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.

Here's Part 4 -

-----

The convoy rolled out of Baghdad the morning of Dec. 10, 1995, and headed toward the crash site.

Nine months had passed since Iraq agreed to allow a visit to the wreckage of Scott Speicher's F/A-18, though Baghdad had postponed it three times. A year had gone by since Timothy Connolly urged his superiors at the Pentagon to secretly dispatch a team to the desert.

Two years had passed since Qataris found Speicher's jet.

Only the night before in Baghdad, the International Committee of the Red Cross had given the Iraqis the latitude and longitude of the crash site. But as the team neared the wreckage, Bedouins stood along the sandy path and waved their arms, directing the vehicles to the site.

The United States had sent investigators from the Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, including an anthropologist to help examine human remains. Experts from the Navy's crash investigation unit in China Lake, Calif., also went to the site, along with a medic, an explosive-disposal expert and three linguists.

The ICRC sent four people. The Iraqis sent two people and ordered soldiers to encircle the perimeter of the camp for protection.

The group had left the fertile flatlands and lakes surrounding Baghdad and, just three hours later, stood on a moonlike surface. They were 1,000 feet above sea level, in the desert. As far as they looked, all they could see was sand and a few scattered clumps of grass, shrubs and vines.

Just to the north, trails radiated out from Bedouin camps.

Speicher's Hornet was right-side up. Big chunks of it, easily recognized parts like its engines, lay in a circle no more than 60 feet wide.

Without moving one shovel of sand, military experts knew what that meant. The jet had lost power, gone into a flat spin and dropped almost straight to the desert floor.

Speicher's jet had not, as first thought, been blown to bits in the sky.

Investigators quickly noticed one other thing: The cockpit was missing.

Obviously, others had gotten to the crash site before the Americans.

Investigators started at the nose of the F/A-18 and roped off an area to excavate. It looked to them like the wreckage had been searched by people who knew what they were doing.

A pile of backfill, a mound of sand dug from somewhere else, had been heaped near where the cockpit should have been. Popped rivets lay on the ground nearby. The backfill, the experts thought, was less than a month old.

Components from the Hornet's computer had been removed, too.

As the work near the jet continued, other members of the team formed skirmish lines, spreading out and walking slowly to look for other evidence.

Two thousand feet to the north, they spotted something man-made, a tall arch sitting upright on a sandy knoll. They got closer and saw that it was the frame of the canopy, the transparent shield that covers the cockpit. It looked like Bedouins had stood it on end as a landmark.

To the south, they found one of the HARM missiles Speicher was to drop on the first night of the Gulf War.

A couple of days later, Navy flight mishap investigator Bruce Trenholm got a call on his radio. The other team members had found something a couple of miles away and wanted him to look at it.

He drove north and found the group standing in a circle. One of the Iraqis said a Bedouin boy had found a jumpsuit while herding his sheep.

They told Trenholm it was Speicher's flight suit. Trenholm could see that it was a U.S. NOMEX suit, standard aviator coveralls resistant to fires up to several hundred degrees. He also could see that it had faded from its usual olive color to a more greenish yellow.

He'd have to investigate to make sure it was Speicher's.

Near the flight suit, they found a cluster of pilot survival items: pieces of straps from a parachute, an inflatable raft, a 20 mm shell and pieces of an anti-G suit that a pilot wears to lessen aerodynamic forces.

They found a signaling flare. Someone had tried to light both ends, one for daytime and one for night. The pyrotechnics were still inside the night end, which meant maybe it hadn't worked.

On the team's fourth day in the desert, Trenholm spotted a small item sitting on a rock. Part of it had been sheared off when the jet hit the ground, but he knew what it was: the data storage unit of a Hornet.

If the information could be recovered from it, the DSU could unveil a minute-by-minute mechanical account of Speicher's last flight.

On their last day in the desert, the team anthropologist and others excavated a rectangular rock pile near the canopy. They thought it might be a makeshift grave.

They dug down several feet but found no remains.

The next day, Dec. 15, the team pulled out. Some of the most valuable evidence would turn up in the weeks to come, as the DSU and the flight suit were analyzed.

But during those five days, team members got a look at what Speicher would have seen if he'd landed safely. Miles of sand in any direction, far from anybody who could help him.

One other thought picked at Trenholm's brain. It was cold. Freezing.

This was December. Speicher was shot down in January.

If it was cold now, in a tent, with plenty of layers and thick sleeping bags, Trenholm knew it would have been bone-cold for Speicher.

A battered flight suit was recovered in the Iraqi desert, and the size of the Velcro left on the suit matched the patch, shown here, worn by members of Scott Speicher's squadron . Photo by Steve Earley / The Virginian-Pilot.

A few weeks later, Tony Albano got a message during a training flight that Trenholm was trying to track him down.

Albano, Speicher's roommate on the carrier Saratoga during the war, by that time was with a squadron in Meridian, Miss. Albano and Mark Fox, another squadronmate from VFA-81, agreed to meet Trenholm at Florida's Cecil Field.

In Jacksonville, Trenholm explained that he had been on the International Red Cross mission to the Iraqi desert, they had found a flight suit and he wanted Albano to look at it and see if he thought it was Speicher's.

He told them about the Bedouin boy who said he found the suit and that most of the Red Cross team members figured the Iraqis had planted it.

He told them that the legs were slit in the back, like an emergency worker or doctor would cut a suit off someone who was face down. He told them he'd estimated Speicher's height at 5 feet 11 inches, his weight at 168 pounds and his flight suit size at 38 long. The suit was a 38 long.

Then Trenholm reached into a paper bag and pulled it out.

The last time Albano had seen that suit, Speicher was wearing it, and they were slapping hands, wishing each other luck on their first wartime missions.

Now, here it was, found lying in the sand, coming out of a bag.

Albano saw that the suit was a little tattered, pockets were missing and the patches were gone. He knew that pilots remove those patches to ``sanitize'' their flight suits before flying into enemy territory.

He looked at Trenholm.

``I'm positive that's his flight suit,'' Albano 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 sleeve matched Fox's ``Sunliners-Anytime-Anyplace'' patch. An oval of Velcro on the left sleeve lined up perfectly with a patch that read, ``F/A-18 Hornet 1000 Hours.''

Trenholm then told Speicher's squadronmates about the condition of the jet, and the canopy and the parachute straps and the life support gear.

Five years after that awful night, there seemed to be even fewer answers. And the same old question.

``Oh God,'' Albano thought. ``Well, what happened to him?''

Soon after the team returned to the United States, a top official at the Defense Department's POW/MIA office met with Sen. Robert Smith to tell him what the group had found.

Smith, a New Hampshire Republican, was on the Senate Armed Services Committee and had tracked the Speicher case since the Qataris found the wreckage in 1993. Smith's own father was a naval aviator who was killed near the end of World War II, two days before Smith's fourth birthday.

On Jan. 17, during his briefing with the POW/MIA official, Smith heard grave news: The Red Cross team had found nothing to suggest Speicher could have survived.

A few weeks later, the aircraft investigators, life support experts, aviation engineers and anthropologists filed their reports. Their findings colored in a fairly thorough picture of what had happened to Speicher during his final mission.

That picture differed sharply from what Smith had been told.

On Feb. 15, an aircraft mishap investigator at the Navy's Safety Center in Norfolk reported a time line of Speicher's last flight. The information had come from the damaged memory unit the team recovered.

Speicher lifted the Hornet off the deck of the Saratoga at 1:36 a.m.

At 1:43 a.m., his jet recorded a code indicating a HARM launch computer failure. One, two or all three of his missiles might have been inoperative.

Two hours later, nearing the target, the jet's computer recorded another code: Speicher's ALR-67 radar warning receiver. The device would have detected threats from air or land. It might have had a minor problem or a complete failure. Speicher could have looked at another gauge to see how well the device was working.

At 3:49, Speicher turned off the jet's autopilot.

Seventeen seconds later, something slammed into his Hornet so hard that it lost power.

Engineers reported that the rocket motors that blast the canopy from the aircraft had burned even marks on its frame. That signaled a good ejection. They determined that the charred paint on the inside of the canopy, and the way the outside had melted, meant that Speicher had been engulfed for about three seconds in a 600- to 700-degree fire.

Speicher would have had second-degree burns on exposed skin, such as the back of his neck. But because of survival vests, the NOMEX suit and his anti-G suit, it would take a fire hotter than 700 degrees and longer than 10 seconds to cause fatal burns.

One of the 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 this pilot is getting rid of his canopy is by ejecting.''

Trenholm's report picked up with the ejection.

He determined that the canopy's distance from the wreckage meant that when Speicher pulled the ejection handle, it separated as it should have.

Team members sift the sand beneath the aircraft, hoping to find Speicher's remains. They're wearing face masks as shields against boron fibers in the wreckage Department of Defense file photo.

The flight suit, signal flare, life raft items and anti-G suit materials were all in pretty good shape. If the ejection had failed, Trenholm knew, those things probably would have burned until they were unrecognizable.

Up to that point, 58 air crew had ejected from F/A-18s. Six had been injured fatally, and a majority were injured either from the jolt when the parachute opened or from landing.

But most pilots who ejected lived.

Trenholm found out that China Lake, years earlier, had issued a warning about the GQ 1000 Aeronautical Parachute that Speicher was using. Those parachutes sometimes allowed pilots to fall too fast, causing landing injuries.

His report concluded that Speicher probably had been injured either when the parachute opened or during his landing. Speicher's flight suit had some stains, maybe blood, but not enough to suggest that he had serious injuries.

Smith had been told the team found no evidence that Speicher survived.

But no one had turned up any evidence he had died, either.

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