Courts-Martial Common in Cases Similar to Pilot’s

WASHINGTON — Is 1st Lt. Kelly Flinn, a once-rising star of the new Air Force and the first woman to pilot a B-52 bomber, facing a harsh and unjust punishment for falling in love with the wrong man?

Politicians are rushing to her defense and the public appears to be taking her side. Yet an examination of her case suggests that her claims of unfair treatment are still far from proved.

Indeed, experts in military law say that the Air Force decision to court-martial her is consistent with its treatment of other officers who first broke rules regarding sexual conduct, then lied about their behavior or disobeyed a commander’s orders.

“This is not an unusual case. I have been involved in 24 cases in the last few years of senior Air Force officers who were court-martialed for adultery and fraternization and lying about it. But you haven’t heard about them because those cases weren’t considered newsworthy,” said Duke University law professor Scott Silliman, who retired recently as a senior lawyer in the Air Force command.

A step-by-step analysis of Flinn’s case shows that she ignored repeated warnings from at least three Air Force officials to stop her affair with the husband of an enlisted female airman, effectively eliminating her opportunities to end the matter without damage to her career.

Most significantly, as she has acknowledged, she lied to her superiors about the romance and disobeyed their orders to stop it.

“It’s the willfulness that makes this case serious in the military’s eyes,” said Charles W. Gittins, a military justice lawyer in Alexandria, Va. “It’s only rarely that [commanders] see an officer who willingly and knowingly violates the rules. But when they do, they deal with it sternly.”

At the same time, the experts and some military officials acknowledged that there is blame to go around in this drama of heartbreak and periled ambition.

Since Flinn began her love affair at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota last summer, Air Force officials have missed repeated opportunities that could have brought the 26-year-old Air Force Academy graduate in line without the drastic step of a career-ending court-martial, which also may inflict long-lasting damage on the service’s reputation.

The Flinn case has spotlighted another failure by the military: to explain to an outside civilian world why it needs to prohibit adultery and intimacy between the ranks and to enforce its rules by examining private lives and to demand truthful answers about intimate conduct.

To the uniformed services, such rules are necessary to keep discipline and harmony, to ensure that all troops will obey orders under combat conditions. In this case, Air Force officials said, Flinn’s offense was not simply one of adultery but of carrying on an affair with the spouse of an enlisted woman on base. This kind of affair, far from being a strictly private matter, can disrupt an entire organization, they said.

To many civilians in a peaceful age, such rules on conduct are offensive anachronisms--as perhaps suggested by a new poll released Wednesday by Maricopa Research Inc. It showed that 65% of Americans believe Flinn should get an honorable discharge.

The clash of cultures has been apparent since the court-martial charges came to light in February. Many civilians have seen the case foremost as the Air Force trying to drum out an exemplary performer whose romantic violations would not bring a traffic ticket elsewhere.

But for the military, it has been about lying and disobeying orders. According to the allegations, Flinn signed a sworn statement last November saying that she had not had sexual relations with Marc Zigo, the married soccer coach at Minot Air Force Base. A month later, as she acknowledged, she disobeyed a direct order from her squadron commander, Lt. Col. Theodore LaPlante, forbidding her to have any contact with Zigo, even through an intermediary.

The military justice system allows wide latitude to commanding officers to deal with infractions in the ranks and in the vast majority of cases adultery and fraternization are handled with far milder means than court-martial. Sixty men and seven women were court-martialed by the Air Force for adultery last year, but hundreds were disciplined privately by commanders using such means as letters of reprimand, fines or temporary loss of liberty--or a simple chewing-out.

But far more serious are the cases of service members who break the rules and then lie about it or otherwise try to conceal what they have done.

And officers who break the rules and then try to cover up are treated far more seriously than enlisted ranks “because they are believed to have a far, far greater responsibility,” said Gittins.

One example is the case of Capt. Jerry Coles, of Keesler Air Force Base in Louisiana. Coles, like Flinn, was alleged to have violated an order to stay away from a woman with whom he was having an adulterous affair. But Coles--unlike Flinn--was incarcerated while he awaited court-martial and ended up serving five months imprisonment. He was dismissed from the Air Force, which is the officer’s equivalent of a dishonorable discharge.

In another case, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, the commander of a U.S. squadron in Turkey, was court-martialed for an affair with an enlisted woman. Because his superiors believed that he had not been fully cooperative in their investigation, he was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment in the Fort Leavenworth, Kan., military prison.

“If [suspects are] upfront, the military doesn’t take such a hard line,” said Mary McCormick, a former Navy judge advocate in Kansas City, Mo., who was consulted by the officer. “But as officers, if they lie, if they don’t come clean, they will be treated harshly.”

In the Air Force’s view, Flinn falls into just that category.

Military officials said that they rarely snoop out improper sexual relationships, unless they hear complaints from spouses or other sources that would suggest the relationship might become visible and disruptive.

In Flinn’s case, the authorities got warnings from two such sources.

Gayla Zigo, who had recently been recruited into the Air Force enlisted ranks and was married to Marc Zigo, complained to her first sergeant last summer when she believed that Flinn and her husband were beginning a romance.

In a just-released letter to Air Force Secretary Sheila E. Widnall, Gayla Zigo contended that Lt. Flinn was having sex with her husband “less than a week after we arrived on the base.” She said that, when she found letters between the two, she asked the sergeant to talk to Flinn.

She said that she believed Flinn’s promises to end her relationship with Zigo, although “later I found out I was wrong.”

About the same time, authorities at the 23rd Bomb Squadron heard wide-ranging accusations of sexual misconduct at the base from one of Zigo’s friends, Lt. Brian Mudery. Facing accusations of sexual misconduct and assault, Mudery offered investigators tips about a variety of supposed illicit liaisons at the base, none of which checked out--except the rumors about Flinn and Zigo.

When investigators questioned Flinn, she told them that her relationship with the soccer coach was platonic--a statement that she made under oath and in writing in November. But within a month, LaPlante, her commander, learned that Flinn was seeing Zigo again and issued a written order directing her to stay at least 100 yards away from him at all times.

LaPlante’s first encounter with Flinn on the subject was in a chilly meeting in which he issued the order and a clear threat to take action if she did not comply, Air Force officials said.

Some experts believe that at this point, LaPlante could have shown more flexibility--offering counseling, for example or another less confrontational approach that might have worked better with a woman they saw as clearly swept up in romance. Instead, one week later, an Air Force lawyer warned her again to break off the affair.

Flinn paid no heed to the warning because, she told CBS’s “60 Minutes,” salvaging her relationship with Zigo was her first priority. At Christmas, she took Zigo home to meet her parents in Atlanta.

In January, the Air Force began an Article 32 proceeding, the military’s equivalent of a grand jury inquiry. By February, the panel had returned five charges that could put Flinn in jail for more than nine years. The charges were reviewed by Col. Robert J. Elder, commander of the 5th Bomber Wing, and his superior, Lt. Gen. Philip Ford, commander of the 8th Air Force, who ordered the charges to trial.

At this point, the Air Force realized that it faced a giant dilemma. Flinn had hired a lawyer and began a highly effective public relations offensive. She succeeded in framing the case as one of a hide bound military establishment willing to destroy her career and throw her in jail because, as she put it, “I fell in love with the wrong man.”

Key members of Congress quickly took up her complaints. Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), a former Air Force judge, assailed the military for “gender schizophrenia.” This week, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) complained that the services were “not in touch with reality.”

But for the Pentagon, back-tracking would carry a price, too. Going easy on a high-profile female pilot could suggest favoritism based on Flinn’s gender, violating Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen’s declaration that the military cannot engage in “any selective enforcement.”

Now, and perhaps appropriately, Flinn’s fate rests with Widnall, the first woman to serve as Air Force secretary.