Tailhook Investigator Was Suspended for Misconduct

A Navy investigator who was disciplined and removed from the Tailhook sexual assault case after one of the principal victims complained he had pressured her for dates had been suspended a year earlier for “abuse of authority” while serving at Parris Island, S.C., sources said.

The Naval Investigative Service agent, Laney S. Spigener, had been involved in a personal relationship with the wife of an enlisted Marine at the time, sources said. When another woman complained about it to other NIS officials on the base, Spigener asked her to leave a class she was attending and improperly “confronted her” in his office about her complaint, a source with knowledge of the incident said.

Spigener was suspended for seven days without pay and transferred to the local NIS office at the Washington Navy Yard, sources said.

In the fall of 1991, one year after the Parris Island incident, Spigener was assigned to investigate the complaint of Lt. Paula Coughlin, one of 26 women assaulted at the Tailhook convention of naval aviators in Las Vegas last September.

He was removed from the case after Coughlin complained that he had pressured her to date him, the Washington Post reported Thursday.

Sources said Friday that Robert J. Powers, the agency’s chief criminal investigator, overruled three recommendations by NIS officials that Spigener be fired for the misconduct toward Coughlin, opting instead to “discipline” him in an unspecified manner. Spigener, 35, was on leave Friday and unavailable for comment.

Powers’ decision to overrule the recommendations--by the regional NIS director, the head of the career services department and a “performance review board”--is now the focus of an investigation by the Pentagon inspector general’s office.

The Pentagon investigators are looking into whether Spigener received favored treatment because of Powers’ working relationship with Spigener’s father, who was one of 10 regional NIS directors. Spigener’s father retired in 1986.

Powers has told the inspector general’s office that although he knew Spigener’s father, he had no special ties to him and did not show any favoritism to his son, according to a source.

The NIS already has been the focus of scrutiny, and some criticism, for its failure to identify more than a handful of suspects in the Tailhook case. Critics say the mostly civilian agency has botched several important investigations, including the probe of the 1989 explosion aboard the battleship Iowa, and they accuse the NIS of pursuing the Tailhook case with insufficient vigor--a charge the agency denies.

Coughlin told NIS officials that Spigener had asked her out to dinner, proposed a drive in the country, called her at home in the evening and once referred to her as “Sweet Cakes.”

Spigener denied making improper advances, but he acknowledged the dinner invitation and was punished for “poor judgment,” sources said.

A source who is sympathetic to Spigener said Friday that Powers decided not to fire the agent because he had done “nothing of an untoward sexual nature.” The source said, moreover, that although Spigener acknowledged asking Coughlin out to dinner, Powers was not persuaded that his intentions were anything other than friendly.

“They all admit there was a lot of banter going back and forth,” the source said. “They’d been pushed together for three weeks. . . . His position was: ‘I’m trying to be a nice guy.’ ”