Missing Gulf war pilot may be alive

12:00 PM By ROBERT BURNS

President Bill Clinton said the United States has new information about a Navy fighter pilot shot down over Iraq during the 1991 Persian Gulf War that indicates he survived the crash "and that he might be alive."

Clinton commented Friday (NZDT) in a CBS Radio interview in which he was asked about the Navy's announcement that it has changed the status of Lt. Cmdr. Michael Speicher from killed in action to missing. Speicher was shot down in an F–18 fighter from the carrier USS Saratoga on the opening night of the war.

Clinton said the information about Speicher's case "makes us believe that at least he survived his crash ... and that he might be alive." He said U.S. officials have begun trying to determine whether Speicher is alive, and "if he is, where he is and how we can get him out."

"Since he was a uniform service person, he's clearly entitled to be released, and we're going to do everything we can to get him out," Clinton said. The president cautioned, however, that he did not want the change in Speicher's status to "raise false hopes."

Clinton's comments went far beyond the Navy's statement, which was brief and did not mention the possibility that Speicher could be alive. One day after it notified Speicher's family of the decision to change his status to MIA, the Navy said Friday that "additional information and analysis" led Navy Secretary Richard Danzig to reverse earlier determinations that Speicher had died.

The Navy did not explain what new information it had obtained. As recently as 1996 it had reaffirmed a 1991 "finding of death."

Pentagon officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said Danzig acted because of substantial evidence that Speicher may not have died in the crash.

Iraq has never accounted for him.

One official said the State Department sent a new diplomatic note to Baghdad demanding that the Iraqi government tell all it knows about Speicher's fate.

"We don't have a response from Baghdad," Philip Reeker, a State Department spokesman, said Thursday.

He said similar U.S. notes would be sent Iraqi representatives at the United Nations in New York and in Geneva.

"We do believe that the Iraqis hold additional information that could help resolve the case of Commander Speicher, and they are obligated to provide that information to us," Reeker said.

Speicher, of Jacksonville, Florida, went missing when his Navy F–18 Hornet was shot down on Jan. 16, 1991, in an air–to–air battle with an Iraqi fighter. He was the first American lost in the war and the last still unaccounted for.

Upon announcing the loss of Speicher that night, Dick Cheney, defense secretary at the time, told a news conference he was dead. A short time later the Pentagon changed his status to missing in action.

On May 22, 1991, the Navy approved the official "finding of death." That action changed his official status from missing to killed in action.

In May 1994 – more than three years after Speicher went missing – Pentagon officials indicated in a secret memorandum that a U.S. spy satellite had photographed a "manmade symbol" at the crash site earlier that year. Some military officers said they interpreted the symbol as a sign that the Navy pilot might have survived the crash.

A plan was devised in 1994 to conduct a covert operation into Iraq to search the crash site for clues to Speicher's fate, but it was scrapped in December 1994 by Army Gen. John Shalikashvili, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The general ruled the risk of casualties was too high to justify the secret mission.

In 1995, U.S. crash site specialists from the Defense Department, working with the International Committee of the Red Cross, entered Iraq with President Saddam Hussein's permission. When they got to the crash site they found it had been excavated.