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?

FMI: www.jpra.jfcom.mil