Lt. Commander Micheal Scott "Spike" Speicher from VFA-81 was shot down in his F/A-18 over Iraq on Jan. 17, 1991. It is not known exactly what happened to Speicher on that night, the first time anyone knew he was missing was after the planes had returned to friendly air space, Spike could not be found. During the mission one pilot saw a fireball in the air. At the time it did not seem important enough to report, but later he decided that this may have been Scott Speicher. By retracing his flight he determined where he thought this may have been. Later at the first briefing to inform America of the activities of the first night of Desert Storm, Dick Cheney said there was but one plane lost. When asked if the pilot was dead or wounded he paused and then said "A......(hesitation).....a death. There was no proof of this death at all, in fact the majority of the pilots assumed he had ejected and was in Iraq. This statement meant doom to them, they knew that the Search and Rescue people would not search for a dead man. They also knew that if he was in fact alive, Iraq would know that the U.S. thought he was dead. This gave them the chance to have a permant trophy, a downed American pilot. Through all of this there was still hope. A squadron mate was sent to Iraq for the prisoner exchange to see if Speicher was among them. A Kuwaiti prisoner reported being in the hospital with a man that was not released. The U.S. said investigating this was not necessary. Soon, Iraq sent the remains of a man they called "Mickel" to the U.S. The remains were tested and did not belong to Speicher. As soon as this was discovered the Navy said that there was no evidence that Speicher survived his crash. There was a memorial service for him on May 22, 1991, the same day he was declared Killed In Action/ Body Not Recovered. (KIA/BNR) Later he was given a marker in Arlington National, but his remains are not there. In the years since the end of the war the official story has come unravelled. From the man that saw the fire ball saying there was no way it was a SAM, but it had to have been a Mig, to the discovery of the crash site. At this time, with no official announcement the official story became that he was shot down by a Mig-25. This is also when the U.S. decided that they needed to investigate this crash site more closely, to see if they could return his remains to his family. As they prepared to send a team to search the crash site it was learned that the ELT, a device that sends a UHF signal out for rescuers to home in on, was disabled. This added with the fact that his survival radio was new, and too large for his pocket; and that the canopy was found over two miles from the crash site made it clear that there was at least a glimmer of hope that Spike had ejected over Iraq. Of course this means that thanks to the severe and misguided policies of the Army search and rescue commander, an American serviceman may have been left behind. Over one year after the crash site was found the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided not to send in a special operations unit to investigate, but to exploe the diplomatic options. Once again, this was writing off the possibility the the pilot was still alive.
Some two years after the crash site was found, the U.S. finally worked through diplomatic channels to search the site. Once there two things were immdiatly obvious. First the plane had not erupted in a fireball at all. It had gone into a flat spin and crashed. Second the cockpit was gone, meaning that someone had beaten them to the site. Around the site several itwems were found, from survival gear to the flight suit that Speicher had worn on that mission. Soon after the mission it was reported that there was nothing to suggest that he had lived. This proves to be an outright lie, in truth, there is nothing to suggest that he did not live through the crash of the F/A-18.
In 1999 a man defected from Iraq. Once in America he had a powerful story to tell. He claimed to have driven a man from near this crash site to Baghdad. When shown a photo line up he quicly picked out Scott Speicher. He passed several lie detector tests, was offered money to say it was someone else, but the story never changed. He claimed that Scott Speicher was an Iraqi POW. It must also be noted that Iraq held an Iranian POW from 1980 until 1998, so this would not be new ground for them.
Finally, after being confronted with all of the evidence, Speicher was switched from KIA to MIA in Jan of 2001, ten years after being shot down. This was a first for the United States. Never before has a person been removed from the KIA and put on the MIA list.
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