With Iraq's O.K., a U.S. Team Seeks War Pilot's Body

A Pentagon team is on a secret mission to Iraq, searching the desert for the remains of the first American pilot downed in the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

The mission, undertaken with the approval of President Saddam Hussein, represents a small but potentially significant step in Iraq's attempts to end its deep isolation. Since the end of the gulf war, Iraq has been an international pariah, subjected to strict economic sanctions.

Though the mission is under the leadership of the International Committee of the Red Cross, it represents the first official visit of American military officers to Iraq since the war's end. American military and diplomatic officials acknowledged that the Iraqi Government had made a humanitarian gesture by allowing 11 American military officers to join 4 Red Cross officials on the search.

The search began this week in a remote section of western Iraq, where a Navy FA-18 fighter-bomber crashed on the first night of the gulf war nearly five years ago. The pilot, Lieut. Comdr. Michael Scott Speicher, 33, was the first American combat casualty of the war. He left a wife and two infant children.

Commander Speicher took off from the aircraft carrier Saratoga in the Red Sea on the night of Jan. 16, 1991, flying northeast toward Baghdad. Shortly after he entered Iraqi airspace, his plane disintegrated in midair. Navy intelligence officers were never sure why. They later concluded that he either had a freak midair collision with an Iraqi MIG-25 or that the enemy plane shot him out of the sky.

He crashed in a wasteland, far from civilization. Though Commander Speicher's status was changed from missing in action to killed in action in 1991, he remains the only American pilot downed in the war whose body has not been recovered.