2003
BAGHDAD -- The search for Navy Capt. Michael Scott Speicher, the American pilot left behind in the 1991 gulf war, passes through acres of broken yellow bricks, twisted metal lampposts and wind-tossed papers of Al Radwaniyah, a feared Republic Guard training base that Iraqis whisper was a "very special place."
Speicher was shot down in the Iraqi desert on the first day of the gulf war and later given up for dead. But it is now accepted at the highest echelons of U.S. military and intelligence communities that Speicher likely survived to become one of the dark secrets of Al Radwaniyah.
Classified documents show that Speicher was seen at Al Radwaniyah years after being shot down. Other accounts, supplied by Iraqi sources to intelligence agents and deemed credible, assert that the pilot was alive in early 2002 and was believed to be hidden in Iraq as recently as a few months ago.
American intelligence agents are now in Iraq searching for clues about what happened to Speicher. As one intelligence source said, "There is a strong belief that we are looking for someone alive."
Interviews with dozens of pilots and information gleaned from hundreds of classified and unclassified documents, some obtained from military personnel and some through the Freedom of Information Act, have shed light on what happened the night Michael Speicher was shot down and what failed to happen in the years that followed.
Speicher was 32 and a Navy lieutenant commander when he made history as the first casualty of the gulf war. He made history again a decade later when the Navy, the Pentagon and the White House conceded a terrible mistake had been made: Speicher had been left behind.
A CIA and Defense Department joint review in 2000 triggered the admission. The review, spurred on by congressional investigations and media accounts that showed sharp inconsistencies and errors in the Pentagon's official version of Speicher's loss, found no evidence that he had died in Iraq.
According to the 100-page review, Speicher most likely lived through his shootdown and parachuted into the Iraqi desert. The report concluded that "if he survived, he was almost certainly captured by the Iraqis."
In the waning days of the Clinton administration, the Navy changed Speicher's status from "killed in action" to "missing in action." President Bill Clinton somberly explained that the change meant that Speicher "might be alive" and "if he is . . . we're going to do everything to get him out."
Since his file was reopened, he has been promoted twice and is now a captain.
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Last year, as the U.S. prepared for war with Iraq, the Bush administration sent a clear message about Speicher. He was no longer "missing in action." He now was "missing/captured." As Secretary of the Navy Gordon England wrote on Oct. 11, Speicher was likely a prisoner of war.
The most enduring mystery of the gulf war of 1991 began within hours of the launch of the air war. Speicher, a top gun among fliers, was part of the first mission on the first night. On Jan. 17, 1991, his F/A-18 fighter jet was hit by an air-to-air missile fired by an Iraqi warplane.
By the next day, Speicher was deemed a likely loss. Classified documents show that fellow airmen reported a midair blast and subsequent explosions below their aircraft. But only when the pilots returned from the mission did they realize one man was missing. Speicher was never heard from again.
The day after Speicher's shootdown, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney went on national television to announce the loss of one American pilot. That announcement, classified documents show, was roundly criticized within the military and regarded as a breach of procedure to give up a soldier--without proof--to an enemy.
The U.S. military did search for Speicher, but rescue teams apparently followed the wrong lead, classified documents show. On Jan. 17, the U.S. military recorded two separate shootdowns of aircraft. Somehow, information about the two downed aircraft was switched. The locations were far apart and, in a mistake noted on classified documents, the military only sent search aircraft over one of the sites--and not Speicher's. Classified documents show search planes never flew over the coordinates given for Speicher. No one ever made any kind of ground search, documents show.
The Navy at first designated Speicher as missing in action. At the end of the war and with the release of American prisoners of war, the Navy approached Speicher's family about the likelihood of his death. His wife, Joanne, accepted the Navy's version of the facts. Only one bureaucratic issue remained. The U.S. military had received notice from the Iraqis that a 1 1/2-pound package of human remains sent from Iraq were those of an American serviceman named Michael. With only one American missing, the military concluded the remains were most likely Speicher's.
DNA samples were taken from Speicher's two children to verify the remains. The test, however, show that the remains and the DNA samples could not be linked. Scientifically, the tests proved the remains were not from Speicher.
For reasons that are unclear, Navy documents began using that test as evidence that Speicher was dead. Scientists involved in the DNA testing of the sample still cannot explain the mistake or why the Navy, for years, stood behind the errant conclusion.
The Navy notified the family in May 1991 that Speicher could now be considered "killed in action." The family signed off on the paperwork as victory parades marched through American streets that summer.
The next few years, Speicher was all but forgotten. His wife remarried, and she and her new husband, a former Navy pilot, had two children. Life went on. What the new family never knew was that over the years, there were about a dozen reports of sightings or information about the lost pilot, according to military sources.
The accounts were duly noted by the Pentagon's then-tiny division for missing personnel. The personnel office, however, did little with the information and never passed it on for analysis for a simple reason: Speicher was deemed dead. Sightings were viewed as non-credible.
That changed in December 1993. Qataris hunting for birds in the western desert of Iraq happened upon the wreckage, largely intact, of a U.S. fighter plane. The Americans were alerted, and the discovery sent shock waves through the Pentagon.
The plane was quickly determined to be Speicher's, and it appeared that the pilot had successfully ejected. The pilot's canopy, released during a punchout, was some distance from the body of the plane.
Speicher's family was alerted to the find in 1994, and Special Operations teams began making plans to go to the site to try to find out what happened. In December 1994, after a year of planning, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Gen. John Shalikashvili and Defense Secretary William Perry in the lead, held a critical meeting to weigh the decision on a covert search in enemy territory.
Shalikashvili, in the end, decided not. As several witnesses have recounted, Shalikashvili dismissed operational assessments, still classified, that judged the mission risk as low. He told the group of military men planning the covert action that he didn't want to soldiers to die looking "for old bones."
Soldiers in that meeting still have trouble understanding that decision. One captain, who asked not to be identified, said people were stunned. The Pentagon quickly turned the search for Speicher into an operation in cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross and with permission of Iraq.
A year passed before Iraq would allow American troops to enter with the Red Cross. When the search team entered, they found the crash site had been recently disturbed and, in the words of one member of the team, "the sands looked like they had been sifted."
The search team concluded that there was no evidence Speicher had died. The plane, once thought through satellite imagery to be upside down in the sand, had landed right side up. The canopy appeared intact. There was no sign of blood or human remains on any part of the plane. There was no sign of a burial ground.
There was also some clear maneuvering by the Iraqis to portray the pilot as dead at the site. The Iraqis produced a flight suit that, they said, had just been located near the plane. American investigators judged that the flight suit had not been exposed to the elements for years. They also concluded that, based on missing patches and size, it belonged to Speicher.
Investigators were able to retrieve some of the jet's computer data, still intact after 10 years. The data indicated that the F/A-18 had been struck in midair, suffered a two-to-three-second cockpit fire, and then the pilot bailed out.
Speicher could no longer be considered dead. And no one in the military seemed to know what to do with the information.
The New York Times reported in December 1995 that a secret mission had taken place to examine the desert crash site, but there was no suggestion that Speicher could have been alive.
The story incensed some senators, notably Republicans Bob Smith of New Hampshire and Pat Roberts of Kansas. Both men later concluded that they had been misled, if not lied to, in previous Navy and intelligence briefings about Speicher's fate.
The Pentagon continued to publicly describe Speicher's case as one "in which there was no evidence that the pilot survived the crash." In fact, investigators on the mission, who later described the findings to Perry, said exactly the opposite: There was no evidence to prove Speicher was dead.
Smith's staff pursued tough questions with the Navy, the CIA and the Pentagon. Later, Roberts, a former TV journalist, also became convinced that the information provided by the government failed to add up.
The pilot's family was astounded at the turn of events. Joanne Speicher's new husband, Albert Harris, a close friend of the missing pilot, was on reserve duty in the Pentagon when Speicher's plane was first found, and he knew about the discovery almost immediately. In an awkward position, Harris took on much of the family responsibility for demanding an accounting by the military.
Speicher's fate attracted attention in May 2000 when the television news program "60 Minutes II" detailed how the handling of Speicher's loss was fraught with errors. The news program revealed that in 1999, an Iraqi defector deemed credible by U.S. intelligence had told investigators that he had driven Speicher, alive and talking, from the desert to an Iraqi military facility shortly after the crash in 1991.
The defector, who passed three polygraph tests and picked Speicher out of lineup of photos, said the pilot was taken alive. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence requested a CIA-Defense Department review of the case. That review, released in late 2000, confirmed suspicions that Speicher likely lived through his crash and was captured.
The CIA-Defense report was read by Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and President Clinton. The change in Speicher's status--an unprecedented shift from "killed in action" to "missing in action"--triggered a revitalized effort to account for the pilot.
One tip produced some known coordinates of Speicher--33 12 19 N/044 17 29E--that led investigators to the Al Radwaniyah training camp. Speicher was seen there in 1998, according to classified information, but agents working for the United States were never able to penetrate the base.
Then in the spring of 2002, another Iraqi defector came forward, this time to Dutch intelligence, offering information about an American pilot in captivity in Iraq. The defector said the pilot had been held, for some time in 2001, at the Iraqi Intelligence Headquarters in Baghdad. That was the same building bombed by the United States in 1993 after revelations of a plot to assassinate former President George Bush.
The defector told intelligence agents that the pilot was moved to a military facility in southern Baghdad on Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the terrorist attacks on America. The Iraqis feared reprisals from the United States and moved the pilot for safekeeping, the defector told his interrogators.
The defector added that only a handful of Iraqis were aware of the pilot's existence--and both Saddam Hussein and his son Qusai closely monitored his well-being, sources said. The defector also added that Speicher was in good health although he walked with a limp. As far as the defector knew, Speicher was alive as of January 2002.
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This week, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, investigators found the initials "MSS" etched into a cell wall in the Hakmiyah prison in Baghdad. It is unknown who scrawled the letters or whether they had anything to do with the missing pilot, but an informant had also reported that an American pilot was held at that prison in the mid-1990s, the officials said.
The months leading up to the war with Iraq this year were laced with tensions for investigators who have spent years trying to figure out what happened to Speicher.
One military source said Speicher's case was on a high-priority list for secret operations run since the first missiles fell. A team of agents from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency are in Iraq to check every defector claim and sighting.
"They've been looking for him since the beginning," said one military source. "Speicher's been on the list all along. They're in there--and they've been in there. They're checking out every possibility."
The ruins of Al Radwaniyah may never provide answers. Bombed five days into the war, according to Iraqis who live nearby, the camp was reduced to dust and rubble. Iraqis ran out to the site as soon as they believed it to be safe to look for any prisoners in a small building of dungeon-like cells on the grounds. There were always rumors, said Iraqis who wandered the tattered camp this week, that people were held captive there.
So far, not a prisoner has been found.
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
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