Author and former intelligence officer Amy Waters Yarsinske breaks the incredible true story of the first American pilot shot down during the Gulf War - discovered alive 11 years after his own government left him for dead.On January 16, 1991, Lt. Comdr. Michael Scott Speicher launches from the USS Saratoga, one of 40 F/A-18 Hornets of which only 39 would return. Moments after an assault by an Iraqi MiG-25, Speicher's plane vanished in a fireball over the Baghdad desert. The next day, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell declared Speicher killed in action - the first casualty of the Gulf War.
Two months later, a Kuwaiti secret police colonel claimed he was in the same hospital as a captured American pilot. Over the years, evidence of Speicher's survival continued to emerge, and on January 10, 2001, Speicher was declared missing in action - the first time in history that a U.S. serviceman's status has been changed.
Tracking this explosive story for the past eight years, Yarsinske has interviewed top government and military officials, diplomats, pilots, informers, and Iraqi defectors. The result is a stunning true account of government denials and cover-ups that obscured an essential fact: Speicher actually survived. No One Left Behind takes us beyond the lies to unearth the truth of the pilot left behind.