Part 6: Missing in Action – Renewed effort to solving mystery

Part 6 of a 6 part series enttitled "Scott Speicher - Dead or Alive?"

Originally published Jan. 4, 2002.

By Lon Wagner and Amy Yarsinske

Part 5: Hope Reawakens – Pilot declared dead again

Any day now, the call would come.

Scott Speicher's widow, Joanne, and her husband, Buddy Harris, would be told on which day Speicher's status would be changed to missing in action. President Clinton had signed off.

It was early January 2001, 10 years since Speicher's F/A-18 had been shot down over Iraq, nearly as long since the Navy had declared him killed in action.

What was about to happen would make history.

No American service member, from any war, had ever been taken off the KIA list and switched back to missing in action.

Despite being KIA, Speicher's career had flourished: The lieutenant commander who entered the Gulf War had been promoted to commander. The Navy paid Joanne a lump sum of $300,000 in back pay. Once he was listed as MIA, she would start receiving Speicher's monthly salary of $6,313.

Joanne and Buddy knew the story would stir the media. They'd have to talk to the kids, Michael and Meghan.

They were 1 and 3 when their father was shot down. The couple worried that this would jumble their lives again.

``The worst thing that's going to happen,'' Buddy remembers telling them, ``is that somebody is going to come back into your lives who loves you more than anything else. Having more than one person love you can't be bad.''

Word of the announcement leaked a day early, and reporters surrounded the Harris house in Jacksonville, Fla.

Joanne and Buddy stuck with their plan: They packed up the family and left town for a week.

The Navy announced Speicher's status change on Jan. 11 in a four-paragraph statement. But President Clinton created a frenzy.

``We have some information that leads us to believe he might be alive,'' Clinton told reporters later that day. ``And we hope and pray that he is. But we have already begun working to try to determine whether, in fact, he's alive, if he is, where he is and how we can get him out.''

Alive? What did the government know? Or had Clinton, 10 days before leaving office, gone too far? Hours later, he tried to temper the statement.

``Well, I don't want to say more than we have,'' the president said. ``All I want to say is we have evidence which convinced me that we can't ensure that he perished. I don't want to hold out false hope, but I thought it was wrong to continue to classify him as killed in action when he might not have been.''

The next day, the story made the front page of newspapers across the country. Speicher's squadronmate Barry Hull and Sen. Robert Smith appeared on CBS's ``The Early Show.'' The show's anchor asked Smith why the U.S. government had waited seven years, from the time Speicher's jet was found, to try to locate the pilot.

Smith said he couldn't understand that, either. He said that up until 1998, he had been misled, and he promised to deal later with those who had steered Congress awry. There's not one shred of evidence, Smith said, that shows where, how or even if Speicher died.

``This pilot, if he's alive, has been there for 10 years with nobody looking for him. And that's just plain outrageous.''

Hull began by saying hello to his combat buddies: Ammo, Banker, Bano, Bert, Chauncy, Coop, Donor, Hoff, Jonah, Maggot, Mongo, Cong, MRT, Oscar, Polecat, , Spock and Whip.

``And, Spike, if you're out there, we're thinking about you, buddy.''

The anchor asked Hull if he really thought Speicher could be alive, after 10 years.

He didn't think so, Hull said, but he couldn't be sure.

``I believe I read somewhere where the North Vietnamese held prisoners for, held the French prisoners for 20 years. So it has happened before. And there's no assurance that he's dead.''

The question had haunted Hull, his squadronmates, Spike's friends and the government for a decade.

It confounded them more, not less, as each year passed.

Tony Albano may have been the last pilot to speak to Speicher. They were roommates on the carrier Saratoga, about to fly off the ship on their first strike. ``See you back on deck in a couple of hours,'' he told Spike.

Albano stayed with the Navy and is now a captain. He's commander of Training Air Wing Two in Kingsville, Texas. He's still loyal to the Navy, but frustrated that the service, the Department of Defense and other government agencies only passively pursued finding Speicher at key times.

In his darkest thoughts, Albano thinks Speicher may have been captured and held prisoner for a couple of years. When the Iraqis found out the United States knew what happened, they executed him.

``Saddam Hussein is, from what I understand, he's basically whacked in the head and he's a trophy keeper,'' Albano said. ``That would be my worst thought . . . here's my first capture and that's my trophy.''

One time, Albano offered a more benign theory to a superior. Speicher had a dark complexion, and if he grew facial hair he could have blended in pretty well. Maybe he slammed his head during the ejection, got amnesia and wandered around.

``That's a little bit ridiculous, Bano,'' his superior told him.

David Rowe, Spike's old high school and Florida State friend, doesn't have any theories about what happened. Rowe still lives in Jacksonville and works as an environmental consultant. At this point, he's not even sure what to hope for.

When he first heard that Spike might have ejected, he thought about watching his friend pirouette off that oak tree and dive headfirst into Big Dismal Sink.

``I knew that Spike punched out,'' Rowe said. ``I knew it, I knew it in my heart and soul that he had punched.''

But that leads, ultimately, to the idea that Speicher landed, lived and was captured. Rowe can't stand to carry that any further.

``Oh, that's hurtful. I mean, I want my friend to have survived, but to think what he's been through . . . ''

Timothy Connolly left the Pentagon in 1996 and is waiting on paperwork to allow him to teach middle school social studies. To this day, he is the only deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations who served in one of those services, the Army Rangers.

He's been connected to the military for more than 20 years, so it pains him when new service members ask what would happen if they went down behind enemy lines.

``My view is, right now, that I could not tell you with any degree of certainty that if you are either captured or fall behind enemy lines that the U.S. will go and get you,'' he tells them.

He still thinks the Pentagon blew it when Secretary of Defense Bill Perry and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman John Shalikashvili refused to covertly search Speicher's crash site. Intelligence agents could have worked the information from the wreckage through their channels and by now may have known what happened.

Over the years, Connolly pieced together his own theory:

Speicher ejected, got hurt and left an evasion symbol near the crash site. Then he fled. He was captured by Bedouins, who turned him over to Iraqi military forces. Connolly's unit during the war seized an air force base, so he knew that many of the Iraqis were essentially reservists.

He figures the reservists took Speicher and turned him over to regular forces, around An Nasiriyah, where he was put in a hospital.

By the time the leaders in Baghdad found out they had an American pilot, Dick Cheney had already pronounced him dead. With nobody looking for him, they kept him.

Connolly admits his theory is patched together, but:

``That's as good a scenario as anyone could come up with that he had died, which was zero.''

For those who wonder whether Speicher could still be a captive, reports emerged from Iraq just three months ago that make it plausible:

Defectors who had been guards said Iraq had an underground prison, below a grove of trees, betrayed only by an air duct on the surface. They said Kuwaitis captured during the Iraqi invasion 10 years earlier were in the cells.

Bruce Trenholm is still investigating flight mishaps for the Navy. As much as he's tried to move on to other cases, he can't get away from the Speicher investigation.

Every year or two, sometimes more often, government investigators will look him up and start asking questions.

``This thing grew this big head later,'' Trenholm says of the case. ``I don't know what the big deal is. The guy was a lieutenant commander in the Navy, no big deal, just a pilot, just doing his job like every other pilot was, and he happened to get whacked. It's just one of those unfortunate things that happen in war.''

But as hard-edged as the ex-Marine sounds, he, too, is spooked by what may have happened.

Last fall, while on assignment in Maryland, he took a late-afternoon drive toward Point Lookout. He saw a sign outside a restaurant advertising all-you-can-eat crabs for $15 and stopped in.

The waitress spread old newspapers on his table. He looked down at a USA Today from Jan. 21, 1991. There was a front-page story on Speicher. He tucked it away to keep and asked for more newspapers.

Trenholm still thinks Speicher ejected, probably was hurt and likely died of exposure on those cold January nights in the desert. But he doesn't know. He does know this:

``That man deserves, I don't care if it's his toenail, deserves the right to have it buried on American soil, not on Iraqi soil. His family and his kids have a right to say, `My father was buried HERE.' A little mom, apple pie there, but that's the way I feel.''

Trenholm took one of his photos from the crash-site visit down to an aviators' bar in Pensacola, Fla. There on the wall, covered with pictures of jets, pilots and admirals, he hung a snapshot of the team at the crash site.

He wrote on it the name of the mission: ``Operation Promise Kept.''

Whenever he goes to Trader Jon's, Trenholm looks at the picture and drinks a toast to Scott Speicher.

Buddy Harris knows he's in a weird position: looking for his wife's ex-husband, who is missing in action.

He started investigating Scott's disappearance before he and Joanne began dating, the two developed a bond, it just happened, he says.

When they first got together, the kids had a blast going through his old photos, shots of Buddy and Scott, Joanne and Scott, Buddy, Scott and Joanne.

Buddy figures he wound up with this role for a reason. He was put in the Pentagon, assigned to that original work group, kept informed for a reason.

``I think I'm the only one that can speak for Scott, because I know him,'' Buddy says. ``Certainly, now at this point in time in my life, I know him better than anybody in the world.

``If I was over there and he had this information, there's no doubt in my mind that he would be continuing to push it and probably doing a better job.''

He avoids speculating on what may have happened to Scott. Until someone turns up evidence that Scott died, he'll press forward assuming that he's alive.

If he finds Scott, he knows there will be a media crush that will probably last for several years. His and Joanne's life, their kids' lives, would not be the same.

The only thing that has saved them from that so far, he says, is that Joanne has refused interview requests all along.

Buddy has decided that it's time to talk, to keep the pressure on. If it's possible, he wants to bring Scott home.

What would his family do then? People always ask.

First, Buddy says, they'd throw a party. The biggest welcome-home party ever. Then they'd figure things out.

Victor Weedn's DNA work continued, and he set up the first military identification program.

If a pilot went down today and a foreign country sent a pound of flesh, scientists could quickly compare the flesh's DNA to the DNA of any service member.

The Defense Intelligence Agency last year set up its own unit to investigate missing service members.

In May, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence agreed to formally investigate the intelligence community's work on the Speicher case.

A few months later, after Sept. 11, several of those agencies would be questioned over lapses similar to the Speicher investigation: Did they share information? How good were they at analyzing data? Could they oversee and critique their own work?

To Speicher's fellow pilots and others steeped in military culture, the one thing they can't understand is why the government took so long to react.

When it signed a treaty to end the war, the United States didn't put Speicher's name on a list of POWs. The government didn't officially ask Iraq for information on Speicher until January 2001.

Nor did the military search for him when he went down. And they waited two years to look after finding his jet.

Even the Iraqi government blames the American government for not accounting for the pilot sooner. They claim to know nothing about what happened to Speicher.

Sending Americans into combat in a foreign land requires loyalty and faith, from both ends of the pecking order. That's what bothers the pilots.

``That's part of the deal,'' Barry Hull says. ``When I hang my ass out and go across the border, if I get shot down or something happens to me, I absolutely know, there is no question in my mind, those guys are going to do whatever they have to do to get me.

``If they know in their minds I am dead, well, they're probably not going to come get me. If it's three or four years later and they find out something different, they better get over there.

``And we had an opportunity to do it, and we made a conscious decision not to.''

Hull is now commander of a reserve unit, runs Sunliner Tire and Auto Plaza in South Carolina and flies for American Airlines. He's got a successful business, a pretty girlfriend, a good life, he says, and at best Speicher is sitting in an Iraqi prison.

He has often thought back to that first night of the war. He can pop up one picture like it happened yesterday: sitting in his Hornet at the fueling tanker, looking down into another pilot's cockpit, thinking about the power and maneuverability of one of the United States' hot new fighter planes.

But not just that, the power of the country, to set up a fighting force that far from its shores, to help patrol the world.

He later asked others when they left the tanker, trying to figure out whom he had watched refuel. Eventually, he eliminated everyone he talked to.

That January night, looking into that cockpit, he had gotten his last view of Scott Speicher.

And all the power and agility of the Hornet, all the political and economic might of the United States, didn't help to save Spike. It hasn't helped to find him.

The same question that rattled the Saratoga after that first strike still can't be answered.

Where's Spike?

Memo:

The information used in this story was gathered through interviews with pilots, military investigators and government officials. Facts also were gleaned from hundreds of pages of Defense Department reports, memos and correspondences and media reports. Conversations were written as participants recalled them.

The following people declined interviews: Michael ``Spock'' Anderson; Gen. John Shalikashvili; former Secretary of Defense William Cohen; former Secretary of Defense William Perry; former Secretary of Defense (and current Vice President) Richard Cheney; former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and current Secretary of State) Colin Powell; and Adm. Stanley Arthur.

News researcher Ann Kinken Johnson contributed to this series.