Gulf War pilot no longer presumed dead

Iraq informed

The State Department on Wednesday notified the Iraqi government of its intention to change Speicher's status.

Officials told CNN the State Department "demarched" Iraqi diplomats at the Iraqi Interest section in the Algerian embassy in Washington.

"The State Department passed a message to the Iraqis... informing them of this news," said one senior State Department official.

This official pointed out that this message was not written down in a "diplomatic note" but was delivered verbally in a "diplomatic communication."

Pilot may have survived crash

Meanwhile, one administration source said it's possible Speicher could be alive to this day. But Defense Department sources close to the case suggested that was unlikely.

The sources, however, said they could not rule out the possibility Speicher survived after his F/A-18 was shot down over Iraq on the opening night of the war.

Speicher was on his way to drop bombs on downtown Baghdad on Jan. 17, 1991, when the fighter jet he was piloting went down over the Iraqi desert. It is still unclear whether a surface-to-air missile or an Iraqi MiG downed Speicher's plane.

He is officially listed as "the only air-to-air combat loss" of the war, since it is believed that he was in a dogfight with an Iraqi fighter jet when his plane went down.

Defense officials familiar with the episode told CNN that Speicher's "wing man" reported seeing his plane explode in flight and a second explosion upon impact with the ground. No distress signals were ever received, Navy officials said.

Had Speicher ejected from the plane before impact, a distress beacon mounted in the ejection seat should have been automatically activated. But signals from the beacon were never received. Nor was any call for help detected from the personal two-way radio that pilots carry for emergency use, officials said.

Shortly after the plane went down, search-and-rescue teams scanned the desert looking for wreckage from the F/A-18 Hornet, but did not find any evidence of Speicher, officials said.

Speicher had flown from the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga in the Persian Gulf that night.

Wreckage found

In 1994, three years after the end of the Gulf War, hunters in the Iraqi desert stumbled across the wreckage of Speicher's plane and informed U.S. officials of their discovery.

U.S. military and civilian officials at the highest levels wrestled with the options, including whether to send a special operations unit under the cover of night to the site to recover what it could from the wreckage to determine what happened. Special forces units trained for the proposed mission before America's highest ranking soldier put a stop to it.

Gen. John Shalikashvili, the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, decided that he would not put U.S. soldiers at risk "for old bones." He decided instead to pursue diplomatic efforts with Iraq to excavate the site and solve the mystery, officials said.

It would be two years before the Iraqi bureaucratic machinery would allow a Red Cross team, including Americans, to inspect the site. By then, the official said, the site had been picked over and there was not a great deal to be learned from the inspection.

No human remains were recovered.

"The plane was upside-down" and "relatively intact," said the official, indicating to the investigators that the plane had gone into a "flat spin" before the impact. The plane's Plexiglas canopy, however, was found some distance from the fuselage, an indication that Speicher had been able to eject.

But no ejection seat was found in the area, even though the hunters said they had seen one two years earlier. The area is sparsely populated by nomadic Bedouin Arabs who may have collected pieces of the plane.

The team was able to retrieve the plane's flight data recorder from area Bedouins, as well as "a tattered flight suit" that appeared to belong to Speicher. The data recorder offered no useful clues, nor did the flight suit, officials said. Likewise, the Bedouins were not of any substantial help.

In June, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence ordered military and intelligence officials to investigate the fate of Speicher.

There are more than 2,000 U.S. military personnel listed as missing in action from the Vietnam War, more than 8,000 from the Korean War and more than 75,000 Americans listed as missing in action from World War II.