Chapter 7
Back at Fort Belvoir Joint Service SERE Agency director air force colonel John Chapman and his deputy, Bob Dussault, received word of what happened in the Iraqi desert. Both were taken aback by the news, but hardly surprised. Chapman, Colonel Bonn’s replacement, was fully aware of what had taken place in the months immediately leading up to Scott’s capture. His and Dussault’s dealings with the JCS Joint Special Operations Center (JSOC) were less than fruitful. They’d hoped to get approval for a rescue mission. None came. After discussions began with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Iraq for a visit to the crash site, both of them knew they’d lost Scott Speicher. But they still had the crash site. The Falcon Hunter’s visits to Speicher’s downed Hornet started a cascade of information that arguably provided investigators with more information than they needed to prove Scott had survived his shoot down. Pieces of the puzzle, the backstory before his capture, started to come together. So did Iraqi deception operations on his crash site.
“[The Iraqis] have significant historical experience [with denial and deception operations],” Dr. John Yurechko, DIA officer for information operations and denial and deception operations and an expert in the strategy and methods used by different countries to deceive and hide their weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs, told reporters at an October 11, 2002 foreign press briefing. “I mean, the denial and deception efforts started long before Desert Storm. They used it in their war with Iran, both on the battlefield and on a strategic level.” He pointed out that the Iraqi denial and deception program under Saddam involved not just a specific government organization. On the contrary, said Yurechko, “it involved inculcating down to the lowest worker level the whole concept of denial and deception.” Prefacing his comments, Yurechko told the press that his job was much like theirs, the job of a reporter. “I try to find answers to a lot of very difficult questions.” This includes not relying on a single source to make a judgment. While his briefing that day was unclassified, he cautioned that there would be subjects touched upon by reporters in the room that he couldn’t address. “I have to protect my sources,” he said, “like you do.” But what he had to say about Iraq’s intentions couldn’t have been clearer.
Yurechko’s message was simple. “Denial and deception are interrelated. Denial is the basis for successful deception. You can’t blur the truth, or lie convincingly, unless the truth is first concealed.” He pointed to the challenge the West, most especially the United States, would face trying to separate truth from Iraq’s sophisticated denial and deception machine. He pointed to the obvious: that after Desert Storm the Iraqis directed a massive, well-organized denial and deception effort to defeat the UNSCOM inspection system. “A number of foreign inspectors, senior UNSCOM officials and Iraqi defectors have described this effort in considerable detail,” Yurechko told them. He cited inspector David A. Kay’s article on denial and deception practices of WMD proliferators, published in the winter 1995 Washington Quarterly; British inspector Tim Trevan’s 1999 book, Saddam’s Secrets; several insightful articles and reports by former U.S. inspector David Albright, and former UNSCOM Chairman Richard Butler’s 2000 book, The Greatest Threat. “And if these Western sources don’t suffice,” he iterated, “there [was then] a small but growing body of accounts by knowledgeable Iraqi defectors.” Further citations included a February 23, 2000 State Department study “Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” the October 2002 CIA document “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs,” and the British government’s 2002 assessment “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.”
What does all of this have to do with Speicher? Many of these denial and deception activities were targeted against the UN and UNSCOM inspectors. Some were directed against the United States and Western intelligence. WMD wasn’t the only area in which it was practiced. The same concealment and sanitization exercised over its WMD facilities was used to hide Speicher from U.S. authorities. Such sophistication relied on high mobility and good command, control and communications. The example Yurechko used was placing WMD facilities in residential areas to conceal them from inspectors. “There is a famous aphorism I can think of by the late Amron Katz, he was a specialist in arms control,” Yurechko said, “He said, quote, ‘We have never found anything that our enemies have successfully concealed,’ unquote.” Speicher was no different.
The JCS didn’t get the result of a feasibility study on a covert military operation at the Speicher crash site until May 1994. It took a few months before a planning order made its way down to Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The July 5, 1994 order started the planning process for this operation. The original order read:
When directed by the NCA, USCINCCENT [United States Commander in Chief Central] will conduct military operations to investigate a Desert Storm F/A-18 crash site in western Iraq to retrieve information and/or recover designated pieces of wreckage to assist in determining the fact of the pilot whose remains are unaccounted for.
The National Command Authority (NCA), defined by law, is the president of the United States and the secretary of defense. Both are required to make decisions, including the release of nuclear weapons on a target or the initiation of covert operations inside another country’s sovereign borders. Immediately on receipt of the message, special operations planners started mapping out a feasible insertion of Special Forces onto the crash site.
But the message received by CENTCOM army general J. H. Binford Peay III changed before it reached him. The message Peay passed to his staff included significant changes to the original body of the order:
When directed, COMSOCCENT [Commander, Special Operations Command Central] deploys a JSOTF [Joint Special Operations Task Force] to USCENTCOM AOR [area of responsibility] and conducts intrusive military operations in conjunction with JTF-SWA [Joint Task Force-Southwest Asia] assets to investigate a Desert Storm F/A-18 crash site in western Iraq. Mission is to retrieve information and/or recover designated pieces of wreckage to assist in determining the fate of the pilot, and if possible recover his remains.
The JTF-SWA were already in theater to support U.S. enforcement of the no-fly zone over Iraq. The change of wording from “whose remains are unaccounted for” to “if possible recover his remains” suggested there was more at stake than aircraft parts. The first statement suggested that Speicher’s fate was unknown; the second made it clear planners believed Speicher already dead.
Four covert teams assembled at Hurlburt Air Force Base, Florida, to execute the order that had come down from the JCS to JSOC. They were Delta Force, familiarly known as “snakeaters.” They were experts from the army’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii (CILHI). They were investigators from the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWCWD), also called China Lake. And there was one investigator from Naval Safety Center Norfolk (NAVSAFECEN), Lieutenant Michael Buran, an experienced aircraft mishap expert and navy helicopter pilot. Buran wasn’t originally part of the team. But then neither was anyone from the safety center, not until China Lake’s parachute expert Bruce W. Trenholm insisted someone from Norfolk needed to go. Buran became the only active duty navy member of the ICRC team to enter Iraq in search of what remained of Speicher’s Hornet and perhaps its pilot.
Soon after the prospective team was chosen, General Shalikashvili called them together. The JSOTF now consisted of seventy-four Deltas and army Special Forces, forty-two navy field investigators and active duty personnel, and ten DIA analysts and field officers. Investigators went through weeks of commando training, taught by their Delta mirror, assigned to each civilian member of the team and responsible for their training and action in the field. Some of the Delta Force assigned to this mission had been at Mogadishu in 1993. Others had been behind enemy lines during Desert Storm. “When they handed you a Colt AR-15 automatic rifle, these guys told us, even with a laser scope, not to fire unless they were standing right in front of us,” said Buran. Delta Force, the serious shooters, did all the planning. It was their responsibility to get everyone in and out of Iraq without incident.
Buran made a few calls and got an F/A-18 airframe shipped from San Diego to the JSOTF desert training ground at Fort Bliss, Texas. They practiced taking apart the cockpit for its vital components before blowing it up. The Pentagon got Lieutenant Commander James Otto Stutz Jr. to provide investigators all possible F/A-18 background information. He didn’t go with the team to the desert. The team was still getting read up on the aircraft as August 1994 came and went. This included a call for information by Naval Air Systems Command in Washington to an aerospace engineer at Naval Aviation Depot Norfolk, Michael E. Brock, for photographic, dimensional and operational specifications for the Hornet’s Martin-Baker SJU-5A ejection seat. Brock was told to reply directly to J. Alan Liotta, DPMO deputy director. Brock wrote Liotta in early September that he presumed the information involved a mishap of some sort. He cautioned that since he’d not spoken to Liotta directly, “I cannot ascertain exactly what type of information you truly need.” Brock attached basic information on the Martin-Baker’s ejection sequence. After discussion with Peter Yost, a colleague at the Naval Air Warfare Center, Warminster, Pennsylvania, Brock went back to Liotta, informing him that Yost could supply basic ejection seat dimensions.
Brock and Yost provided all they had on the ejection seat. But back at China Lake, Trenholm got word that the JSOC needed preliminary ejection event analysis. He was told only, just then, that it pertained to an F/A-18 mishap. Covert planners wanted to know where to look and what to expect when they reached the crash site. Trenholm’s September 7, 1994 report included the projected descent path an ejected seat would follow to the desert floor below. He told JSOC Major J. Pryor to evaluate such an ejection, he used three factors: location of the aircraft canopy, type of aircraft ejection seat, and the pilot’s size. “The location of the aircraft impact site is less critical,” he wrote, “since the aircraft lift surfaces may divert its flight path away from the original course and heading after the ejection event. The canopy, on the other hand, has a more predictable trajectory based on the ejection airspeed, and it generally maintains the original aircraft heading at the point of ejection.” To be more responsive to the JSOC request, Trenholm loaded test data on the canopy travel distance versus airspeed. He conducted tests at the Supersonic Naval Ordnance Research Track (SNORT), where the trajectory of an ejected seat was measured using film analysis. His final document walked the JSOC through the entire ejection analysis and modeling and simulation.
Liotta asked JSSA to provide further ejection seat information. But this had taken place much earlier than fall 1994. That June, just two months after Colonel Bonn ordered him to stop analysis of Speicher’s ground-to-air signal, Bob Dussault got a call from DPMO. “They asked if I could scrounge an F/A-18 ejection seat. I knew what they were up to,” he said later, “but they wouldn’t tell me. They learned that they couldn’t find something they hadn’t seen before. It was quite clear that I was persona non grata for any old stuff, but new, they were interesting to learn all they could. I was getting images and new tests with simple phone calls.” Clearly, recovery of the ejection seat was the major thrust of JSOC planners. For whatever secrets it held, the seat had to be located, no matter the cost.
The location of Speicher’s aircraft canopy was calculated based on ejection altitude and windage that was then confirmed by the JCS and JSSA from overhead imagery. The canopy’s discovery in the exact location it should have been, shown on the film, indicated a successful ejection. “This sign alone,” said Dussault, “even before the ICRC trip, convinced us he had ejected successfully.” Based on his background and decades’ long experience with SERE training and recovery operations, Dussault believed that Speicher should always have been considered alive until his death could be conclusively proven, not the other way around. But DPMO continued to look for Shalikashvili’s “old bones.” Speicher would get no help until he could prove he wasn’t dead.
“Like I told General [Harry E.] Soyster and international security affairs [in the Pentagon],” Dussault recalled of his conversation with the general in September 1991, “if John Noble’s case depended on them, he would still be in Russia.” DPMO has been rightly accused of focusing on the wrong end of POW/MIA operations, waiting until Shalikashvili’s self-fulfilling prophecy of old bones makes the mission a hunt for the dead, not the living. Recovery of downed airmen is about getting them back, not DPMO running complex analyses to determine whether they are alive or dead in advance of any effort to help them. “That rests with the CINC [commander in chief] who lost the guy,” said Dussault. “But is this how it happened? Nope. DPMO decided on the case. Scott was dead. Drop it, CINC.” DPMO spent an excessive amount of time, much of it wasted, doing nothing for Scott Speicher. This was in spite of growing evidence that demanded they take a closer look.
Overhead U-2 imagery again confirmed that Speicher’s Hornet pancaked onto the desert floor about one hundred miles northeast of the Saudi border town of Ar Ar. This made a convenient point from which to insert a covert team. MH-6J Little Bird Special Operations helicopters could fly to the crash site from Ar Ar with a team of experts to examine the wreckage. There would also be specialists from China Lake, Norfolk and Hawaii. Each man would be heavily armed in case the team came under attack from the Iraqis. But no one wanted to think about it. Not then. They rehearsed the mission over and over at Bliss, memorizing the tasks that they would have to do quickly once on the wreckage. Still, sneaking across the Iraqi border would be tight. The Iraqis already suspected the Americans were after a pilot.
After the Persian Gulf War, Saddam ordered the construction of a string of radar towers along Iraq’s border with Saudi Arabia. American intelligence observed the sites to learn which ones were occupied and which ones weren’t. It wasn’t hard to figure out when the towers were occupied. Iraqi soldiers tossed their gear at the base of the towers when they went on duty, thus the tower was operational and high risk. JSOC planners determined the manning status of each tower at different times of day down to the last detail. They found a corridor near Ar Ar that made the town the best possible option for the team’s ingress and egress to the crash site. With the wreckage an hour away, they’d be on the site overnight and return to Saudi Arabia in the morning. The mission profile was low risk. Demolition experts assigned to each team carried fuses, plastique and a posthole digger to place charges and blow up what remained of Speicher’s cockpit after they’d gone over it for anything useful. If the Iraqis discovered them, they could get out in a hurry and be back in Ar Ar in forty-five minutes.
But the covert mission wasn’t a sure thing. Back at the Pentagon, Tim Connolly thought time was wasting. The Iraqis could happen on the site any day. Questions were being raised about Speicher’s wreckage on both sides. But the Iraqis were far more interested in the pilot. They wondered where the pilot must be for the Americans to be so anxious to examine the wreckage. Washington hadn’t asked to see any other crash site? And there were others. In fact, there were others from which no remains had been recovered. What made this one unique? Was it the gear on board the jet? Probably not. What about the pilot? Probably so.
A second camp in the Pentagon suggested the diplomatic route. They suggested Washington approach the ICRC and ask it to contact Baghdad. The ICRC would tell the Iraqis about the crash site and ask for permission to take a team to investigate it. The diplomatic proposal posed no risk of lives, and many political and military leaders were still shaken by what happened at Mogadishu just a year earlier. The ICRC option offered the added benefit of showing the Iraqis that the United States was playing by the rules.
When military planners heard that the diplomatic option was on the table, they thought it must be a ghost option, a backup for appearance’s sake. It couldn’t be real. Connolly didn’t like it. If the United States went in undercover, intelligence could guarantee that the information gathered was untainted and used to investigate further. He also didn’t want to tell Iraq exactly where the site was, if they didn’t already know, which is what the diplomatic notification would have to do to gain access to the wreckage. Even if they only gave Iraq the general vicinity, Saddam would move quickly to get ahead of them and find Speicher. Connolly was worried, too, over how much time had already passed. He tried to speed up the process, warning those involved: “If it were to become known that we had identified the potential remains of a service member who had potentially died in combat and we were not immediately going in there to assure they wouldn’t fall into the hands of the enemy, we would be crucified politically.”
Buddy Harris and a small number of investigators examined the first set of the Falcon Hunter’s pictures and the overhead imagery of the wreckage. The F/A-18’s canopy appeared to be about two miles, maybe a bit less, from the crash site. When a pilot ejects, small explosives ignite and blast off the canopy. It appeared as if that’s exactly what happened to Speicher’s jet. Those who looked into Speicher’s disappearance early on didn’t have wreckage to examine, but they determined he hadn’t ejected because no one heard his emergency locator transmitter (ELT). A downed pilot’s ELT normally emits a distinct whooping signal that surveilling aircraft and other pilots would hear on a UHF frequency.
Being a pilot, Harris knew that some aviators liked to have their ELT disconnected when they flew over hostile territory. They thought the signals made it easy for the enemy to find them if shot down. Harris asked a couple of people from Speicher’s squadron, VFA-81, about a disconnected ELT in Speicher’s seat, but they claimed they hadn’t disconnected any ELT devices that night. Maybe the ELT malfunctioned, he thought. When he checked into that possibility he learned that the beacons have several electronic backups that make them extremely reliable. But then he found VFA-81’s maintenance officer, Lieutenant Commander Steve “Ammo” Minnis. If the ELTs were disconnected, he would know about it. Yes, Minnis said, the beacons had been disconnected. Harris had been misled. “Did you know they didn’t go after Scott and look for him because they didn’t know this and got no signal?” Harris told Minnis. Minnis was stunned. The higher-ups knew that the ELTs were turned off, he told Harris. The ELT message should have been conveyed to CSAR. “There’s just no way,” Minnis said. That piece of information had to have been known by his superiors.
Investigators were shocked, too. They’d already been told about the incompatible Motorola survival radios, the AN/PRC-112s, that were too large to fit into the pilots’ vest pockets. Since controlling aircraft and CSAR would be monitoring radio traffic for a signal to come get him, they assumed he couldn’t communicate. Perhaps he lost the survival radio on the way down. Maybe it malfunctioned. But they didn’t know his ELT was disconnected. Certainly, if the squadron’s maintenance logs up to January 17, 1991, were available, this would have been an easy question to answer. But they weren’t. Those log books had been sent over to LaSalle and from there no one will say where they ended up. There are some good guesses but no one knows for certain. Given the lack of CSAR for Speicher, his potential radio problems and the disconnected ELT, military planners could make a near-perfect case for the covert mission. Or could they?
Connolly left his office and walked through the Pentagon to the secretary of defense’s conference room in the E-ring. This briefing, which would decide whether to go in as a covert operation or under the banner of the ICRC, was a long time coming. It was now December 23, 1994, a year since Speicher’s F/A-18 had been found in the Iraqi desert. General Shalikashvili took a seat at the head of the table. To his left sat his top planner, the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, air force lieutenant general Howell M. Estes III. Beside Estes was the deputy principal secretary of defense for international security affairs, Frederick C. Smith. Secretary of Defense William Perry sat to Shalikashvili’s right with Perry’s undersecretary of defense for policy, Walter B. “Walt” Slocombe. Down the table was Colonel William G. “Jerry” Boykin, head of Special Operations Division J33. Boykin was later outed by Attorney General Janet Reno as one of two Delta Force officers the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) asked for, by name, for their expertise when the Bureau stormed the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Aides holding briefing packets, transparencies and flip charts stood uncomfortably along the walls. There was no one from Connolly’s office, though but him, and many from international security affairs. Connolly thought this was odd as he took his seat.
There was no way to know what direction Perry and Shalikashvili would take. At no time was Connolly’s boss, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, Henry Allen Holmes1, involved in any of the planning. If the secretary of defense or chairman raised a question, it was Pentagon protocol that only someone directly involved in the mission’s planning could answer it. But none of the planners who worked out the details of the covert mission were in the room. “This thing’s been preloaded,” Connolly thought. As staffers threw up the presentation on the wall, page by page, Connolly followed his handout. His counterpart, Fred Smith, talked about the diplomatic mission. Then one of Shalikashvili’s staff laid out the military option. They had done a threat analysis of the covert mission, breaking it down into its critical components: infiltration, actions on objective, and exfiltration. In each case they rated chances for success as high and threats low.
Though Shalikashvili’s staffer made the covert operation look flawless and controlled, start to finish, Connolly knew it wouldn’t be that easy. When he was an army Ranger, a dozen men, including his battalion commander, died just while training for a special operation. Military missions, covert or not, carry some level of danger. But the odds for this one looked as promising as any other. So he thought. The longer the meeting wore on the more Connolly felt support for the covert option slipping away. Finally, having heard enough, Connolly addressed Perry and Shalikashvili directly. “This country has an obligation to go in and find out what happened to this pilot,” he said. Then he quoted the fifth stanza of the army Ranger creed: “I shall never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy.” He paused. Still sensing the group’s hesitation to send Special Forces into harm’s way so soon after Somalia, he took one more shot.
“Mr. Secretary,” Connolly said, “I will go out the door of this conference room. I will stand in the hallway and I will stop the first five people who walk by in military uniform, regardless of their gender. I will explain to them what the mission is. I will ask them if they will volunteer to get on the helicopters, and I guarantee you that all five of them will volunteer.”
Secretary Perry thanked him for his impassioned statement, then turned to Shalikashvili. “Mr. Chairman, what do you think?” It was just then that Shalikashvili made his “looking for old bones” statement. He wasn’t necessarily speaking for the majority, but his opinion pulled more weight. “Sorry thing,” said Dussault, “was [that] all the Joint Staff wanted to do something. [They’d] made plans, encouraged others to make plans. And in the end it was all called off by the famous Shalikashvili speech, thus turning it all over State and the CIA.” Though he wasn’t there for the briefing, Dussault knew Shalikashvili had made the claim that one soldier wasn’t important enough to authorize military action. “I don’t know if he said it because that is how he felt or because he was told by higher ups that was the case and he and DoD were going to have to live with it.”
Perry wanted some time to think about all that was said in the meeting. In the meantime he directed the military to keep the covert option on the table. But Connolly knew Shalikashvili’s feelings, expressed at the meeting’s end, had already derailed a Special Forces entry into Iraq. Neither Perry nor Shalikashvili had the mettle for putting any forces in jeopardy for this mission, Connolly observed. Two weeks later, on January 4, 1995, Perry told Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher that the United States needed the ICRC to approach the Iraqi government for a humanitarian mission to the Speicher crash site.
A month after their late December meeting, Connolly got a letter from the deputy secretary of defense. Perry had chosen the diplomatic route. This was largely at the insistence of Fred Smith, whose office believed that Speicher was dead and that his remains were under the jet. But not everyone shared this view, most especially the Iraqis. Baghdad knew something was going on from the ICRC’s first communication, a request to send an emissary to Iraq to discuss an American team that wanted entry into the country to search a crash site. If Scott Speicher was purportedly dead, recalling Secretary Cheney’s pronouncement on January 18, 1991, and if Baghdad had returned remains it said were his, what was the United States trying to discover now? Maybe, just maybe, the Americans didn’t think he was dead. Maybe they knew the remains weren’t his. Perhaps there was something of value to America’s national security buried among the jet’s debris? Neither the U.S. Department of State, the Pentagon nor CENTCOM ever went back to the Iraqis to demand answers after DNA analysis proved the remains they returned, certified as Speicher’s, weren’t his. The Pentagon made a presumptive finding of death where there wasn’t proof of one. But Scott Speicher was very much alive and in assisted evasion mode.
More than a month passed before the ICRC signed off on the plan to accommodate an American team’s visit to the crash site. Michel Cageneaux, ICRC director of Middle East operations, was dispatched to Baghdad to negotiate the deal. Their February 14 meeting went smoothly, but Fred Smith said afterward that the Iraqis took detailed notes and hung on everything said. While they weren’t provided coordinates for the crash site, alerted to the missing aircraft by the ICRC on behalf of the United States, it was clear the Americans were in search of more than the aircraft. Scott Speicher was now the hunted.
On the face of it the meeting in Baghdad had gone well. But that assessment was short-sighted and naïve. Saddam just wanted time to think it over. Back at Fort Bliss, covert teams went through a complete dry run of the mission, code named Isolated Ivory, a veiled reference to Shalikashvili’s jibe about looking for Speicher’s “old bones.” Washington was notified through diplomatic channels on March 1, 1995, that the Iraqis agreed to the plan but the team had to have Iraqi officials escort them in. March is a cold month in the desert clime, and inhospitable for a search team. The desert hardpan was still frozen solid, a fact learned the hard way by downed Coalition airmen and Special Forces over the winter of 1991. The ICRC mission was on, though no one knew exactly when the Iraqis would let the mission into the country to search. In the meantime Isolated Ivory was still active at Fort Bliss.
Despite all that was said in Secretary Perry’s conference room, a covert plan crept forward. Their objective was retrieval of the cockpit and ejection seat, both of which held great value to some around the table that December day. They didn’t want Iraqis to get either. Of the four covert teams formed in the summer of 1994, one secretly broke away to train at the Naval Strike Warfare Center, Fallon, Nevada.
“I was out there [Fallon, Nevada] in late spring, early summer 1995,” explained a navy commander who spoke only on condition of anonymity. The commander engaged a Delta Force member in conversation off and on. “They had been out here for a short time when one day he said, ‘Yeah, man, we’re going out to the desert to get some guy’s cockpit and bring it back.’ One day they were gone. But a few days later they’d returned from the mission.” The commander’s recollection is confirmed by Lieutenant Commander Allen “Zoomie” Baker, halfway around the world in Riyadh just then. Baker had been on the Joint Staff between 1994 and 1995 and was a new arrival in Saudi Arabia when Delta Force snakeaters went to investigate Speicher’s crash site. They checked in, he observed, with operations and moved out to the site using the planned insertion point at Ar Ar. They knew what they were looking for. The Falcon Hunter’s photographs had already shown JSOC planners that Scott’s cockpit looked intact. But they’d have to go check it out to know for sure. Planners were keenly interested to find out if the distinct outline of a chair resting on the desert floor – visible on the U-2 imagery – was actually the hundred-pound shell of Speicher’s Martin-Baker ejection seat. They also wanted the jet’s avionics package back, unaware that all of it had already been removed. The ICRC convoy rolled out of Baghdad headed for the crash site the morning of December 10, 1995. Nine months had gone by since Iraq initially agreed to the search. From overhead imagery shot at intervals right before the ICRC team’s departure from the Iraqi capital, Pentagon officials confirmed the presence of truck trails leading to and from the site, raising concerns about the integrity of the Hornet’s wreckage.
This team knew nothing of the covert visit to the site. And also knew nothing of Iraqi deception operations there. Two classified documents, one dated May 28, 2003, subject line Iraqi deception operations involving the Speicher crash site discovery, and the other, IIR [intelligence information report] 7 739 0377 03, address this clearly. From information contained in the subject line of these reports, unclassified information found in others, investigators’ statements and a confidential source at NSWC Fallon, there is proof enough that there were at least three disturbances of the Speicher crash site immediately prior to the ICRC’s December 10 arrival. One was American – the second American visit after careful documentation of the site and retrieval of sensitive avionics from the aircraft immediately post-shoot down – and the other Iraqi. It is also abundantly clear that the site of Scott Speicher’s crashed Hornet continued to be an object of interest for Saddam for years to come.
The ICRC team was cautious with the crash site coordinates. They waited until the night before leaving Baghdad to convey the latitude and longitude of the site to their Iraqi escorts: 33°00’125”N 042°15’28”E. This was the coordinate military planners attached to the crash site. They were wrong – by a mile. The distance between where they believed the crash site to be and where it was actually found would turn out to be 1.756 kilometers or 1.09 miles. When the team arrived at the coordinates originally provided they saw nothing but desert. Bedouin herders stood nearby on a sandy path waving their arms at the lead vehicle. They knew what they were looking for. With the help of simple herders the team ultimately located Scott Speicher’s wreckage at 33°00’114”N 042°15’28E, a full 150 statute miles from the coordinates originally reported when Spock Anderson recorded his last known coordinates back in January 1991 and filed them in a series of reports.
There were only four ICRC representatives on the team, code named Operation Promise Kept. The rest were Deltas and military investigators. CILHI sent its chief anthropologist, Dr. Thomas D. Holland, to examine any human remains Smith’s office strongly believed were buried under the Hornet. Experts from China Lake and Norfolk were on the team. There was also a medic, explosive disposal expert and three linguists. Baghdad attached two aircraft investigators to the team roster and ordered Republican Guard to encircle the site’s perimeter for “their protection.” “Each person on the mission had his own agenda, his own reasons for being there,” said Mike Buran later. Some of those agendas had been determined by a boss back in Washington, some had been assigned tasks outside their expertise and understanding. “I knew that the agenda of the ICRC was to find the body,” said Bob Dussault. “My guys trained everyone [all the Americans] who went on the trip… on two different occasions. I know what went into preparing the team. Liotta,” Dussault recalled, “was also much involved. But the focus was not to gather all the possible evidence [of Speicher’s fate], just [information] which supported his [Speicher’s] death.” The investigation had two possible outcomes: the truth or the truth fashioned in advance by the Pentagon that had already concluded Scott Speicher was “old bones.”
Buran was among the few investigators on the crash site in December 1995 who believed that Speicher shouldn’t have been declared dead before there was proof to support that conclusion. But he was at a disadvantage to argue the point. He took orders like everybody else. Within three hours of leaving Baghdad he and the others stood on a moonlike surface southwest of a city in the vicinity of Tulul ad al-Dulaym, Wadi Thumayl. They were 1,080 feet above sea level, in the desert, less than thirty kilometers – 18.64 miles – to the south of a major east-west highway. There were no remarkable landmarks in the area. The Saudi border was about two hundred kilometers – roughly 124 miles – to the northeast. Several Bedouin camps were pitched in the desert to the north and northwest of the crash site. While visible to the team, they kept their distance. Dirt trails radiated out from the camps to nearby paved roads. Other than those few noticeable ripples in the terrain, there was nothing but light brown sand made up of weathered rock particles less than half a millimeter in diameter, larger scattered rock and a few clumps of grass, shrubs and vines.
As they climbed out of their Land Rovers and trucks, the team could see Speicher’s wreckage and knew exactly what had happened without shoveling the first spade of dirt or examining one piece of his jet. Speicher’s Hornet was now right side up. Big chunks of it, easily recognizable parts like the engines, lay in a circle no more than sixty feet in diameter. There was no significant crash crater and the wreckage showed minimal fragmentation, all consistent with terminal velocity, high angle and low-power impact. Team experts knew what that meant. The jet lost power and dropped like a falling leaf straight to the desert floor. Speicher’s jet had not, as first believed, been blown to bits midair. Investigators quickly noticed something else: the cockpit was missing. The entire cockpit and instrument bay section, from forward of the wings to just aft of the gun, had been sheared cleanly from the rest of the fuselage. Someone else had gotten to the crash site ahead of them.
“It was like a car in the junkyard that you’d decided you wanted just the part from the front windshield to the bumper and cut it off,” said Buran. “The Iraqis couldn’t afford batteries in that country because of the embargo. We brought our own. Yet the cockpit of the aircraft was cut off clean and quickly.” He was incredulous. The precision of the cut wasn’t the work of the Iraqis, he thought. They didn’t have the equipment nor adequate remote power source to do what had been done to Scott Speicher’s Hornet.
Whoever had been to the site first would have had to sidestep gingerly around Speicher’s ordnance, much of which was scattered about the axis of the aircraft. Bedouins, although normally anxious to take down an aircraft for salable parts and scrap, wouldn’t have breached the Hornet’s perimeter with missiles half-buried in the sand. Past experience proves this true. They’d scavenge pieces thrown clear of the main debris field. Anyone unfamiliar with aircraft ordnance would have stayed away from the fuselage. Then who had gotten there first?
Tim Connolly got it right – at least as much as he knew at that point. Connolly wasn’t privy to the Joint team that got to Speicher’s jet just after his shoot down. “I would not be surprised,” he said, “if it turned out the U.S. government went in covertly at some point.” Buran’s February 15, 1996 report called it “another force.” “From the evidence of the crash site before the ICRC team arrived, it is likely that another force…examined the wreckage and removed major portions of the cockpit and instrument bay section.” Then they all noticed that the ejection seat, obvious on overhead imagery about two miles from the aircraft wreckage, had been removed. Another critical piece of evidence had vanished. Other members of ICRC team would comment on the missing parts of Speicher’s jet, too. They used the words “professional” to describe the manner in which the cockpit was removed. Some of them speculated that whoever had done it was looking for Speicher’s body under the aircraft. They realized just then that not only was it “professional” but “calculated.” Missing were two major evidential parts of the aircraft. Two pieces that might lead investigators to unequivocally conclude that Scott Speicher had survived his shoot down. The ICRC team just then had no knowledge of the joint military team that exploited Speicher’s Hornet immediately after his shoot-down.
The ICRC team recovered whatever else it could find. There was nose gear and the twenty-millimeter M61A1 Vulcan cannon. There were wings, engines, tail rudders and stabilizers. The radar antenna was gone. They assumed Bedouins, maybe the bustard hunters who they were told found the site, took it. Ordnance included everything Scott Speicher’s Hornet was carrying on his mission minus one HARM. He had three. He’d also been carrying two Sparrow and two Sidewinder missiles. “Can’t remember if we had two drop tanks [vice] one,” said Tony Albano. “We always carried the ubiquitous centerline drop tank. Except, of course, Banker, who had only two HARMs so he could recover with both still on.” Banker Caldwell was the airborne spare on the Sunliners’ first mission of Desert Storm. Albano explained that if a three-HARM Hornet had problems that recovery required he jettison one or find a divert field to land. Ordnance was carefully removed from Speicher’s wreckage and roped off. “We had people familiar with armament to take care of this,” said Bruce Trenholm. Armament specialists dug a pit to bury it before the team left the desert. But not before members of the team removed the fins from Speicher’s HARM missiles as souvenirs.
The team recovered major parts of the Hornet outside the main debris field, including the wing fuel drop tank, found 4,000 meters (about 2.5 miles) north; the centerline fuel drop tank, located 2,500 meters (1.5 miles) north, and the canopy, which had come down 670 meters (.42 miles) northeast. A long-burning post-crash magnesium burn from the Hornet’s tires, coupled with erosion from the wreckage sitting in the desert exposed to the elements, contributed to the breakdown and disintegration of the composite components of the aircraft that they recovered. The wings were in bad shape.
Investigators started at the F/A-18’s nose and roped off an excavation area. As they started their work they realized that whoever had beat them to the site knew what they were doing. A pile of backfill, sand dug from elsewhere, was heaped near where the cockpit should have been. Popped rivets lay on the ground nearby. The backfill, they thought, looked like it’d been there less than a month. It was clear, too, that parts of the Hornet’s computer had been removed. Given all this, they decided to start digging in the same spot as whoever had been there first: the cockpit. Dirt under the cockpit showed signs of recent manual digging. They excavated it further, taking it down fifty centimeters (1.64 feet) to culturally sterile soil. This information was reported to the ICRC’s Michel Cageneaux in a 1997 memo prepared by Lieutenant Commander Kevin J. Wilson, who worked in the office of the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs/DPMO. Investigators continued to excavate down the midline of Speicher’s fuselage finding no significant cockpit debris and pilot-related material. They also found no pilot’s remains.
Post-crash analysis concluded the Hornet’s engines shut down in flight. Both were in relatively good condition. Absent the cockpit and ejection seat, key evidence of missile damage was missing. But there was just enough to tell that the warhead that detonated under Speicher’s jet was packed with high explosive. The Hornet’s fuel lines were cut and its starboard wing flaps blown off, enough to kill the airplane but not the pilot. “The damage,” claimed one investigator, who asked for anonymity, “was consistent with an AIM-54C Phoenix missile,” a fact he wasn’t allowed to include in his final report. The controversial Phoenix, the missile that F-14 Tomcat pilots were told they weren’t allowed to fire, has a 135-pound blast fragmentation warhead designed to bring down enemy aircraft. With a range of over one hundred nautical miles, it was the Tomcat’s longest-range missile. But the Phoenix missile’s official history doesn’t mention employment during Operation Desert Storm nor the Phoenix shot at the F-1EQ. Despite the Phoenix missile’s much touted capabilities, it is on record as having only been fired twice in combat by the U.S. Navy, both over Iraq in 1999 and, even then, there were no confirmed targets destroyed.
The investigators’ declassified reports also offer no mention of the possibility that it might have been the AIM-7M Sparrow. The Sparrow has an 88-pound high explosive blast fragmentation warhead while a guidance and control section (GCS) tracks the target; directs and stabilizes the missile on a lead-angle navigation course to the target; and starts warhead detonation by use of an active radar proximity fuze or a backup contact fuze. The guidance system uses energy reflected from the target and data received from the missile fire-control system to track the target. A comparison of these signals allows the guidance section to sense changes in target position and create signals used by the control section to control movement of the wings and thus maintain course to target intercept. The fact that more than one air force controller, one of them “a tactics guy” can confirm the Sparrow would appear to rule out the Phoenix.
The wing and centerline drop tanks of Speicher’s Hornet, found north of the main debris field, still had their pylons attached. This indicated to investigators that the pylons were torn from the fuselage in flight, subject to excessive aerodynamic forces over a short period of time. This is consistent with an aircraft that has come down in a flat spin or falling leaf mode.
As work continued near the jet, members of the team formed skirmish lines, spreading out and walking slowly to look for less obvious evidence, perhaps something small that provided another piece of the puzzle. Buran was paired with an Iraqi Air Force investigator, a man who went by the pseudonym Mohammed. He’d been a MiG pilot during the Iran-Iraq War. Shot down twice, Mohammed had a bad back from parachuting out of his aircraft a second time. He no longer flew. With his flying days over, he was sent to Great Britain to learn the business of aircraft mishap investigation. Out in the middle of the western Iraqi desert he and Buran talked frequently. At one point he stopped Buran as they walked the site looking for clues and asked if aircraft mishap investigators were needed in other countries. “Are there jobs for people like us?” he asked. “Oh, yes,” said Buran. “Lots of them.” Mohammed smiled broadly. He later gave Buran a set of his Iraqi pilot’s wings, a gesture between two pilots. Buran still has them.
Baghdad limited the search area. But during their recovery effort, team members surveyed a circular area about ten kilometers in diameter (about 6.2 miles) centered on the aircraft crash site. About thirty meters north (.0186 miles), east and south of the site, the team noticed several low, rectangular rock piles. Dr. Holland shovel-tested rock piles closest to the wreckage assuming they might indicate a gravesite. But none had been subject to subsurface disturbance within ten years prior to their site visit. Holland found no remains. They also found no personal pilot gear either. The only item tied to the cockpit that they found on the site, excluding the DSU, were two switches and one warning light indicator. Nothing else.
Two thousand feet (.378 miles) to the north they noticed something manmade propped upright on a sandy knoll. As team members got closer, they saw it was the canopy frame, what was left of it. Bedouins stood it on end, perhaps as a landmark. No one knew for sure. A Bedouin boy had scrawled in Arabic across the bottom of the canopy frame how much he hated it there. The canopy-jettison rocket motors had been fired. Investigators could tell this was the case just looking at the even and complete burn marks on the frame. As they picked through evidence on the ground, the team got a clearer picture of what Scott Speicher had and hadn’t done. He’d initiated the canopy jettison. This finding favored his survival. He’d ejected from the aircraft. To the south they found his missing HARM missile. This didn’t indicate Scott released it to regain control of his stricken Hornet, said Albano. The missile, like the others found, had been ripped from the aircraft as it hurtled toward the desert below.
A couple of days into the site visit, navy flight mishap investigator Bruce Trenholm got a call on his radio that left him unable to believe what he was hearing. Iraqi officials at the site had just notified the team that a young Bedouin boy claimed to have come across a flight suit herding his sheep. The flight suit was roughly three-and-a-half kilometers northeast of the wreckage. Trenholm drove over to it. Members of the team were already there, standing around it in a circle. Standing nearby was the boy’s “uncle,” a robe-clad, impeccably dressed man wearing polished wing-tip shoes, hardly the attire of a shepherd. The boy complained the flight suit smelled bad. He hadn’t touched it. Odd, thought Trenholm. Something was wrong with the story. But he wasn’t allowed to interview the boy. The flight suit wasn’t on the ground when found. “It had been handed to us,” said Buran. “That’s a big difference.”
Trenholm could see for himself that it was an American Nomex flight suit, standard aviator coveralls resistant to fires exceeding several hundred degrees. He could also see that it had faded from its usual olive green color to a greenish yellow. “I was told that it was Michael’s flight suit,” said Trenholm. “But all I said at the time was ‘Well, all I can tell you is it’s a flight suit. I don’t know whose it is.’” He’d have to run tests to make sure it was Speicher’s. Out there in the desert, standing there holding a flight suit, there were more questions than answers. “I mean, you know, the deal was we were looking for Michael Speicher. That was our task. You know there’s a flight suit, but it’s just like an Easter egg hunt basically, and here’s his flight suit. ‘This is his.’” Trenholm was suspicious from the start. The sudden and dramatic appearance of a key piece of forensic evidence suggested that Baghdad’s deception had swung into high gear. “I can’t verify whose it is,” he said. “If I don’t see anybody wearing it, then I’m not really sure it’s yours.” During repeated prior visits by the Falcon Hunter and American CIA field agents who’d “gone native” to report from the desert between 1991 and 1994, no U.S. Nomex flight suit was found lying around on the desert floor or splayed across a rock waiting to be picked up. Thus the “discovery,” begged serious questions. Where had it been all this time? Where was the pilot who’d worn it? Was he Scott Speicher?
Near the place where investigators were handed the flight suit a cluster of pilot aviation life support system (ALSS) equipment was discovered: a fragment of ejection seat upper-leg garter, three fragments from a survival raft, pieces of a parachute strap, an inflatable raft, a twenty-millimeter shell from the Hornet’s nose cannon, and six pieces of an anti-G suit that a pilot wears to lessen aerodynamic forces. They also found a signaling flare. Someone had tried to light both ends of the flare, one used for daytime, the other for night. The bottom line was this: the flight suit and all ALSS equipment recovered by the team had been cut with a sharp object. Though much of it had what looked like bloodstains, none suggested massive external bleeding.
“The flight suit was cut up the back not including the collar,” explained Trenholm. The cuts up the back included the legs and the crotch, where the suit was notched or cut around the straps and fasteners of Speicher’s torso harness, leaving a diamond-shaped cut by the groin area of each leg. The flight suit, if it was Speicher’s, had been places other than the desert, Trenholm remarked later. This finding was predicated on the presence of foreign trace evidence on the flight suit, including carpet fibers and dog hair. Perhaps from a Bedouin herder’s black tent? Carpet fibers and dog hair would both be present there. Still, no one could say just then how long Scott Speicher had worn his flight suit. No one knew how long he might have kept it either. These were questions that investigators hoped they’d eventually be able to answer. Baghdad’s restrictive search area made it harder to get to ground truth. Admiral Arthur observed later, on July 10, 2010, that “if he had ejected immediately upon being hit, the chances of the canopy or he being anywhere in the vicinity of the crash site are about a million to one.” The search area, unrestricted, would clearly have been more fruitful for the ICRC team.
American investigators were further denied access to Bedouins they could see just outside their circular search area. “The Bedouins in that area out there, they’re nomadic tribes and they go from point A to point B to point C,” said Trenholm. “They do this all year round. They are like gypsies. They just travel. There was a small Bedouin tribe not too far away, but we never had any dealings with them at all. The Iraqis were there. I think the whole Iraqi army was there.” Trenholm wasn’t exaggerating by much. Iraqi Air Force general Khaldoun Khattab was there. So was the Republican Guard. So were Saddam’s best intelligence operatives. “Every time the Bedouins tried to tell us something or even looked like they wanted to tell us something,” said Mike Buran, “one of these intelligence guys intervened.” They ran interference for days. But they had their reasons. Saddam’s intelligence was rapidly working through those small tribal groups. They needed to know if any of them knew about Scott Speicher and the family group that had protected him.
The Bedouins moving in and around the area of Speicher’s downed Hornet had to know Saddam’s men were looking for something or someone to have sent such a large force into this desolate patch of desert. Time was growing short for those who’d protected and at the very least known about Speicher. As soon as the ICRC left the area, the Iraqi troops who’d ringed the Americans’ camp would quickly turn on them. Speicher’s Bedouin protectors were prepared to go down fighting. They knew Saddam wasn’t coming to send them to jail. He would be coming to kill them. Even if Speicher had still been with them, he couldn’t just run up to the ICRC camp. Though most of the ICRC team were Deltas, neither he nor the Bedouins who’d protected him knew that and it really wouldn’t have helped any of them to force the team into an unwinnable standoff with Khattab’s men. The Iraqis had overwhelming firepower ringing the site and the team. Saddam’s mukhabarat, the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS), made sure that the Bedouins who might tell the team about Speicher never got the chance.
Saddam’s IIS found Speicher. Their job wasn’t hard. Neither the Americans nor the ICRC had asked for the Iraqis’ help locating the crash site. This told Saddam that the Americans had to have been monitoring the crash site a long time to know where it was and what they were going to find. He could judge for himself that whatever and whoever the ICRC was there to find had to be close by. Saddam delayed the ICRC team’s entry into Iraq long enough to locate the man who went with the Hornet wreckage. Saddam had to assume that Speicher would be back in the area if still with the same Bedouin family group. They migrated, predictably and circuitously, in and out of the same grazing areas with the change of season. It was nearly mid-December and thus if Speicher were still with the group, he’d be making his way into Anbar Province to the place where he’d first made contact with them. Saddam couldn’t be certain, but he could be ready. His search area soon narrowed to the tribal groups in the vicinity of Tulul ad al-Dulaym, Wadi Thumayl. Since the site was being watched Saddam had to know that his best chance to get to Speicher was before the ICRC team got to the area. Baghdad couldn’t afford an international incident with an ICRC team caught in the middle. After Baghdad gave the ICRC mission the green light, it was too late. Saddam had his prize. Khattab, the Republican Guard and the IIS were sent out to make certain the Bedouin group present around the site didn’t talk.
Baghdad held the team to the search area negotiated prior to their arrival. At its widest point the circular search area was eighteen to twenty meters. Anything outside the prescribed coordinates was off limits. “Bruce [Trenholm] had taken some wind drift calculations that he thought we should’ve looked at,” said Buran. “But the Iraqis didn’t want us going outside the predetermined search perimeter. We thought that perhaps given the winds that night, he [Speicher] might have ended up slightly beyond where we initially thought.” Buran and Trenholm had been hamstrung, in truth, by both sides from searching the area where Speicher’s ground-to-air signal was detected by overhead imagery. Baghdad didn’t want them to see it. Washington didn’t either. They could see the area but couldn’t walk into it. “Our hands were tied,” said Buran. “The Iraqis said no.” But so had the American chain of command.
DPMO later published its analysis of Speicher’s ground-to-air signal (GTAS), the same one Colonel Bonn and Bob Dussault certified was the navy’s missing pilot’s marker. DPMO’s statement, undated and eventually forwarded to ONI in March 2002, read that the ICRC team “searched the entire vicinity and noted nothing they considered to be any type of survival symbol.” The ugly truth was that the team had never been allowed to search there at all. They’d lied. But worse, they’d fabricated information received from the team. “Iraqi military units routinely draw designs in the desert sand during training exercises,” wrote DPMO of their December 1995 findings. “The site of the unidentified marking is in the general vicinity of an Iraqi military training area.” The facts are altogether different.
“There’s nothing out there, nothing but sand, dirt and rocks,” said Trenholm. “Nobody goes through there but the native people.” Buran iterated that the only population in that part of the western Iraqi desert were the Bedouin sheep herders and “lots of sheep. We’re talking a lot of them,” he said. “The entire crash area was covered with sheep droppings everywhere you looked.”
DPMO debunked itself further trying to sell the story about “tracks radiating out from the crash site” when it stated “the marking [the tracks] could not be associated with any known Iraqi military unit.” Further, the ICRC team never claimed to have seen evidence of motorized vehicles in the area, despite the fact DPMO reported “analysts believe the ground marking may have been caused by tire tracks left by some unidentifiable vehicle. Motorized vehicles have been noted in this area.” This, too, was a fabrication. “The site was in the middle of nowhere and I mean nowhere,” said Trenholm. No one went willingly into the harsh environment of Iraq’s winter desert clime except the herders who’d learned to cope with extreme drops in temperature. But it troubled Trenholm to think of Speicher out there in the freezing cold. This was December he thought. Speicher was shot down in January. If it was cold for the ICRC team in a tent with plenty of layers of blankets and thick sleeping bags, he knew it would have been bone-chilling for Speicher.
The team’s investigation wound down after their fourth full day in the desert. As they drew closer to their tents, Buran, Trenholm and several other team members noticed something that took them aback. Next to the team’s tents, piled high, were artifacts from the aircraft and crash site that they hadn’t mapped in the debris field. When they asked where it’d come from, the Iraqis pleaded ignorance. But it really wasn’t ignorance; it was a sign. Among the items was the one aircraft component they’d hoped to find, barring the absence of the cockpit and ejection seat: the DSU. If there was one piece of equipment that could tell investigators what happened to Speicher, barring recovery of the cockpit section and ejection seat, this was it. But its sudden appearance had them wondering where exactly it had come from and who’d had it. Why retrieve it and not other, equally important pieces of the wreckage? Were the Bedouins who took money from Buran for the DSU the same ones who’d protected Speicher?
The DSU had been blown out of its case and shut down immediately. Buran and the rest of the team later learned that this happened while the Hornet was still airborne, when Speicher ejected. There is no mention in the team’s findings of it, but the DSU is located in the F/A-18C Lot 10s behind the pilot’s left hip. The top [faceplate] of the DSU is exposed directly to the flame of the ejection seat when the pilot departs the aircraft. “There would be scorch marks present to the top of the unit from this exposure,” observed Sunliner AMSC Terryl Chandler later. “The Hornet is a tough jet,” Chandler continued. The front faceplate of Speicher’s DSU was gone.
The DSU fell away from the Hornet before the jet impacted the desert floor. The bottom plate of the memory unit had a midline fissure roughly half its length. The edges of the fissure were jagged and displaced outward from the center of the unit. The front faceplate, with its handle and motherboard, was missing. If information could be recovered from the damaged DSU, it would reveal a minute-by-minute mechanical picture of Speicher’s last flight. The DSU could also provide insight from its cordoned-off secure files. But for Buran, at that moment, there was only one problem: getting it out of Iraq. Buran downplayed its importance in front of Iraqi officials. They already seemed surprised that it was found. He offered the Bedouins money for it. They accepted. He quickly stowed it in his personal gear. It was the only way he was going to get it out of the country without raising further suspicion among the team’s Iraqi hosts.
Before he left the crash site Mike Buran had one more thing he wanted to do. He cut the tailhook off Speicher’s Hornet and brought it back for Michael Scott Speicher Jr., who was eighteen months old the last time he saw his father. He turned it over to Scott’s former commanding officer, Spock Anderson, to clean up and present to Speicher’s son. The “hook” is a cherished symbol of a naval aviator’s flying career. At least Scott Speicher’s son, he thought, would have something from his father’s aircraft to remember him by.
The team pulled out of Iraq on December 16, 1995. They’d collected physical evidence and preliminary findings that once fully evaluated called into question the Pentagon’s presumptive finding of death in the case of Michael Scott Speicher. But what they missed altogether was the man who’d flown the jet they’d come to investigate. They’d missed Scott Speicher. Just as the Bedouins predicted, General Khaldoun Khattab and “the whole Iraqi army” moved in and it was over.
The Pentagon would have to tell Joanne Speicher what the ICRC team found in the western Iraqi desert. Details of the mission were bound to become public and the Defense Department didn’t want her reading about it in the newspaper. There was already much that she hadn’t been told. The ICRC had intermittently asked Baghdad to account for Scott Speicher and Barry Cooke since the war. But Joanne wasn’t notified of these inquiries. Whether Buddy Harris, then working in the Pentagon, mentioned the information to her as it became known to him is speculative. But his proximity to the Speicher family was closer than his Pentagon chain of command knew. When Washington engaged the ICRC to get Baghdad’s permission to visit the crash site, the navy decided it was time to contact Joanne. As plans were made and next-of-kin considerations discussed, Harris knew he had to come forward with one more piece of information for his bosses in the Pentagon.
Over two years before, on July 4, 1992, Harris had married Joanne Speicher. He’d not mentioned the marriage to his colleagues. He’d not told his superiors. But he kept investigating the case. A few investigators who worked with Harris purportedly knew he’d married her, but most didn’t. Jeff Manor recalled later how forthcoming a navy captain from the Chief of Naval Operations’ special operations group had been with him during a meeting to discuss Speicher’s status. “He told me right away about the mess with Buddy Harris. I think it was then that I informed him that things were even worse because Joanne was not the primary next-of-kin. It was a wrinkle,” Manor explained, “that I don’t think they initially considered. I’m not sure what I would have done in Buddy Harris’ place. I know that Admiral Arthur secured a promise from him that he wouldn’t release anything to Joanne until the navy decided to do so. I’m not sure why all this stuff was not code word since it involved possible special ops.”
Code word, a level of classification above top secret, would have required members of the Speicher investigation team, including Harris, sign a secrecy agreement that prohibited them from disclosing classified information about the case. The one exception to this rule of law is when a witness has been served a notice of deposition by a U.S. Marshal. That person is then required under oath and sworn to tell the truth under penalty of perjury before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in closed session. But code word wasn’t used among the team, so there was no way to keep Harris from discussing the case with Joanne then or others later. To those who didn’t know, finding out about Harris’ marriage to the wife of the man he was investigating was a clear case of conflict of interest, no matter how well intentioned, no matter how much he believed his work as part of the team boosted Scott Speicher’s case in front of his boss. Harris was in a tough position. Despite what anyone thought of him, he knew deep down that what he’d done to help Scott was the right decision.
Admiral Arthur pulled Harris into his office after he found out about the marriage to Joanne Speicher. They talked for about an hour. Arthur told Harris he wouldn’t have been assigned to Scott’s investigation if he’d known the truth. But it was just as well. “Basically he said he’s sorry,” Harris said. Arthur took full responsibility for what happened to Scott. During the war, he’d been in charge of Desert Storm naval operations. He thought his staff had made serious mistakes. Now, Arthur confided to Harris, he was going to do everything he could to make it right, to get answers to all the questions that had been asked since Speicher’s jet went down. It was a heartfelt promise, but Admiral Arthur was hamstrung by the same bureaucracy that said Scott Speicher was “old bones.” His chances of being able to get Speicher back under those circumstances was moot.
William G. “Chip” Beck worked closely with Admiral Arthur during Desert Storm. Beck had been pulled from his job at the CIA, where he’d been a station chief. The navy needed him back. Commander Beck was the navy’s official combat artist for the duration of the war. But he was also a naval intelligence officer. “I was on the USS Ranger [CV-61] the night that the air war commenced,” he said later, “the night that Scott Speicher was shot down. I believe from the comments I heard at the time the navy, and certainly Admiral Arthur, believed the initial reports that Speicher was killed in the shoot down of his aircraft. Exactly why a SAR bird wasn’t sent into the area, I don’t know.” Beck thought he’d gotten to know Arthur enough to characterize him as a caring and competent leader and a human being “who wouldn’t knowingly leave one of his men in the lurch. Like most people at his level,” he explained, “he accepted the professional assessments of his subordinates, and had too much else going on to probably focus on the details that might have [otherwise] caused him to question the analysis [he’d received]. After all,” Beck concluded, “that is what his subordinate staffs and DPMO were supposed to do at their stages of the action [and] post action investigations.”
After his meeting with Arthur, Harris would have to watch the Speicher investigation from the sidelines. “Instead of being part of the group and listening to what everybody else had to say, my tasks became more menial,” he said later. Rather than uncover, evaluate and present information up the chain of command, Harris was relegated to gathering information that was passed to a navy captain to present in group sessions. “The group tended to always have meetings when I was not there or they wouldn’t have any time to notify me. I was slowly put on the outside,” Harris explained. It had become clear he was no longer part of the team. He understood. But he wasn’t sure he’d have done anything differently. “So at that point I had to tell Joanne.”
Harris’ marriage to Joanne Speicher hadn’t really gone unnoticed. It wasn’t the forthcoming comments of a navy captain that tipped Manor to Speicher’s next-of-kin rights issue. He already knew about it. “Technically,” he explained, “Joanne was no longer the next-of-kin since she was remarried. [Speicher’s] father was.” But his office had difficulty tracking down Wallace Speicher at the time DNA testing was performed on DS1-256. “Nobody knew if he was dead or alive.” Manor found him in a Jacksonville nursing home, but Wallace was at the end stages of dementia. He died on June 30, 1995. Before his health sharply declined, Wallace was outspoken on Scott’s case. He wanted his son back. “I think,” Manor explained, “[one reason concerned] money because of Scott’s loss. Add to that, he was not Scott’s natural father.” Scott’s adoption complicated the next-of-kin issue. While he had a sister, Sheryl Speicher Long, she, too, had been adopted by Wallace and Barbara Speicher.
At the time of his loss, Scott Speicher’s children were minors ineligible to become next-of-kin until they reached the age of eighteen. The Defense Department played with the semantic between “primary next-of-kin” and “member of the immediate family,” thus setting up problems the navy hadn’t dealt with to date: what to do if he were ever declared missing again. “We didn’t know what we were going to do,” said Manor. “All that retroactive pay had to go to someone.” Primary next-of-kin, in reference to a missing person at the time Scott Speicher was lost, was defined as an individual authorized to direct disposition of the person’s remains. But a member of the immediate family was considered, as Manor explained, altogether different. A member of the immediate family of the missing person meant the spouse, if they hadn’t remarried or divorced the service member; a natural, adopted or recognized illegitimate child, but only if that child had reached the age of eighteen or, if not eighteen, a surviving parent could speak for them; a biological parent, unless the law revoked custody by court decree and it was never restored; or a brother or sister of the service member, if they were at least eighteen years of age.
Under the aforementioned guidelines, had they been strictly interpreted, Joanne Speicher-Harris was no longer Scott Speicher’s primary next-of-kin nor a member of his immediate family. Had the navy followed legal guidelines, the primary next-of-kin qualified to make decisions for Scott Speicher and receive his retroactive pay after July 4, 1992, was his father, Wallace. But by the time Manor found Wallace he was far too sick to assume the role of primary next-of-kin. The only person left to fulfill that role was his sister. No one in Manor’s position had ever encountered such a complicated and sensitive family situation. After Speicher’s fate was called into question and he was moved to missing and, later, missing-captured status, Joanne Speicher-Harris was paid two lump sums of Scott’s back pay, one installment in 1996 and another in 2001.
Buddy Harris couldn’t have been pushed aside from the Speicher investigation at a worse time. Word from the ICRC team was beginning to reach the Pentagon. Everyone hoped that they’d found answers that would clear up the mystery of what happened to Scott Speicher once and for all. But what they didn’t know just then was that the Hornet’s wreckage would only make them feel worse.
Back in the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense William Perry wanted to know how long it would take to resolve the issues in the case. “I told him it’d be thirty to forty days,” said Bruce Trenholm later. Yet despite this, on January 17, 1996, J. Alan Liotta, DPMO deputy director, briefed New Hampshire Republican senator Robert C. “Bob” Smith, a ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, to tell him what the ICRC team had found. Smith had tracked Speicher’s case since the Falcon Hunter visited the wreckage three years before. What Smith heard from Liotta was grave news: the Red Cross team had found nothing to suggest that Scott Speicher survived his shoot-down. But that wasn’t the truth. The truth took years to work its way to the surface.
1 Holmes was born in Bucharest, Romania, to American parents. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1954 at Princeton University, where he was a classmate of Donald Rumsfeld. Holmes then joined the United States Marine Corps, leaving as an infantry captain in 1957 to study at the University of Paris, where he graduated with a certificate in 1958 and was hired as an intelligence research analyst for the United States Department of State that same year. Holmes began his diplomatic career by joining the Foreign Service in 1959; his first posting was as a consular and political officer in Yaoundé, Cameroon. He continued to advance through various State Department positions for the next two decades, including posts in Rome and Paris, until his appointment as ambassador to Portugal in 1982. From 1985 to 1989 Holmes served as United States assistant secretary of state for politico-military affairs. In 1989 he was appointed ambassador at large for Burdensharing in which he ensured balanced security responsibility among NATO members, Japan, and other American allies. Following this he was nominated by President Clinton to be assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations and low-intensity conflict. During this time his office generated a plan for the Department of Defense to launch new national counterterrorism strategy to respond to “the gauntlet the international terrorists have thrown at our feet,” but as referenced in the 9/11 report, the paper never went beyond the Office of the Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.