Navy Capt. Michael "Scott" Speiche
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 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?
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