32 Years Ago Today

[Bones]

Operation Desert Shield became Operation Desert Storm.

Time really flies...

v6,
boNes

[PanzerMeyer]

Yup, back when I was a senior in high school and when CNN actually had objective journalism!

[Bones]

I was a sophomore in college. I remember the deadline had passed and we had a feeling something was starting so that night I was watching ABC and they were just reporting regular news. I switched to CBS and they had a correspondent reporting in Baghdad saying that nothing is happening etc etc and then there was a boom, and he looked behind him and was like, "What was that?" Then the sky lit up with tracers. I switched back to ABC and they were completely unaware, still on the other news stories.

So it was with luck that I happened to be watching right when the first F117s and Tomahawks hit. We were also quite concerned because my sister was deployed there with the US Navy in the Persian Gulf off of Kuwait.

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

[PanzerMeyer]

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

Thanks for sharing this story since I didn't know about those details. Was his F/A-18C the one that was shot down by a MiG-25?

[Bones]

That is the somewhat official report, a MiG-25PD to be exact. But there are several unconfirmed things about that as well. For instance, there is some evidence that the MiG-25 pilot might not have been Iraqi, but actually Russian. Possibly an instructor pilot for the MiG-25, maybe a mercenary (the latter being even more rumor). But there are also reports that it could have been a SAM, or even a Phoenix missile, and other speculation. Each of those have their own little investigative story, and all prompted by rumor and off the cuff assessment. Spike was doomed when Cheney announced live in a press conference hours after the war began that there was a single F/A-18 lost and when he was asked what the pilot's status was, he said he was KIA. He said this without any evidence, mere hours after the incident. So most of the SAR guys and the higher ups were like, "Oh, he's the Secretary of Defense, he must know more than we do and so he's dead" and that's why no one bothered to go look for him.

But the basics of it was that everything seemed stacked against Spike. They were issued new PRC-90 survival radios before they launched, and they didn't fit well in the survival vest. One pilot said his life support guy said, "You know, if you eject, that radio isn't staying in that pocket." The evidence from the found wreckage show that he did indeed have a successful ejection and the worse injuries he would have had thanks to his flight suit were burns from the ejection and getting hit on his exposed neck. There was evidence of "rescue me" signals near the crash site that one learns in SERE school. An Iraqi defector said that as a cabbie he was told to drive a prisoner to the prison and when showed an array of like 20 photos of different Americans, he pointed out Spike's photo with no problem. Then there was the method of which the crash site was investigated. It was supposed to be a covert op with Delta Force and SEALs but the brass (I won't name names) got cold feet and decided to go diplomatic instead and ask Hussein for permission to go in. That was what clued Hussein off that they were looking for one of his captured pilots that was already declared KIA even before anyone had intel that this was true. So, they couldn't go investigate until Hussein said it was OK,which oh surprise surprise the date was pushed off multiple times and then when they finally were allowed there,they had to under Iraqi watch and they found the crash site had already been excavated. Then as pressure went up to Baghdad to cooperate with the investigation, they went back to the crash site and lo and behold, they find Spike's flight suit that wasn't there before when they investigated the first time. This flight suit was taken back to Washington for forensics and it was pretty much proven that it was his--and then it suddenly disappeared.

I could go on and on and this is just scraping the tip of the iceberg. The whole thing was a travesty and a disgrace. There is closure somewhat, at least for the family, but the circumstances around it are unacceptable to me and many others. The level of intrigue is so high, you'd think they would make a movie about it. I doubt that government would ever allow that though, and if they did, it would be heavily censored.

v6,
boNes

[PanzerMeyer]

Yeah, I'm simply stunned bones and I have to say the US government more than just "dropped the ball" in that circumstance.

And yes, someone could absolutely make a movie out of this. This is like Tom Clancy/Bourne Identity levels of intrigue here.

[Grifter]

You could make a film about this, and I don't think there is much the government could do to censor the film. First amendment would prohibit the government's interference, assuming that the information you've summarized here is not classified? Sure, the government could probably huff and puff about national security, but they would be hard pressed to do so, I think, in this case. You would need an Oliver Stone type to direct or produce it.

[Bones]

An old article from 2000 I found in my archives from CBS. It is very dated so some of the info is not accurate as things developed.

(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."

v6,
boNes