Michael Scott Speicher's bones lay 18 inches deep in Iraqi sand, more or less right where a group of Iraqis had led an American search team in 1995. The search for Speicher was frustrated by two wars, mysteriously switched remains, Iraqi duplicity and a final tip from a young nomad in Anbar province.
U.S. officials often were blinded by the same myopia that tainted prewar intelligence - the American conviction that Hussein's government lied about everything. As it turned out, the Iraqis lied, but sometimes they told the truth.
For more than a decade, speculation swirled that the 33-year-old Speicher, a lieutenant commander when he went missing, had been captured alive. That was disproved by the team that found and confirmed his remains. "He wasn't captured or tortured," said Thomas Brown, chief of the Intelligence Community POW/MIA analytic cell at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Brown, who worked on Speicher's case for 15 years, described to The Associated Press in an exclusive interview how the threads leading to the pilot got so tangled."
