Since Friday, when news broke about David Petraeus’s decision to resign after 14 months as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, details have been spilling out about the events that led up to his ouster. The story seems to get stranger and more convoluted by the day.
The latest news, which came out last night: The top commander in Afghanistan, Marine Gen. John Allen, who has been nominated to be the new NATO supreme allied commander for Europe, had accumulated a staggering 20,000-30,000 pages of documents, most of them emails with Jill Kelley, a social planner who organized events at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla. It was Kelley who sparked the investigation that led to the discovery of Petraeus’s extra-marital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. A senior defense official, who is the source on this wrinkle in the story, declined to say whether the inappropriate emails between Allen and Kelley were sexual in nature or contained classified information.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has put the confirmation of General Allen on hold, pending further investigation. Under the military code of justice, adultery is considered a crime. (General Allen has declined to comment on the matter. Kelley and her husband have been silent on the scandal, aside from releasing a statement saying they “have been friends with General Petraeus and his family for over five years” and asking for privacy).
How did we get to this point? Here is a recap of the timeline as reported thus far, with descriptions of the players and their roles in the widening scandal.
Back in May, officials involved in the probe have told reporters, Kelley started receiving harassing emails from an anonymous source. According to several reports, Kelley turned to an FBI agent who was also a friend, and asked him to investigate. Another piece of news that emerged yesterday: This FBI agent, as yet unnamed, allegedly sent shirtless photos of himself to Kelley prior to the investigation. The agent is now being probed by the Office of Professional Responsibility, the internal-affairs arm of the FBI.
After Kelley told the agent about the harassing emails, the agent referred her complaint to a cyber crimes unit at the Bureau, which opened an investigation. Supervisors reportedly became concerned that Kelley’s agent friend had grown obsessed with the case and barred him from any role in the investigation (The agent has not been identified and has not offered his side of the story).
After some weeks, the FBI figured out that the harassing emails came from Paula Broadwell, the co-author of a January, 2012 biography of Petraeus, All In: The Education of David Petraeus. Broadwell, 40, is a lifelong high achiever, a valedictorian of her high school class in North Dakota, homecoming queen, and a fitness champion at West Point who holds a graduate degree from Harvard and is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. According to several stories in The New York Times, she is also a self-described “soccer mom” and ironman triathlete who now lives in an upscale neighborhood of Charlotte, N.C. with her two young sons and her radiologist husband. She and Petraeus spent many hours together while Petraeus was commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, taping interviews for the book while the two ran six-minute miles together in Kabul.
Broadwell has made no statements since the scandal broke Friday. According to The Washington Post, on Monday she hired a prominent defense lawyer, Robert F. Muse.
By now the facts about David Petraeus’s career have been oft repeated. The capsule biography: He is a four-star general who served in the military for 37 years before becoming head of the CIA. Among his many accomplishments, he has been credited with turning the tide of the war in Iraq and stalling the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan. Petraeus, 60, also pioneered the military technique of counter-insurgency, which puts more emphasis on protecting civilians than on killing enemies.
He is married to Holly Petraeus, whom he met while he was a cadet at West Point and she was a student at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. She was the daughter of West Point’s superintendent. The couple has two grown children and Holly works for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, running a branch that educates members of the military about financial matters. She has made no public statements since the scandal broke, but U.S. Army Col. Steve Boylan has told reporters that he talked to David Petraeus over the weekend and that Holly Petraeus was alarmed to learn about the affair. “Furious would be an understatement,” said Boylan.
When he resigned last week, Petraeus issued a memo to his staff at the CIA, which said, “After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair. Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours.” He added, “Teddy Roosevelt once observed that life’s greatest gift is the opportunity to work hard at work worth doing. I will always treasure my opportunity to have done that with you and I will always regret the circumstances that brought that work with you to an end.”
Back to the unfolding scandal: While probing the emails from Broadwell to Kelley, according to several reports, the FBI uncovered explicit emails between Broadwell and Petraeus that revealed the affair, which apparently began after Petraeus left the military, two months into his tenure as CIA director. Reports say the affair ended early this year. In her emails to Kelley, Broadwell criticized Kelley for supposed flirtatious behavior toward Petraeus at social events, accusing her of touching him inappropriately under the dinner table.
Though he had referred the case to the cybercrimes unit, Kelley’s FBI agent friend became convinced that the case had stalled and according to the Times, the agent suspected a cover-up aimed at protecting President Obama. There are differing accounts about what the agent did next. According to the Wall Street Journal, he got in touch with Rep. David Reichert (R-Washington). The Times says he reached House majority leader Eric Cantor, who called FBI director Robert S. Mueller III on Oct. 31 to tell him about the agent’s concerns.
The Times reports that FBI agents first talked to Broadwell in September. She admitted her affair with Petraeus and allowed agents to search her computer. The Times also reports that before Broadwell talked to the FBI, Petraeus learned that she had sent harassing emails to Kelley, and he asked her to stop. Agents first interviewed Petraeus the week of Oct. 28, and he admitted his affair with Broadwell. The Wall Street Journal reports that the FBI found classified documents on Broadwell’s computer, though multiple reports have said that U.S. security was never compromised by the affair. Of course an extra-marital affair can make a member of the intelligence security subject to blackmail, a serious concern.
Yesterday The Washington Post reported that Petraeus had hoped that even though FBI officials knew of his affair, that he could keep the matter quiet and hold onto his job at the CIA. It was Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., who told Petraeus that he should resign, last Tuesday, election day. On Thursday, Petraeus went to the White House and told the President he intended to step down. The President took the night to think about it before accepting Petraeus’s resignation on Friday, when Petraeus issued his public statement and the story became headline news.
Since then, there has been a flood of stories about the FBI’s email probe and the motivations of the players in the scandal. One story worth reading is by Washington Post writer Vernon Loeb, who co-authored the Petraeus biography with Broadwell. He says he was “clueless” about the affair, while describing the unusually close relationship between writer and biographer that developed over the 16 months it took to write the book. Loeb describes how much Petraeus valued character, adding that the General always said that “character was what you did when no one was watching.” Petraeus would hasten to add, writes Loeb, that “someone is always watching.”
Plenty of questions remain about the scandal. It has been reported that Petraeus communicated with Broadwell through a private Gmail account he set up with a pseudonym. How could the nation’s top spy not know how easy it would be to establish his identity? What was contained in those supposed harassing emails to Kelley and why did they prompt her to pull in the FBI? What was the nature of Kelley’s relationship with that FBI agent, and her relationship with General Allen? If Kelley’s FBI friend hadn’t contacted members of Congress, is there any way the investigation could have remained under wraps and Petraeus could have kept his job? Why did it take so long for the FBI and members of Congress who knew about the affair to inform the White House?
Speculation has already begun about who will succeed Petraeus at the CIA. Three names have been mentioned repeatedly, the deputy CIA director who is now acting director, Michael Morell, a longtime member of the agency who briefed President Obama as the U.S. was preparing to go after Osama bin Laden; John Brennan, the chief White House counterterrorism adviser and career CIA employee; and former congresswoman from California Jane Harman, who had been the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. More names include Rhode Island senior senator Jack Reed, a retired army paratrooper, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, outgoing Indiana senator Dick Lugar, undersecretary of defense Michael Vickers and Mike Leiter, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
What will Petraeus do now that he is out of a job? He was once heavily rumored to be a possible Presidential candidate, and at another point, a running mate to Mitt Romney. One of my colleagues suggested that he could head a defense contractor like Lockheed, but CEO-elect Christopher Kubasik, who was set to head the company in January, just resigned after a reported improper relationship with a female employee. It seems that both government and the private sector are less tolerant than ever of people who engage in inappropriate relationships.
