Chapter 8
A few weeks after the ICRC team wrapped up its inquiry, aircraft investigators, life support experts, aviation engineers and forensic anthropologists filed their reports. Their findings drew a fairly clear picture of what had happened to Scott Speicher on his last flight. That picture differed sharply from what New Hampshire Senator Bob Smith had been told by J. Alan Liotta. Five days before Liotta briefed Smith a McDonnell Douglas investigative team extracted the information from Speicher’s DSU. Each member of the team – Jeff Edwards, an aircraft mishap investigator; Scott Reynolds, an F/A-18 product safety analyst; Kevin Schmitz and Jeff Staudacher, DSU data retrieval, and Glen Patterson from Hamilton Standard, the DSU’s manufacturer – played a key role in pulling off about 93 percent of the data, despite significant damage to the memory unit. Data fed into the DSU is recorded onto the memory unit from a low chip to a high chip. Power loss to Speicher’s DSU was abrupt and occurred between the time data was being written from the low chip to the high chip.
The McDonnell Douglas team’s final report gave lead investigators a detailed time line of events involving Speicher’s Hornet, from the time he launched to the moment he was hit. Data started recording to Speicher’s DSU at 1:35:29.25 a.m. Baghdad local time. The Hornet’s throttles were set to 98 percent, full military power. Weight off wheels occurred at 1:36:18.44 as Speicher left the deck of the Saratoga. Everything in his flight appeared normal during the climb out to cruise altitude, which varied between 21,000 and 23,000 feet. But then his problems started. Eight minutes after takeoff his jet recorded a lengthy series of maintenance status panel (MSP) code and built-in test (BIT) code failures. Several of these would play a significant role in what happened to him that night.
At 1:43:30.65 Speicher got a warning that indicated he had a HARM command launch computer (HARM CLC) failure (MSP Code 375). One, two or all three of his HARM missiles might have been inoperative. Seconds later he got a HARM to radar warning receiver (HARM/RWR) interface failure (MSP Code 377). The HARM CLC failure would either have degraded or eliminated the HARM to RWR interface that enabled the HARM to characterize threats. As he neared his first target at 3:46:25.95, two hours and ten minutes into the flight, the jet’s computer recorded another failure. This one was to the ALR 67 radar warning receiver analyzer failure (MSP Code 111), the device that detected threats to the aircraft from air or land. It was this failure that corresponded to the BIT Code 94 failure of the Hornet’s countermeasures weapon system. The read-only memory (ROM) on the second of two processors was declared failed, which thus caused the analyzer to declare a failure. The severity of this failure can vary from minor degradation to complete loss of displayed threat information, explained crash investigator Mike Buran, but in his opinion “he was totally blind” to air-to-air threats. The severity of the degradation Buran described would have been displayed to the pilot on the azimuth indicator to the right side of the cockpit instrument panel, so Speicher could have looked over at another gauge to notice how well – or not – the device was working.
The DSU recorded multiple, significant avionic BIT code failures to Speicher’s Hornet within ten minutes of weight off wheels. Several of his HARM BIT codes failures indicated general function fail, target of opportunity mode fail, self-protect mode fail, HARM mode degradation, HARM CLC No Go, CLC fail and the ALR 67/HARM to RWR interface fail. The McDonnell Douglas team was unable to determine exactly which HARM station or stations were declared failed from the information on the memory unit. They also couldn’t tell which one might have been damaged.
At 2:31:15.05, about fifty-five minutes into the flight, BIT Code 114, his signal data computer (SDC), recorded its first failure of the flight. The SDC controls the four main electronic displays in the cockpit: the HUD, the right and left digital display indicators (DDIs) and the lower-middle navigation (NAV) display. The second failure came twenty-two minutes later and was recorded at 2:53:30.65. These failures were believed to have been caused during one of three in-flight refueling events that took place before Speicher’s run on the target.
The BIT code failures seemed more than normal to Bob Stumpf. “He does appear to [have been] having a bad day with the jet,” he said. “We train to function with multiple degrades and it appears Spike decided he could accomplish his mission with what he had, just as I decided I could make it with the lesser amount of fuel I had.” He pointed to the fact that on that night they all had considerable motivation to get their HARM missiles on the mark. Strikers [air force F-117s] were coming in below and depended on the Hornets’ HARMs to shut down Iraqi missile batteries. “Those are the tough decisions that pilots have to make in the combat environment,” said Stumpf.
From data taken off his DSU, Speicher received several advisories during the flight that notified him of the status of his autopilot engagement. His last one indicated that autopilot was selected at 3:38:56.55, roughly two hours and three minutes into the mission. “It doesn’t surprise me that Spike was on autopilot,” said Stumpf. “We were on a very benign profile and the autopilot does a great job of keeping on this sort of profile.” It permits the pilot to focus on other flying aspects besides navigation. “I’m sure we were all on autopilot for much of the flight.”
Scott Speicher disengaged autopilot at 3:49:42.75. He’d been at 28,160 feet traveling 364 knots. Seventeen seconds later something slammed into his Hornet so hard that it experienced abrupt power loss. Information taken five seconds prior to the last recorded frame on the DSU indicates that Speicher dropped to 27,872 feet. His airspeed had increased four knots. He was dropping into his target run. This slight nose-down input by the pilot ten seconds before loss of power is the only anomaly on the tape.
Mike Buran’s Naval Safety Center analysis was not submitted to DPMO deputy director Liotta and CILHI army major W. L. Ray until February 15, a month after Liotta drew the presumptive conclusion for Senator Smith that the ICRC had found nothing to indicate Speicher survived his shoot-down. Naval Aviation Depot Jacksonville engineers concluded that the Hornet’s engines crashed with very little to no rotation. Both were in good condition and that wouldn’t have been the case had they been turning on impact. This coupled with post-crash witness marks on engine components led Buran and depot engineers to the qualified assumption that both engines were no longer getting fuel and had shut down in flight. There were no entrance or exit wounds to either engine to indicate battle damage. Evidence pointed instead to a proximity detonation under the cockpit area of the aircraft. Whatever had damaged Scott Speicher’s jet cut the fuel flow to the engines.
Analysis of the wing and centerline drop tanks that had been located by the ICRC team north of the main wreckage with the pylons still attached were analyzed and documented. This gave investigators another piece of the story. The pylons were torn from the fuselage, which indicated to them that Speicher’s Hornet was put under excessive aerodynamic forces over a short period of time, perhaps two to three seconds, as the Hornet’s altitude and approximated airspeed increased dramatically to 540 knots or .92 Mach. Charles Sapp, McDonnell Douglas’ unit manager of flight load limits, estimated that the maximum G-load and sideslip in those few seconds caused the tanks to leave the airframe with their pylons still attached. He put the G-load at six Gs with sixty degrees of sideslip. But by the time his Hornet slipped into this falling leaf configuration, Speicher was no longer with the jet. He’d already punched out.
Buran’s engineering investigation reported that the rocket motors that blast the canopy away from the aircraft left even burn marks on the frame. “The pilot had to have initiated the jettison,” wrote Buran in his final report. There are only two ways for the canopy to jettison in an F/A-18 Hornet: the pilot pulling either of the two jettison release handles, one on the left side of the canopy or the one located between his legs. From the canopy alone it was impossible to tell which one Speicher pulled. What they did know was that he’d ejected successfully.
Buran hypothesized that the Hornet’s engines shut down from an impact to the port side of the aircraft. This is the same side the DSU and recovered cockpit indicators were located. The throttle configuration on the F/A-18 is designed in such a way that if the throttle’s cable is pulled forward, the aircraft loses power. If an explosion, perhaps in addition to airframe damage, resulted in the throttle system being displaced forward enough, it could have caused the engines to shut down.
There was something else that Buran’s report told the Pentagon that it didn’t want to hear: the pilot was not incapacitated by the missile’s initial impact. One of his investigating engineers wrote: “This pilot was over enemy territory, in extremis situation and sitting in the middle of a hot cockpit fire. Logic dictates that the only way the pilot is getting rid of his canopy is by ejecting.” When he consulted with flight surgeons and aviation life support system (ALSS) experts regarding pilot survivability under those circumstances, they assured Buran that Speicher had an 85 to 90 percent chance of surviving the flash heat and fire and the aerodynamic forces of the initial impact. Collene Swavely, a physical scientist in the protective clothing division at the Naval Air Warfare Center, Warminster, Pennsylvania, told Buran that three- to four-second exposure to temperatures of 650 degrees Fahrenheit would result in second-degree burns on exposed areas of skin. If Speicher had been burned just prior to ejection, it might have been to the back of his neck and any other areas left unprotected by his flight gear, including the face if his visor was up and his hands, if he wasn’t wearing his flight gloves. Swavely’s study proved that a ten- to twelve-second exposure to temperatures in excess of 700 degrees Fahrenheit would have been necessary to burn a pilot through his survival vest, anti-G suit, Nomex flight suit and cotton underwear. The interior canopy bubble of Scott’s jet was exposed to only a few seconds of 400- to 500-degree heat. But this differed significantly from Dr. Holland’s report, which suggested the cockpit was exposed to a short-lived fire “possibly reaching 650°-700° F.” Holland, a forensic anthropologist, was estimating something outside his field of expertise. Engineers and physical scientists working with Speicher’s wreckage knew better.
Trenholm’s report picked up with Speicher’s ejection from the Hornet. He concluded the canopy’s distance from the primary wreckage site indicated that when the ejection handle was pulled, it separated as it should have. That said, he moved on to more pressing matters. Top of the list was the mysterious flight suit handed to them in desert just weeks before. He placed a call to Spock Anderson, who was out of the navy and working for McDonnell Douglas. He wanted to ask Anderson if he’d authorized his pilots to wear their name tags on the mission. Anderson said he’d think about it and get back to him. “But when someone says this and doesn’t get your phone number to call you back,” said Trenholm, “you aren’t likely to get an answer.”
The Sunliners wore red name tags, usually stitched with their call signs. Speicher’s read “Spike.” Trenholm knew it was important he figure out if the Iraqis cut off the left breast Velcro for the Spike name tag or if the Bedouins had just removed all the flight suit’s usable Velcro and metal fasteners for practical use. Anderson hadn’t answered the question: did he or didn’t he tell his pilots to remove all patches from their flight suits before combat missions. He assumed Anderson’s negative interest was an admission that he hadn’t. Trenholm never got an answer to his question during the active part of the investigation. The real answer didn’t come until much later. And it came from Tony Albano, Speicher’s Saratoga roommate and best friend.
“We sanitized our flight suits,” said Albano. “We didn’t wear our name tags. Perhaps he [Trenholm] was thinking of the tag on the inside back collar that we used to write our names and ‘last four’ for the ship’s laundry. But we didn’t have any name tags or patches on our flight suits that night or any other mission during the war.” The “last four” to which Albano referred were the last four digits of a pilot’s social security number. If the Iraqis had Speicher’s flight suit for any length of time, they knew exactly who they had: Scott Speicher. “The laundry label would’ve had Scott’s last name on it.”
Trenholm took the flight suit around to various bureaus and agencies for testing. He was not alone in his suspicions about the flight suit’s origin. In his comprehensive report, Dr. Holland addressed the flight suit “found” by the Bedouin boy with the word “found” in quotes. He didn’t believe the Iraqis’ story either. Trenholm sent the flight suit over to the Body Mounted Systems Branch of the Naval Air Warfare Center in Warminster, Pennsylvania. They determined it was a CWU-27P flight suit in a size 38 Long. But the leg inseam was based on an approximate measurement. That part of the fabric of the flight suit was missing. There was no size tag nor manufacturer information inside the collar of the suit (this would also include the laundry information for the garment). Branch investigators estimated that the wearer of the suit had a 30.5-inch inseam. Speicher’s anthropomorphic data was further estimated, given what they had in front of them, 71 inches tall and 168 pounds. But that wasn’t right. The DIA POW/MIA database and the DUSTWUN sheet filled out for him by Spock Anderson recorded his height as 71.7 inches (5 feet 11 inches) and his weight as 154 pounds. They said he wore a 38 Long flight suit. Maybe, maybe not. Military aviators like to wear their flight suits slightly larger than their actual size to provide greater mobility. But after going to available reference materials and drawing photographic comparisons, the idea that the flight suit was in fact Speicher’s began to add up for Trenholm. The suit, for him, “started quacking like a duck. I basically, for the most part, said that it was ‘probable’ it was his flight suit. [Now] I’m ninety-nine percent sure, just not a hundred percent sure. Personally, you know, you have a professional opinion and a personal opinion, right? My professional opinion is that most probably it’s his. My personal opinion? Yeah, it’s his. That’s just the way I have to look at things.”
The flight suit was and continues to be a pivotal piece of forensic evidence in the Scott Speicher case. But it also has a convoluted chain of custody to match the mystery of its being “found” by a Bedouin boy. Less than a month after American members of the ICRC team returned stateside, on January 9, 1996, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for POW/MIA Affairs James W. Wold sent a letter to FBI director Louis Freeh asking the Bureau to analyze a flight suit “recently discovered near a desert crash site.” “The flight suit is presently being evaluated to determine if it belonged to the aviator involved in the loss incident,” said the letter. “In particular we are interested in any evidence of body fluids or foreign material remaining on the flight suit that may be used for DNA analysis and identification at a later date.” The request further asked that “DNA testing is not desired at this time. The flight suit has already been examined by military crash investigation experts for heat damage and other crash-related evidence.”
FBI special agent Joe Errera was told only that the loss incident in question “is receiving high-level DoD, State and NSC attention.” Nothing else. Wold wanted results back by February 6. Due to the its strict custody requirements, the flight suit was submitted to the FBI by Bruce Trenholm and he was the only person other than Commander Mark D. Jensen, a navy helicopter pilot working for Wold, authorized to receive the flight suit once the FBI was finished testing it. Trenholm delivered the flight suit in a bag to the FBI laboratory in Washington, D.C., ten days later, on January 19.
The FBI’s lab issued preliminary findings on January 31. Technicians found brown Caucasian body hairs, which they determined were insufficient for comparison purposes, meaning DNA. Dark, reddish-brown dog hair was removed from the flight suit. Blue and brown carpet fibers were also found and preserved on glass microscope slides for future comparison. “A preliminary chemical test for the possible evidence of blood was positive on stains found on the flight suit,” according to the FBI lab report, but strangely, it refused to confirm whether the stain was actually blood. It only suggested “possible evidence of” but not the actual presence of blood on the flight suit. The FBI lab tested three dark splotches on the flight suit, each about an eighth of an inch in diameter. There was also a moderate presence of dark brown stains from the left arm cuff to the Velcro closure. Both Velcro closures on the sleeves were intact. Samples of stains on the crotch and armpit were taken for possible DNA analysis. None were done. Dr. Holland wrote in a report dated March 19, 1996, that “FBI chemical tests of the flight suit were positive for possible blood residues.” But that’s not exactly true. The FBI report never conclusively identifies the stains as blood. The FBI did find a small amount of sand and whitish plant debris. Samples of all were placed in envelopes to be kept with the flight suit until it was retrieved by either Trenholm or Jensen.
An independent fingerprint examination of the flight suit, performed by the FBI, wasn’t put in the file as of February 6, nor any time thereafter. And while it wasn’t explained in detail, the FBI did run a serology workup and limited DNA testing for the lab’s edification. Those results weren’t entered into the file. Bureau examiners further agreed not to talk about their findings interagency and, obviously, in public. But it is known that they did agree on whatever the results of these tests showed.
When the Bureau submitted its results to Wold, its report stated that the flight suit, aside from the tests performed, belonged to either “an unknown suspect, unnamed victim or a missing person.” They’d been given nothing to go on and, quite frankly, had the FBI lab been provided DNA for comparison, there might actually have been more answers. Their report described the flight suit in their custody as “olive green, very worn, heavily soiled with multiple pockets with zipper closures, a few snaps, and no inside labels.” Lab technicians noticed that it was hard to tell the top of the suit from the bottom. Entire portions of it were missing. “Completely torn and shredded” were the descriptives they used. But there were still several Velcro areas sewn to the suit for squadron patches in addition to the cuffs, which they’d already noted in the report. The FBI examiner noted that the laundry tag Albano had said had Scott’s name, which had been partly cut and only small parts of it were actually readable. What remained was badly faded but they were able to read portions of it that told them it was a United States Air Force summer issue flight suit. They photographed the flight suit for their records. The FBI’s examination of the flight suit was inexplicably ordered discontinued on February 7 and a facsimile of its lab results sent to Trenholm at China Lake shortly thereafter.
The next day, February 8, Commander Jensen, Wold’s assistant, signed out the flight suit, specimens and all test results at the FBI and took the specimens to the DNA Identification Laboratory at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) in Rockville, Maryland. Jensen’s was the last name officially recorded on the flight suit chain of custody log. The AFIP examined a small Ziploc bag containing stained green material; two portions of the left arm cuff, which had moderate stains that looked like dried blood; a crotch cutting and an armpit cutting. The specimens were analyzed using short tandem repeat (STR) analysis, but nothing conclusive is recorded in the report. This report, absent conclusive analyses, is signed off by two DNA analysts, Richard E. Wilson and Jeanne M. Willard; Dr. Mitchell M. Holland, branch chief of the AFIP DNA Laboratory, and Dr. Victor M. Weedn, the same DNA expert who five years earlier had run tests on DS1-256, the remains the Iraqis claimed was a pilot named “Mickel.”
While the flight suit made its rounds of East Coast laboratories, Trenholm sent five small fragments of Scott Speicher’s canopy bubble to Marlowe V. Moncur at Pilkington Aerospace on February 2. Moncur returned the samples five days later with a report that indicated the stretch acrylic that once made up Scott’s canopy bubble had undergone “shrinkback,” a process in which the thickness increases and in-plane dimensions decrease. “Surface shrinkback forces caused the fissuring and thickness increase evident in all the samples,” she wrote. Based on the degree of damage to the samples, Moncur estimated that the canopy surfaces reached temperatures of 400° to 500° F, perhaps higher, while the core temperature remained below the minimum shrinkback temperature of 230° F. In other words, the canopy was exposed to intense heat that lasted only seconds. This was an assessment that gave Trenholm a better idea of the flash fire’s intensity and duration. Although he was getting a pretty good picture of Speicher’s last seconds in the Hornet, key elements were still missing.
Trenholm’s report included an overview of F/A-18 ejection history. Investigators working Speicher’s case had that history committed to memory. The first ejection from a U.S. Navy F/A-18 fleet squadron jet occurred on July 17, 1985. By the time Trenholm started looking hard at previous history there’d been fifty-eight aircrew ejections from fifty-two aircraft. Of the fifty-eight aircrew who’d ejected, forty-one were over land and seventeen over water. Six died. The six fatalities were due to three pilots initiating ejection out of the safe envelope to do so; one pilot’s parachute melted during descent due to direct contact with his exploding aircraft; one pilot was not connected to his parachute; and one aircraft was struck. In the latter incident the pilot ejected and was wrapped in the ejection seat due to a freak asymmetrical drogue deployment. In no instance had a parachute been packed incorrectly. Of the forty-one ejections over land, about 70 percent received injuries, both major and minor, caused by shock loads that occurred during the parachute opening and, to some degree, in the descent or landing.
Based on the condition of parachute materials recovered in the Iraqi desert and review of past F/A-18 mishaps, Trenholm accepted or rejected parachute scenarios or ruled them “probable.” “The parachute was a variable,” he said later, “but not a factor.” “We recognized that the parachute packed in Speicher’s ejection seat was responsible for more injuries in the fleet than any other so we gave it proper attention in the report.” He was referring to the GQ 1000 Aeroconical parachute. He rejected the possibility that the aircraft canopy failed to separate from the aircraft. Based on wreckage analysis, it was clear the pilot, Scott Speicher, initiated the ejection sequence. Trenholm further rejected the idea that the ejection system failed to function. The condition of the aircraft canopy and all ALSS items recovered on the site was inconsistent with an aircraft impact. The pilot couldn’t have been in the aircraft when it struck the desert floor for the ICRC team to have found the items they did in the condition they were if Speicher had ridden the Hornet all the way down. If the ejection system had failed to depart the aircraft prior to impact, he explained, ALSS equipment packed with the seat is almost completely destroyed either as the result of extreme heat and/or impact with the ground or water.
From what was found in the debris field at Scott Speicher’s crash site, investigators determined that Speicher’s GQ 1000 Aeroconical opened during parachute descent. Though they couldn’t say with 100 percent certainty if Speicher opened his parachute or the GQ 1000 deployed on its own, “it can be safely assumed it was opened based on the pieces of life raft found,” said the report. The life raft, located in the seat pan of the ejection seat, normally disintegrates during a successful ejection. Strangely, the GQ 1000 was one piece of equipment that hadn’t been recommended for overland ejection per NATOPS Flight Manual A1-F18AC-NFM-000. The GQ 1000 was a holdover of the blue water navy, to days when its aviators performed most of their duties at sea, not flying over land targets in Southwest and, later, Central Asia.
Based on Scott Speicher’s quick exit from a hot cockpit, Trenholm included expected probable injuries and incapacitation from shock and, perhaps, a hard landing. Warren Ingram, assigned to the Emergency Egress and Crashworthy Systems Division at Naval Air Warfare Center China Lake performed a descent-rate analysis using a suspended weight of 218 pounds, consistent with the pilot’s body weight and all his aviation life support equipment. He matched them to the meteorological conditions of the crash site on January 17, 1991. On the day Scott Speicher was shot down a frontal system brought very low temperatures and cloud cover with bases raised to eight thousand feet and ceilings from twenty to twenty-five thousand feet. Winds whipped from the south-southwest between six and twenty knots, increasing at higher elevations to over one hundred knots aloft. There was patchy fog in west central Iraq, and blowing sand and suspended dust reduced visibility to thirty-two hundred meters during the afternoon along the Saudi Arabia-Iraq border.
Ingram’s analysis showed a minimum total velocity rate of descent of twenty-six feet per second and a maximum of thirty-three feet per second. The calculated rate of descent for Scott Speicher in his parachute might have been enough to inflict injury on landing. Injuries could have been anything from a bloody nose or a bitten tongue to compound fractures. But there was no indication of massive blood loss nor compound fractures from analysis of the flight suit.
Just before Bruce Trenholm issued his final report on the flight suit, Tony Albano got a message during a training flight that Trenholm was trying to track him down. Albano was executive officer of Training Squadron Nineteen (VT-19) in Meridian, Mississippi. Another squadron mate, Commander Mark Fox, was commanding officer of the Sunliners. Trenholm wanted to talk to him, too. They agreed to meet Trenholm at Cecil Field. Prior to the interview Trenholm asked that Albano and Fox bring squadron patches and that any photographs of Scott Speicher in his flight suit that they might have be sent to him for inclusion in his investigation file. They sent four pictures of Scott to Trenholm.
During their meeting at Cecil Field, Trenholm told Albano and Fox that he’d been on the ICRC mission to the Iraqi desert. He explained how the team was handed the flight suit. He wanted to know if Albano could look at it and see if he thought it was Speicher’s. He told them about the Bedouin boy the Iraqis said “found” it, and that most of the Red Cross team figured the Iraqis planted it. He told them that the legs were slit up the back in a way that an emergency worker or doctor might cut a suit off someone who was facedown. He told them he’d estimated Speicher’s height at 71 inches, his weight at 168 pounds and his flight suit size at 38 Long. Then Trenholm reached into a brown paper grocery bag and pulled out the suit.
The last time Albano had seen that flight suit, Speicher was wearing it and they were slapping hands, wishing each other luck on their first wartime mission. Now here it was. “He just pulled it out of the bag like it was nothing,” said Albano. “We’d been talking and then there was the flight suit.” Albano saw that the suit was worn and tattered. Pockets were missing and the patches gone. He knew that pilots removed those patches to sanitize the flight suit before combat missions. He also noticed something else: scorch marks. “The material of the flight suit won’t scorch [flight suits have a chemical retardant that prevents them from burning; the material flakes away]. But there were scorch marks on the shoulders. They were too symmetrical for normal burn marks.” Albano also noticed what he didn’t see: no charring and little blood. He looked at Trenholm. “I’m positive that’s his flight suit,” he said. Then Fox hopped into his car, went to his house and grabbed his old flight suit. A circular patch of Velcro fastener on Speicher’s right arm matched Fox’s “Sunliners-Anytime-Anyplace” patch. An oval of Velcro on the left arm lined up perfectly with a patch their squadron gave out to those who earned it that read “F/A-18 Hornet 1000 Hours.” Trenholm then told Speicher’s squadron mates about the condition of the jet, and the canopy and the parachute straps and life support gear. Five years after that awful night, there seemed to be fewer answers than hoped. And the same old question. “Oh God,” Albano thought. “Well, what happened to him?”
Albano reiterated that all the patches on their flight suits had been removed prior to combat missions, including the name tag over the left breast pocket. Trenholm disagreed. He maintained that the name tag had been left on Speicher’s flight suit and that Spock Anderson gave permission to wear them. “That is not true,” said Albano. “Nobody wore any squadron identification, including the name tag. That’s fabrication. There were standing orders to every aviator in the fleet to take all that off their flight suits on a mission.”
This was January or February 1996, Albano remembered. Trenholm’s final report determined that the flight suit recovered in the Iraqi desert was “most likely worn by VFA-81 naval pilot LCDR M. S. Speicher.” But there was no way to tell whether Scott Speicher wore the name tag that night. Odds are he didn’t.
Bob Stumpf got a telephone call not long after the ICRC mission returned from Iraq. The caller said, “Hey, I saw his flight suit. They found a canopy.” Stumpf thought, “Holy shit.” Then he learned that there had been an option to go in and examine the wreckage covertly and apparently it hadn’t happened. “That just blew me away. We have a contract with our soldiers, it’s black and white, ‘You go down, we’re going to come get you. It doesn’t matter if it takes a while. We’re not going to forget you.’” But that’s not what Stumpf saw happen with Scott Speicher. The evidence pointed to just the opposite. “Basically, what we said was, ‘Screw you, Speicher. We’re not going to honor our commitment to you. You gave your life for your country and we don’t care.’” The canopy was not with the wreckage, which indicated an ejection. The flight suit was in pretty fair shape, not soaked in blood, so all the clues pointed to Scott Speicher walking away from the ejection. What happened to Speicher, in Stumpf’s opinion, “should be unheard of. You can’t do this job without some high level of patriotism and trust. It has to go both ways. The Pentagon just lost its teeth. Where is the spirit, the military spirit and tradition we’ve had for two hundred years? Where is it?”
Trenholm collaborated with other investigators to find answers. Physical evidence gathered at the crash site was analyzed and laid up against other bits and pieces of pilot gear. A picture started to form. They had located several pieces of Speicher’s anti-G suit. The anti-G suit is made of a fire-resistant aramid cloth outer shell that houses a polyurethane bladder. The outer shell has waist and leg slide fasteners, adjustment lacing areas with lacing covers, and leg pockets that also have slide fasteners. The bladder system is constructed of polyurethane-coated nylon cloth and covers the pilot’s abdomen, thighs and calves. The life support material recovered in the vicinity of his Hornet wreckage was consistent with portions of the CSU-15/P anti-G suit issued to navy aircrew. The six fragments found by investigators included the hose, a waist slide fastener, adjacent material to the slide fastener and two pieces of spacer and reinforcement material roughly thirteen inches and three inches in length, respectively. Though the upper arms of Speicher’s flight suit showed signs of heat exposure, there was no evidence that the anti-G suit material was exposed to the flash fire that took place seconds before Speicher ejected from the jet.
One of the most encouraging finds among the debris of his Hornet was an SJU-5A ejection seat upper leg garter. The upper leg garter, connected to the pilot when seated in the aircraft and worn approximately three inches above the knee, is unique to the F/A-18 aircraft. Its purpose is to make sure the pilot’s legs are pulled back when he ejects, thus enhancing the ejection seat’s stability and preventing the pilot’s legs from flailing during ejection. The garter was found in two pieces with about three inches missing. Like the anti-G fragments, the garter hadn’t been exposed to heat.
By the time Trenholm was ready to issue his final report on Speicher’s aviation life-support equipment it was February 26. His opening statement was double-speak. His area of expertise, by his own admission, is parachutes. He was specifically a parachute mishap investigator and mishap investigation support team leader at the time the Speicher case crossed his desk. He’d investigated some 350 aircraft mishaps, but none as lengthy as Speicher’s. He’d become buried in information from the start. But he didn’t follow the picture it drew of the pilot who’d now been missing for five years. This was a big deal. And it required follow through and evidentiary protocol that didn’t happen with the flight suit. But it also didn’t happen with the cockpit canopy analysis or the bits and pieces of gear strewn over the desert floor. In the end, a parachute investigator put a parachute investigator’s spin on a missing person’s case that required so much more.
From the pieces of life support equipment found in the search, Trenholm concluded, “Speicher ejected from the aircraft.” But what else? Though the F/A-18 Hornet has a 85 to 90 percent survival rate on ejection, and no significant amount of blood or body tissue was on any of the equipment recovered, he still insisted that “the pilot may have been injured [or] incapacitated, perhaps fatally, due to trauma associated with ejection, parachute deployment or ground impact.” Where was the proof? There wasn’t enough left in the desert to know. Speicher’s flight helmet, personal gear and parachute were never recovered. Yet during the investigation recall that Trenholm had said clearly: “The parachute was a variable, but not a factor.”
J. Alan Liotta informed Secretary Perry on February 16, 1996, that there wasn’t anything in the desert to prove Speicher was alive, almost two weeks ahead of investigators’ final reports arriving in the Pentagon. He had nothing on which to base the statement he’d made to Perry. “When it came to Speicher,” said Commander Chip Beck, “Liotta was simply not up to the task of conducting a challenging and competent investigation against the Iraqis about the topic of a potentially live and covertly held American.” Beck, the CIA station chief and naval intelligence officer, was then working at DPMO. He remembered the time Liotta went into the field to oversee the crash site investigation in December 1995. “I had known Liotta for some years previously when he was a low-level and unexceptional analyst at CIA,” said Beck.
Liotta didn’t actually step into Iraq. Some news agencies, he observed, omitted that important detail. No, Liotta sat in a Land Rover on the Jordanian-Iraqi border long enough for the battery to die. When Liotta got back to DPMO’s office in Crystal City he gathered the staff in a small conference room to go over the team’s “findings.” “After telling us of the ejection seat and lack of forensic evidence, Liotta, amazingly to me, concluded to the staff that ‘We found no evidence that Lieutenant Commander Speicher survived the crash,’” said Beck. The silence from those around the table was both deafening and telling, he observed later. After a few seconds he challenged Liotta, saying out loud, “Excuse me, Alan, but you didn’t find any evidence that he died either. You basically didn’t find any evidence to support a conclusion of any type, so the investigation has to continue.” The others in the room seemed surprised by his statement. He got a glare from Liotta, but no rebuttal, no response whatsoever. He also had no evidence from the team in Iraq and since he’d actually never set foot on the crash site, hadn’t seen anything remotely resembling evidence. All Liotta had was hearsay and his own conclusion to pass to Perry. Scott Speicher’s life hinged on the presumptive statement of a man unprepared and unwilling to do what it might take to save him.
What was going on in the Pentagon wasn’t the only spin being put on the Speicher case. Baghdad had an agenda of its own to sell to the media. The Iraqi Air Force had sent two of its mishap investigators and its top general to the crash site as part of the ICRC team. General Khaldoun Khattab directed his men to pitch a large, heated tent for his use across the steppe from the ICRC’s makeshift camp. Behind the general’s tent sat two Russian-made Mi-8 Hip helicopters. The Iraqis used the Hip for Khattab’s transportation but also to observe the ICRC’s work from above. Trenholm was invited to Khattab’s tent for coffee. “[We were] eating dates or something,” he recalled. “He leans over, grabs my arm and says, ‘The woolufs eat him.’” Not understanding, Trenholm asked Khattab to repeat what he’d said. “He was trying to say, ‘The wolves ate him.’ This was all too contrived and I almost didn’t understand what he said at all.” If Trenholm thought it was contrived, what did the media think? Khattab repeated his wolf statement for them shortly after. Chip Beck knew Khattab was lying. But did the press?
“I was probably the only DPMO officer who had spent three or more years in North African and Middle East deserts and had seen what desert wolves do to bodies,” said Beck. “First of all, they are more like big, mangy coyotes than the timber wolves we know, and they don’t consume the bodies and bones in a way that would totally obliterate a pilot’s remains.” Beck had seen the bodies of fishermen washed up on the Sahara coastline after they’d been “played with” by desert wolves. “They can be pretty effective at spreading the remains around an area, but they are sloppy eaters and leave enough behind for a recovery team to find a fairly substantial amount of remains, certainly enough for DNA and forensic identification. The wolves would not likely eat the skull or the teeth, for instance, even if they broke [the skull] open for the soft tissue.” Beck found whole skulls in the desert in areas where he personally witnessed wolves eating bodies. “I approached these ‘wolves’ unarmed to see what they were up to with the fishermen’s bodies and they ran off. I never felt threatened at all.”
But the Sahara coastline wasn’t the desert plain between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, where the Arab wolf is one of the most impressive predators in the Middle East. Also called the gray wolf, it can grow up to six-and-a-half feet long and stands as much as three-and-a-half feet high. The Arab wolf weighs up to 120 pounds. It has powerful jaws and can sprint up to forty miles per hour. This is the desert version of the timber wolf. Packs of Arab wolves hunt strategically, organizing themselves into packs and communicating messages through different howl tones. They’ve been in Iraq for centuries. Though they’ve typically kept to devouring the Bedouins’ cattle, sheep and goats, it is only in recent years, long after Speicher went missing in this Iraqi wasteland, that Arab wolves became highly aggressive toward humans. They are hungry. With the Bedouins now protecting their herds with tall fencing, their food source has dramatically declined. They now attack humans with increasing abandon. “They have tremendous qualities. They appear during the day and don’t fear bullets and challenge even men holding rifles,” said Mohammed Abu Reesha, a resident of Samawah.1
Still, the Iraqis had blatantly lied to the Americans, figuring they’d know nothing about wolves’ nature, habitat and prey just then. Khattab told Trenholm a fable. The Qur’an tells the story of Joseph, whose brothers wanted to kill him to curry the favor of their father. The Bible tells a similar story, but the Qur’an’s tale is what Khattab was thinking about as he wove his fantastic lie for Trenholm’s benefit. The Qur’an’s Joseph is thrown down a well. But his brothers tell their father wolves ate him. “They showed him the shirt with blood on it. [The father] said: ‘It is not so, you have made up the story.’” Joseph was picked up by a caravan that had come to use the well. “‘What luck,’ said the man [in the caravan]; ‘here is a boy,’ and they hid him as an item of merchandise, worthless for a few paltry dirham.” The story rung awfully familiar. But why did Khattab lie? The deception begged many questions that weren’t asked and answered by the ICRC team then nor by anyone else later. But metaphorically, at least, Scott Speicher had much in common with Qur’anic Joseph, a boy whose father rejected news of his son’s death, who held the bloody shirt in his hands and still didn’t believe his brothers’ deception, and, finally, got away from his killers through the obligatory kindness of nomadic Bedouins.
“I think we can conclude,” said Beck, “that they were hiding knowledge of what really happened to Speicher.” Of course they’d spun a lie to do it, pandering to the press with a fantastic tale of wolves devouring dead bodies. Khattab killed two birds with one yarn: he’d scare off tribesmen from the area with the wolf story and make the Americans think there was nothing left of their pilot. This doesn’t fit, of course, the biggest fabrication of all, told to American Marines nearly thirteen years later, that yet another Bedouin boy had witnessed the burial of Scott Speicher. By then Speicher would have died a thousand deaths, from being blown to bits in his Hornet, dropped too hard by his parachute to being eaten by wolves. But none of what was found in the barren desert of Iraq in December 1995 supported any of this.
Khattab’s fairytale was a prescient metaphor for the deception and lone-wolf agendas that followed the ICRC-sponsored crash investigation. Buran admitted that he, like each man on the team, was there with his own set of orders. Each had their own agenda. But the biggest one, by far, was Liotta’s. He wanted to find Speicher’s body under the jet. “What a way to go, what a way to send off a mission that could have gathered so much more,” said Bob Dussault. The JCS and DPMO had all the information they could’ve wanted to keep the case open. But their agenda, their objectives, conflicted at best, got in the way. Chip Beck explained that he and Norman D. Kass, chairman of the Joint Commission Support Directorate (JCSD), spent eight hours in closed-door testimony answering questions from Congressman Bob Dornan’s subcommittee on prisoners of war.
It was October 1996. DPMO had already demonstrated lackluster results in resolving the fate of thousands of unrepatriated prisoners from wars of the twentieth century. “We believed that in the case of Vietnam, in particular,” said Beck, “and to a certain extent the cold war, Korea, World War II and World War I as well, this failure was intentionally contrived by longtime analysts, many of who had been in DPMO [and its previous iterations] for twenty-five to thirty years, to cover up the inaccuracy of their initial statements on live Americans.” Now they had at least one publicly charged case from the Persian Gulf War to resolve. If they couldn’t make it go away, the door might swing wide open for less known KIA-BNR and MIA cases from the Persian Gulf War that had yet to be discovered by the press or contested by their families.
Chip Beck was right. Liotta wasn’t up to the task on Speicher’s case. But nothing in his background would have suggested to his superiors that he was capable of leading the investigation either. He’d never served in the military. He had never been in the clandestine service of the CIA. He wasn’t an investigator. He had no experience with original research nor firsthand collection. Beck had been all that Liotta was not: CIA case officer, chief of station, Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) agent, and naval intelligence officer. Beck had also done something else: he’d worked with Kass as a special POW investigator from November 1995 through October 1996. Liotta was so opposed to Kass’ special initiative to flesh out the truth of what had happened to unrepatriated prisoners of war held for decades by Soviet and Soviet Bloc intelligence services “that he actually became part of an integral DPMO effort to sabotage and end our investigations along this path,” Beck said later.
DPMO’s actions, Liotta’s in particular, stalled the Speicher investigation before it had a chance to gain momentum. “[Speicher] may just be the last, or most recent, in a long line of ghosts who did not die when we wanted them to be dead.” Those who wanted him, who wanted all of them, to be dead became a disquieting backdrop to the Speicher investigation. No one knew (not always) who the “they” were nor how the manipulation might affect evidence, witnesses and testimony. But they were there. And each had their own reasons for never wanting a live American pilot to walk out of Iraq.
Particulars of the Speicher investigation just got worse. When Bob Dussault requested the flight suit in the spring of 1996 for independent testing, Liotta’s office told him it was lost. Dussault and JSSA director colonel Chapman were shocked that the flight suit couldn’t be located. Liotta pointed the finger at the FBI. He said they’d “misplaced the suit.” “We received a letter from DPMO stating that it had been sent to the FBI and got lost either at the FBI or in transit back to DPMO,” said Dussault later. But all Dussault knew then was that it could not be found. This was odd. That flight suit was the key piece of evidence in the case of a missing navy pilot. How could it be lost? How could it be misplaced? But Liotta hadn’t told JSSA the truth. Commander Jensen, who worked for Liotta’s boss, James Wold, was the last person to sign the flight suit out of FBI custody on February 8, 1996. He’d taken the suit to the AFIP in Rockville, Maryland, then back to Wold’s office. “At some point,” said Trenholm, “the flight suit gets back to me. I had it for over a year. But around Christmas 1997, I decided to send it by mail to the CILHI. They say they never got it.” Trenholm kept the flight suit out of chain of custody in a paper grocery bag under his desk. He broke custody again by sending it via regular U.S. Mail without tracking and signature requirement by the receiver. But was the flight suit really “lost” or was that a cover story to keep a key piece of evidence from being further examined just then?
Shortly after that Christmas, Trenholm got a call from “somebody in the Pentagon” who wanted the flight suit again. “But I had to tell him, ‘Sorry, buddy, no can do.’” That’s when he explained that he’d tucked the flight suit, specimens and test results into a simple mailing envelope and dropped them in the closest mail drop during the holiday mail rush. Nobody, he said, told him that there was anything particularly important about the flight suit since Speicher had been declared KIA-BNR. Speicher’s status change was admittedly confusing. He was retroactively made an MIA from May 23, 1991, to September 30, 1996, then switched back the next day to what he’d been: KIA-BNR. “He’s dead, so what’s the big deal about the flight suit?” he said later. But the chain of custody nightmare, exemplified by the flight suit, also smacked of people who couldn’t get their story straight. “Somebody has it and they consider it terribly sensitive to mention who, either because it reveals too much that they do not want others to know,” said Dussault, “or because they mishandled it and did not do the proper testing of all the evidence available. That would make them look dumb if that came out.”
By the end of December 1997, whether the flight suit was lost or someone had it secreted away, it was unavailable for further testing. With it went important test results, DNA samples, including specifics of the Caucasian body hair, reddish-brown canine hair and carpet fibers, fingerprint analysis and forensic reports, all of which stood to play a crucial role in Scott Speicher’s status: dead or alive. Nearly two years later, in July 1999, DPMO told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) that the flight suit and ALSS equipment that were worn by Scott Speicher the night he was shot down had been cut off the pilot and that their condition suggested the pilot was severely injured or dead when it was done. Yet another report told them that the flight suit was in tatters, with portions of the legs missing altogether. But other reports attached to the flight suit and ALSS equipment state just the opposite. There was no way to figure this out with the flight suit missing. And there was no way to get a look at photographs of the flight suit because the Pentagon claimed one of two problems when asked to produce them: they were classified or they were lost. Which was it? It couldn’t be both.
Like everything to do with Scott Speicher’s case, there’s always a bottom line. In this case the bottom line belongs to the flight suit handed over to the ICRC in the Iraqi desert: it “disappeared” within two weeks of Senators Smith and Grams’ pressing DPMO for answers. In this respect, the flight suit seemed to follow the path of the ejection seat’s and cockpit section’s disappearing act. Still, to those who tried to use the flight suit to suggest Speicher had died, they’d not made their case. They’d also not done their homework, followed forensic protocol or maintained chain of custody for a critical piece of evidence. The flight suit’s “loss” was just a fragment of the overwhelming denial, deceit and deception that would ensue in this case.
1 Halawa, Hassan and Borzou Daragahi, “Iraq wolves are big, bad and unafraid,” Seattle Times, March 20, 2008.