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Bones wrote: ↑

17 Jan 2023, 07:23

Tonight was also the night we lost then-LCDR Michael Scott "Spike" Speicher in an F/A-18C out of VFA-81 Sunliners, CV-60 USS Saratoga. He was the first aerial loss of the war, and his shootdown became the big subject of much controversy when no one bothered to look for him (thank you very little, Dick Cheney <---my opinion). I religiously followed this story and controversy and was pretty actively involved in bringing him home until he finally came home in 2009, 18 years later. But that's a whole 'nother story.

v6,
boNes

(CBS) On January 17, 1991, the first night of the Gulf War, Lieutenant Commander Michael Scott Speicher was shot down over Iraq. He became the conflict's first American casualty.

But there's one problem: There is no evidence that he is dead. Bob Simon reports.

Speicher is the only American unaccounted for from the Gulf war. When Speicher was officially declared killed in action in May of 1991, the U.S. military had never even looked for him.

Somewhere in the arid, desolate desert of western Iraq, Speicher's F-18 crashed in darkness two hours after the war began.

Speicher was one of the best pilots on the aircraft carrier Saratoga. He wasn't supposed to fly on the first mission of the war but he refused to be left behind. "When it just came down to flying the airplane, there was nobody like Spike," says Barry Hull, another pilot in Speicher's squadron.

On January 17, Hull, Speicher, and 32 other pilots took off at 1:30 a.m. from the USS Saratoga in the Red Sea. They were supposed to suppress enemy air defenses west of Baghdad. It was a very dangerous mission.

"The closer we got to Baghdad the more impressive the light show over Baghdad became," recalls Bob Stumpf, who was flying two planes away from Speicher. "It was just an incredible anti-aircraft barrage."

Eight minutes from the target, Stumpf was startled by a huge flash in the sky. He assumed the blast was a missile, but he didn't think that any planes had been hit.

The fighters continued toward the target and dropped their bombs. As they turned back toward the Saratoga, the pilots checked in over the radio. Speicher didn't check in. The pilots returned to the Saratoga just before dawn without him.

During their intelligence debriefings on the ship, Dave Renaud, who had been the closest pilot to Speicher, reported seeing explosions five miles away, in Speicher's direction, at the same time Stumpf had witnessed that large flash in the sky. Renaud reported the plane had been blown to bits. He even drew a little circle on his map where he thought he had seen the fireball.

"The first report was 'airplane disintegrated on impact; no contact with the pilot; we really don't believe that anyone was able to survive the impact,'" says Admiral Stan Arthur, commander of all Allied Naval Forces in the Persian Gulf.

A few hours after the first mission had returned to the ships, Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney held a press conference in Washington. On the basis of one account of a flash in the night sky and 12 hours of radio silence, Secretary Cheney declared Speicher dead.

To Stumpf, the pronouncement seemed premature.

Why did Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney declare Speicher dead in the first hours of the Gulf War when there was no evidence to support it? Cheney declined to comment.

Admiral Arthur says that because the Navy wasn't sure where Speicher had gone down, no search and rescue mission was launched. But the captain of the Saratoga personally told Speicher's wife Joanne that "every effort continues to be made to locate Scott." A week later, Speicher's commanding officer sent this message to Joanne, "All, repeat, all, theater combat search and rescue efforts were mobilized."

On March 7, 1991, right after the war, Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams assured Americans the military would continue to look for every missing soldier and flier.

When the POWs were released at the end of the war, Tony Albano, who was Speicher's roommate, was sent to Saudi Arabia in case Speicher was among the prisoners being freed. He didn't see Speicher.

Weeks later, the Iraqis sent a pound and a half of flesh to the Americans, claiming it was the remains of a pilot named Michael. Speicher's first name was Michael and there was no other Michael among the missing. One DNA test and the case would be closed forever.

Then things got strange. That spring, Victor Weedn, a forensic pathologist, tested the flesh. He says it did not come from Speicher.

Were Saddam and the Iraqis trying to hide something, or had they just made a mistake? Apparently no one asked, because the next day, May 7, the Navy began the process of officially declaring Speicher KIA. "I was a little surprised at that because our test report didn't show that he was dead," Weedn says.

Joanne Speicher was asked to sign off on this decision. She thought all search efforts had been exhausted, so she agreed. While most of the country was celebrating its victory, a private memorial service was being held in Arlington National Cemetery. There was no body.

Speicher's case was closed. Then in December 1993 an Army general from Qatar came to the western Iraqi desert, 150 miles southwest of Baghdad. He and his party were hunting for rare falcons when they stumbled across an American F-18.

The condition of the nose suggested the plane had not disintegrated in the air. The Qatari took pictures, and pieces of the plane, to the American Embassy in Doha, the Qatari capital. The photos and a piece of radar equipment were sent to Washington, where a check was run on the serial numbers. The results stirred the Pentagon. Nearly three years after the Gulf War, Speicher's jet had been located.

The pictures showed that the canopy had come down away from the plane; this indicated that the pilot had tried to eject.

The Pentagon went back and checked the satellite imagery it used to track Scud launches during the war. It found a crash site, with the outlines of a jet in the sand - Speicher's F-18. The crash spot was right where his fellow pilot had said it was. But despite three years of assurances, no one in the U.S. government or the military had ever bothered to look for Speicher's plane.

Says Arthur: "You get this sinking feeling that there's something really wrong here, that you missed something."