A Test of Honor

Military A test of honor By LON WAGNER AND AMY YARSINSKE, The Virginian-Pilot © January 1, 2002

Pieces of wreckage were on the desert floot and easily recognizable, including the 20mm gun, foreground, that was mounted in the nose of the jet.

Timothy Connolly had been in his Pentagon job just a few months when a staffer came back from a meeting with a curious question:

Connolly, the Army captain who had talked to the Kuwaiti colonel in the desert three years earlier, was now principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. It was early summer, 1994.

He went to the Defense Department's POW/MIA office and asked what was going on. He told them his story, about the Kuwaiti who claimed to have been in a hospital with an American pilot during the last days of the war. They brought him up to date on what they knew:

The year before, in '93, intelligence agents had heard about pieces of an F/A-18 for sale on the black market in the Middle East. They asked where the parts had come from. That's when they learned about the crash site of an American jet in the Iraqi desert.

A group from Qatar, a small, Middle Eastern nation south of Iraq, was then asked to go to the wreckage, take photos and bring back anything that would help identify the aircraft.

The Qataris went into the desert in December 1993. They returned and gave U.S. officials a stack of photographs, including some of the Hornet's canopy. And they brought along metal plates stamped with identification numbers.

The plane identification number was 163470, and the last man to fly that jet was Michael Scott Speicher.

Connolly quickly jumped into the case. As a former Army Ranger, he knew that if Speicher had been left behind, perhaps that was a fog-of-war mistake. Wartime lapses were usually forgiven.

The Defense Intelligence Agency had repositioned a satellite to search for the wreckage and pinpoint it. The satellite shots showed the crash site, something that could be an ejection seat and, near that, an unidentified man-made object. The F/A-18 site looked largely undisturbed.

The head of the POW/MIA office had already talked to the Joint Chiefs of Staff about a cloak-of-night mission to explore the site. The military had a chance to find out what had happened to Speicher, maybe to find his remains and return them to the family, to make things right.

The Pentagon's Timothy Connolly argued that the best way to find out what happened to Speicher was secretly to search the crash site.

Harris, a former Navy pilot himself, worked in the Pentagon for the vice chief of naval operations, Adm. Stanley Arthur. Harris was helping compile a report of all the Navy's missions, every strike flown, every bomb dropped, during the Gulf War.

One day in late 1993, he came across a CIA report stating that Speicher had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile. He called the CIA to straighten that out. He was familiar with the incident, because he knew Spike.

They'd met in Pensacola, Fla., in 1980, when they both were in Aviation Officer Candidate School training to be fighter pilots.

Then Harris went on his first deployment, and his Jacksonville home caught on fire 10 days before he returned. The only clothes he had were those he'd taken with him. Speicher heard what happened and showed up at the ship when Harris got back.

Harris told the CIA that the Department of Defense had changed its finding about Speicher being shot down by a SAM. It determined that he had, like his squadron commander said, been knocked from the sky by a MiG-25.

The phone conversation shifted to the story about Speicher's Hornet being found. The Qataris' photos had just come in. Harris had become one of the Navy's experts on Desert Storm and was asked to help.

The photos of the Hornet and the canopy made it look like Speicher might have ejected. Harris was told to find out what information originally led the Navy to conclude that Speicher didn't eject.

The idea that Speicher might have ejected was enough to give any service member chills. On any battlefield, in any war, the American code is the same -- no man is left behind.

Could Speicher have parachuted into Iraq? Could he have landed safely, sat in the barren desert and looked to the horizon, expecting rescuers to pick him up?

On July 5, 1994, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a planning order to commander, Special Operations Command, who in turn sent the order to the Joint Special Operations Command in Fort Bragg, N.C.

The order said that, when directed by the president and secretary of defense, JSOC should:

``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 fate of the pilot whose remains are unaccounted for.''

Special operations planners started mapping it out. Speicher's Hornet had pancaked onto the desert floor about 100 miles northeast of a Saudi border town named Ar ar. U.S. forces had operated out of Ar ar during the war, and it would be a convenient base from which to send in the covert team.

MH-60 helicopters could fly in from Ar ar with a team of experts to examine the wreckage. They'd have specialists from the Navy's mishap investigation base in China Lake, Calif., someone from the Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii and heavily armed escorts, just in case.

They rehearsed the mission. They went to Fort Bliss, Texas, and drilled it. They made mock-ups of the wreckage. They practiced getting to the site, what they'd do once they got there and how they'd get away.

They figured they could be to Speicher's wreckage in an hour, excavate it overnight and get back to Saudi Arabia by the next morning. If they were discovered and had to get out in a hurry, they could be back in 45 minutes.

The summer flew by. Connolly felt like time was wasting. The Iraqis could happen upon the site any day.

A second group in the Pentagon was suggesting a diplomatic route to the site. The U.S. government could go to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which works on MIA issues, and ask it to contact Baghdad.

The ICRC would tell Iraqi leaders about the crash site and ask for permission to take a team to visit it. The diplomatic proposal posed no risk of lives, and many political and military leaders were still shaken over a failed mission just a year earlier in Somalia. Two Black Hawk helicopters had been shot down and 18 special operations soldiers killed.

The ICRC path also offered the added benefit of showing the Iraqis that the United States was playing by the rules.

Military planners thought the diplomatic plan must be a ghost option, a backup for appearance' sake.

Connolly didn't like it. If the United States went in undercover, intelligence agents could be certain that the information gathered was untainted and then use what they found to investigate further.

He also didn't want to tell Iraq about the site. Even if they only gave Iraq the general vicinity at first, wouldn't Saddam Hussein try to find it?

And Connolly didn't like that so much time had passed. He tried to speed things along by warning those involved:

``If it were to become known that we had identified the potential remains of a service member who had died or potentially had 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.''

Harris and a couple of other investigators kept looking at the Qatari photos and the satellite images of the wreckage.

The F/A-18's canopy -- the see-through bubble that covers the cockpit -- seemed to be a couple of miles away. When a pilot ejects, small explosives ignite and blast off the canopy. It looked like that's what happened with Speicher's jet.

Those who had looked into Speicher's disappearance early on didn't have wreckage to examine, but they had determined that he did not eject. A big reason was that no one had heard his emergency locator transmitter, or ELT.

A downed pilot's ELT normally emits a ``Whoop, whoop, whoop'' signal that other pilots would hear.

Being a pilot, Harris knew that some aviators liked to have their ELTs disconnected when they flew over hostile territory. They thought the signals, sent over a UHF frequency, made it easy for everyone to find them, including the enemy.

Harris asked a couple of people from VFA-81, but they claimed the squadron had not disconnected its ELTs.

Maybe the ELT malfunctioned, he thought. He checked into that and learned that the beacons have several electronic backups that make them extremely reliable.

Finally, he tracked down VFA-81's maintenance officer. If the ELTs were disconnected, he would have to know about it.

Yes, the beacons were disconnected, he told Harris. Earlier, Harris had been lied to.

``Did you know they didn't go after Scott and look for him because they didn't know this and got no signal?'' Harris asked.

The maintenance officer was stunned. The higher-ups knew that the ELTs had been turned off. That message should have been relayed to those in charge of search and rescue.

The investigators, too, were shocked. They already had been told about the new Motorola survival radios that were too large to fit into the pilots' pockets. Those monitoring the airwaves during the war would have been listening for some communication from Speicher, but maybe he had no way to signal.

The reasons they didn't search when Speicher went down had been debunked. As painful as it was for his friends to ``what if?'' those early military decisions, what they knew now made an almost-perfect case for the covert mission.

Connolly left his office and walked through the Pentagon to the secretary of defense's conference room.

This briefing had been a long time coming. It was now Dec. 23, 1994, a year since Speicher's F/A-18 had been found in the Iraqi desert.

Gen. John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took a seat at the head of a long table. To his left sat his top planner. To the planner's left sat the deputy principal secretary of defense for international affairs.

Secretary of Defense William Perry was to the right of Shalikashvili. Perry's undersecretary of defense for policy was to his right, and next to him was Connolly.

Aides holding briefing packets, transparencies and flip charts stood against the walls.

None of the planners who worked out the details of the covert mission was there. Connolly thought that was odd. If the chairman or secretary had a pointed question, Pentagon protocol was that only someone directly involved in the planning could answer it.

As staffers projected the presentation, page by page, onto the wall, those around the table followed along in their handouts. Connolly's counterpart talked about the diplomatic approach.

One of Shalikashvili's staff laid out the military option. They had done a threat analysis of the covert mission, breaking it down into infiltration (getting to the crash site), actions on objective (working at the site) and exfiltration (getting back to the base).

It was no sure thing, Connolly knew. When he was an Army Ranger, a dozen people, including the battalion commander, died just during training. Military missions are inherently dangerous, but the odds for this one looked as promising as any.

Still, the longer the meeting went, the more Connolly felt support for the covert mission slipping. Finally, he addressed Perry and Shalikashvili:

``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. He sensed the group's hesitation to again expose special operations forces to danger, so soon after the disaster in Somalia.

``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.''

Thank you very much for the comments, Perry said, then turned to Shalikashvili. ``Mr. Chairman, what do you think?''

``Well, Mr. Secretary,'' Connolly remembers Shalikashvili saying, ``I don't want to be the one to write letters home to the parents telling them that their son or daughter died looking for old bones.''

Perry wanted to think about it. He directed the military to keep the covert plan viable. But Connolly knew Shalikashvili's feelings had derailed the military option.

Now, the Pentagon would have to tell Speicher's widow that they had found her husband's aircraft. Once they told the Red Cross, the story could become public, and they didn't want her to read about it in the papers.

That meant Albert Harris had one more piece of information for those at the Pentagon.

Adm. Arthur pulled Harris into his office. He told Harris he wouldn't have been on the investigating team if Arthur had known who he was.

Harris remembers that Arthur said he took full responsibility for what had happened to Speicher. Arthur had been in charge of naval operations in Desert Storm. He thought his staff had made serious mistakes.

Now, Arthur said, he was going to do everything he could to make it right. To get answers.

They did not yet know that what the Hornet wreckage revealed would only make them feel worse.

I have very mixed feelings about this article. I knew Michael Speicher. I was flying off the Saratoga with the same Airwing (CVW-17) during Desert Shield/Storm. 'Spike' was the only pilot shot down in the first night of the war out of over 1000 sorties, both Navy and AF. His wife had recently given birth to a child. His death was tragic enough even though it was in the line of duty.

I can not comment about behind the scenes meetings of covert ops to go in and recon the crash site that was found months later, but little facts in the article that do not jive make me suspicious that this story is, at the very least, being sensationalized for the purpose of selling newspapers or books.

Within the same day, CVW-17 lost an A-6 (Wetzel/Zaun), also down in western Iraq and included in stats for the first 1,000 sorties. Also, Spike was not a "death" during the war--he was listed MIA. He was not considered KIA/BNR until May 22, 1991. Meghan was 18 months; Michael, his namesake, 3 years old.

Nothing in the article was sensationalized. It was determined to be air wing policy to turn off the ELT, against the advice of SPEAR--the Navy's premier operational intelligence unit. The radios VFA-81 carried on the first strike were new; VFA-83 didn't carry that model radio on the same strike.

Spike's case is unique in the history of the U.S. military in that he is the first and only person to be officially listed as MIA from any war. The behind the scenes investigation into his whereabouts is one of most significant as well. There is much that the fog of war taught us from January 17, 1991, and it continues to unfold around this particular case.

Not at all. And the point is just the opposite of what you are thinking. In the end, it's about doing the right thing by Scott Speicher--and thereby any of our military who put their lives on the line. But we share an obligation as part of that commitment by our uniformed personnel to do everything possible to account for them, too. There are those now in power and with the ability to help Scott who will. That was not always the case. This "test of honor" or honor itself is something ingrained in all Academy midshipmen--and since I, too, wore my naval officer's uniform with pride, this is a matter of honor and patriotism for me as well.

As for Wetzel/Zaun:

Navy Lieutenants Robert Wetzel and Jeffrey Zaun launched from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS SARATOGA (CV-60) in the Red Sea on the night of 17 January 91. LT Wetzel was piloting an A-6E Intruder carrying 10 Rockeye bombs. LT Jeffrey Zaun was his Bombardier/Navigator (B/N). They were both assigned to Attack Squadron 35 (VA-35), the Black Panthers.

After receiving fuel from a USAF KC-135 tanker located over Saudi Arabia, they proceeded toward H-3 airfield located in southwest Iraq. H-3 airfield was heavily defended by several surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries and numerous anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) batteries. Their target at the airfield was a cluster of fuel storage tanks. The strike package consisted of four A-6E Intruders each flying separate low level routes to arrive at their individual targets at H-3 airfield within a minute of each other. Wetzel and Zaun were "Dash 2" of the flight of four Intruders.

As they approached the target airfield, both aircrew observed parachute flares being deployed by the Iraqis, turning the night sky into daylight. Additionally, the illumination from the tremendous amount of AAA and SAMs launches aided the Iraqis in visually targeting the incoming aircraft. After evading numerous AAA batteries and one SAM, the aircrew were targeted by an SA-6. LT Wetzel attempted to evade the missile but it detonated behind the aircraft’s right wing.

Due to the powerful explosion, the aircraft caught fire and quickly lost power to both engines. Both aircrew ejected from their stricken Intruder. Due to the low altitude and extremely high speed of the aircraft, LT Wetzel broke both his arms, his collar bone, and his back in the ejection. LT Zaun was also injured in the ejection. Both aircrew were captured shortly thereafter by the Iraqis, and transported to Baghdad where they were imprisoned for the rest of the war. They were both repatriated on 4 March 91.

Thank you for the reply. While I can't answer that question, I will say this--and I'd like for everyone to remember that it's the premise-turned-doctrine of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, and in Scott Speicher's case, the duty of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:

"The most basic principle of personal honor in America's armed forces is never willingly to leave a fellow serviceman behind. The black granite wall on the Mall in Washington is filled with the names of those who died in the effort to save their comrades in arms. That bond of loyalty and obligation which spurred so many soldiers to sacrifice themselves is mirrored by the obligation owed to every soldier by our nation, in whose name those sacrifices were made.

"Amidst the uncertainties of war, every soldier is entitled to one certainty--that he will not be forgotten. As former POW Eugene "Red" McDaniel (a U.S. Navy pilot, by the way) put it, as an American asked to serve: 'I was prepared to fight, to be wounded, to be captured, and even prepared to die, but I was not prepared to be abandoned.'"

The Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs was created to ensure that our nation meets its obligation to the missing, now including sizeable help from mandates passed to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, whose members are working on Scott Speicher's behalf. And we need to pay close attention to what goes on in Iraq and better understand the evil that resides there...

This is only factual tidbitting and does not add to the discussion, but if you are going to write that both aircraft were shot down the same night, you better check your sources. Spike was downed the night before, the 16th, and I can produce the initial launch plan from the Saratoga's V-2 that includes his aircraft (its a small keepsake). Maybe I misunderstood you at some point in this discussion, you seem to have done a lot of research and talked, at least to some of, the right folks. but Spikes plane was the only plane lost on 16 Jan 91 (Red Sea Time Zone).

Curious, what class were you, what did you fly, and when did you get out?

I appreciate your e-mail back. I was University of Virginia and intelligence. Not to belabor the point, but you should have the facts on Spike's flight. From the official incident report on Speicher's accident, his flight began at 1:35:39:5 on 17 January (ZULU). Weight off wheels was 1:36:18:44. The mishap was roughly two and a half hours into the flight. The Wetzel/Zaun incident occurred later that day, 17 January, at 2000Z, which would have felt like the next night to those of you on the first strikes, some of which went weight off wheels near midnight on 16 January.

For several years--and to this day--I am a frequent visitor to the U.S. Naval Academy.

I'm rather new to this forum and wasn't sure of the impact, but, yes, I am the author of the pieces you're reading in the Virginian-Pilot as well as the book. I've spent 7 years of my life, the last of which has been the most intense, researching what has happened to Scott Speicher. I've stuck with his case this long, using all the skills I've learned as a researcher, investigative journalist and author of several military aviation books: Wings of Valor, Wings of Gold, , "Memories and Memorials," in U.S. Naval Aviation and others to dog his case. I had the background and personal history to do the right thing by Scott and have. It's not so much about getting it on paper as getting him back. You'll understand that as this story breaks out--and it is. It's very much the unimaginable story--true in every respect and fraught with painful twists of fate. I've been involved so heavily in how it turns out because I care very much that we do the right thing for him. I'm also anguished by the "what ifs" referred to in today's article. There are several not included in today's piece (too complex to explain in such an abbreviated forum). Also, I am not normally featured in the newspaper--I'm an author, not a newspaper columnist. I only make feature guest appearances as they would say in the newspaper world. So, I'm grateful that the Virginian-Pilot, with the nation's highest per capita military population, is reading these pieces. But they are only a bit--a small taste, really--of what's really going on with Scott's case. The rest will come soon.

Thank you. Over the years, I also developed a tremendous focus on what was truly important in life, not that I didn't know it already, but the circumstances surrounding Scott Speicher's case make you realize all the more what's precious. I also sensed he needed an advocate and someone who could turn what they knew into something that could get people to take notice. He never had this much exposure until now. I should say, too, that I'm a very modest person. I didn't write what I did for me but for him. While other folks may have a different reason, that's mine. It's a matter of honor and of commitment.

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