Citing Affair, CIA Director David Petraeus Resigns

[Fashionista]

Petraeus Quits; Evidence of Affair Was Found by F.B.I.

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Published: November 9, 2012

David H. Petraeus is said to have had an affair with Paula Broadwell, right, who wrote a biography of him.

WASHINGTON — David H. Petraeus, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and one of America’s most decorated four-star generals, resigned on Friday after an F.B.I. investigation uncovered evidence that he had been involved in an extramarital affair.

Mr. Petraeus issued a statement acknowledging the affair after President Obama accepted his resignation and it was announced by the C.I.A. The disclosure ended a triumphant re-election week for the president with an unfolding scandal.

Government officials said that the F.B.I. began an investigation into a “potential criminal matter” several months ago that was not focused on Mr. Petraeus. In the course of their inquiry into whether a computer used by Mr. Petraeus had been compromised, agents discovered evidence of the relationship as well as other security concerns. About two weeks ago, F.B.I. agents met with Mr. Petraeus to discuss the investigation.

Administration and Congressional officials identified the woman as Paula Broadwell, the co-author of a biography of Mr. Petraeus. Her book, “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus,” was published this year. Ms. Broadwell could not be reached for comment.

Ms. Broadwell, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, spent 15 years in the military, according to a biography that had appeared on her Web site. She spent extended periods of time with Mr. Petraeus in Afghanistan, interviewing him for her book, which grew out of a two-year research project for her doctoral dissertation and which she promoted on a high-profile tour that included an appearance on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.”

Married with two children, she has described Mr. Petraeus as her mentor.

Senior members of Congress were alerted to Mr. Petraeus’s impending resignation by intelligence officials about six hours before the C.I.A. announced it. One Congressional official who was briefed on the matter said that Mr. Petraeus had been encouraged “to get out in front of the issue” and resign, and that he agreed.

As for how the affair came to light, the Congressional official said that “it was portrayed to us that the F.B.I. was investigating something else and came upon him. My impression is that the F.B.I. stumbled across this.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not inform the Senate and House Intelligence Committees about the inquiry until this week, according to Congressional officials, who noted that by law the panels — and especially their chairmen and ranking members — are supposed to be told about significant developments in the intelligence arena. The Senate committee plans to pursue the question of why it was not told, one official said.

The revelation of a secret inquiry into the head of the nation’s premier spy agency raised urgent questions about Mr. Petraeus’s 14-month tenure at the C.I.A. and the decision by Mr. Obama to elevate him to head the agency after leading the country’s war effort in Afghanistan. White House officials said they did not know about the affair until this week, when Mr. Petraeus informed them.

“After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair,” Mr. Petraeus said in his statement, expressing regret for his abrupt departure. “Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours. This afternoon, the president graciously accepted my resignation.”

Mr. Petraeus’s admission and resignation represent a remarkable fall from grace for one of the most prominent figures in America’s modern military and intelligence community, a commander who helped lead the nation’s wartime activities in the decade after the Sept. 11 attacks and was credited with turning around the failing war effort in Iraq.

Mr. Petraeus almost single-handedly forced a profound evolution in the country’s military thinking and doctrine with his philosophy of counterinsurgency, focused more on protecting the civilian population than on killing enemies. More than most of his flag officer peers, he understood how to navigate Washington politics and news media, helping him rise through the ranks and obtain resources he needed, although fellow Army leaders often resented what they saw as a grasping careerism.

“To an important degree, a generation of officers tried to pattern themselves after Petraeus,” said Stephen Biddle, a military scholar at George Washington University who advised Mr. Petraeus at times. “He was controversial; a lot of people didn’t like him. But everybody looked at him as the model of what a modern general was to be.”

At the C.I.A., Mr. Petraeus maintained a low profile, in contrast to the celebrity that surrounded him as a general. But since the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans two months ago, critics had increasingly pressured him to give the agency’s account of the chaotic night. Mr. Petraeus was scheduled to testify before a closed Congressional hearing next week.

White House officials say they were informed on Wednesday night that Mr. Petraeus was considering resigning because of an extramarital affair. Intelligence officials notified the president’s national security staff. Mr. Obama at the time was on his way back to Washington from Chicago, where he had gone to receive election returns.

On Thursday morning, just before a staff meeting at the White House, Mr. Obama was told. “He was surprised, and he was disappointed,” one senior administration official said. “You don’t expect to hear that the Thursday after you were re-elected.”

The president was in the White House all day on Thursday, getting back to his old routine after months on the campaign trail. That afternoon, Mr. Petraeus came in to see him, and informed him that he strongly believed he had to resign.

Mr. Obama did not accept his resignation right away. “He told him, ‘I’ll think about it overnight,’ ” the administration official said. After months on the road, the disclosure of a career-killing extramarital affair from his larger-than-life C.I.A. director was the last thing that Mr. Obama was expecting, the official said.

The president, officials said, did not want Mr. Petraeus to leave. But he ultimately decided that he would not lean heavily on him to stay. On Friday, he called Mr. Petraeus and accepted the resignation, “agreeing with Petraeus’s judgment that he couldn’t continue to lead the agency,” a White House official said.

The White House had hoped to keep the news under wraps until after the daily briefing for the news media, but as it was reported on MSNBC, reporters checking their e-mail confronted Jay Carney, the press secretary, who tried to duck the questions.

“I think I’ll let General Petraeus address this,” Mr. Carney said. Shortly after the news broke, Mr. Obama released a statement praising Mr. Petraeus for his “extraordinary service” to the country and expressing support for him and his wife, Holly.

“By any measure, through his lifetime of service, David Petraeus has made our country safer and stronger,” the president said. Without directly addressing the affair, Mr. Obama added, “Going forward, my thoughts and prayers are with Dave and Holly Petraeus, who has done so much to help military families through her own work.”

A favorite of President George W. Bush and once the subject of intense speculation about his future as a possible presidential candidate, Mr. Petraeus managed the awkward move from a Republican administration to a Democratic one. He was one of the most telegenic faces of the military during his tenure, testifying frequently in Congress about the country’s difficult battles overseas.

Mr. Petraeus clashed with Mr. Obama in 2008 during a campaign visit to Iraq, having what David Plouffe, his campaign manager, called in his book a “healthy debate” over troop levels in the country.

But the president’s decision to tap Mr. Petraeus to command the war in Afghanistan, and later picking him to lead the C.I.A., effectively ended lingering concerns among Obama political advisers that the popular general might challenge his commander in chief during the election.

Mr. Petraeus and his wife met when he was a cadet at West Point; she was the daughter of the academy’s superintendent and a student at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.

Holly Petraeus works for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, running a branch dedicated to educating military families about financial matters and monitoring their consumer complaints.

Mr. Petraeus’s resignation and the circumstances surrounding it stunned military officers who have served alongside him in war zones over the past two decades and the national security establishment he later served.

“It was a punch in the gut for those of us who know him,” said Col. Michael J. Meese, a professor at West Point who has known Mr. Petraeus for a decade and served as one of his top aides in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Dave’s decision to step down represents the loss of one of our nation’s most respected public servants.” James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement.

By acknowledging an extramarital affair, Mr. Petraeus, 60, was confronting a sensitive issue for a spy chief. Intelligence agencies are often concerned about the possibility that agents who engage in such behavior could be blackmailed for information.

Mr. Petraeus praised his colleagues at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va., calling them “truly exceptional in every regard” and thanking them for their service to the country. He made it clear that his departure was not how he had envisioned ending a storied career in the military and in intelligence.

“Teddy Roosevelt once observed that life’s greatest gift is the opportunity to work hard at work worth doing,” he said. “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.”

Under Mr. Bush, Mr. Petraeus was credited for helping to develop and put in place the “surge” in troops in Iraq that helped wind down the war there. Mr. Petraeus was moved to Afghanistan in 2010 after Mr. Obama fired Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal over comments he made to a reporter.

In his statement on Friday, Mr. Obama said that Michael J. Morell, the deputy director of the C.I.A., would take over once again as acting director, as he did briefly after Leon E. Panetta left the agency last year.

Among those who might succeed Mr. Petraeus permanently is John O. Brennan, the president’s adviser for domestic security and counterterrorism. Mr. Brennan was considered for C.I.A. director before Mr. Obama’s term began but withdrew amid criticism from some of the president’s liberal supporters. Another possibility is Michael G. Vickers, the top Pentagon intelligence policy official and a former C.I.A. paramilitary officer.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/us/ci ... =3&_r=0&hp



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[Fashionista]

Was This Advice Query Written By The Husband Of David Petraeus' Mistress?

“My Wife's Lover,” a New York Times Ethicist submission from July, raises eyebrows with the news of
Petraeus' career-ending affair. Speculate within!


Paula and Scott Broadwell in a Facebook photo.

On Friday, David Petraeus resigned as CIA Director after the FBI discovered he was having an affair. Petraeus' suspected mistress is 40-year-old Paula Broadwell, his biographer. Her husband, Scott Broadwell, is a interventional radiologist. They have two children.

Late Friday night, Foreign Policy Managing Editor Blake Hounshell tweeted — and dozens more shared and retweeted — this New York Times "Ethicist" column from July 13, in which a reader writes in that his wife is having an affair with a "government executive."



My wife is having an affair with a government executive. His role is to manage a project whose progress is seen worldwide as a demonstration of American leadership. (This might seem hyperbolic, but it is not an exaggeration.) I have met with him on several occasions, and he has been gracious. (I doubt if he is aware of my knowledge.) I have watched the affair intensify over the last year, and I have also benefited from his generosity. He is engaged in work that I am passionate about and is absolutely the right person for the job. I strongly feel that exposing the affair will create a major distraction that would adversely impact the success of an important effort. My issue: Should I acknowledge this affair and finally force closure? Should I suffer in silence for the next year or two for a project I feel must succeed? Should I be “true to my heart” and walk away from the entire miserable situation and put the episode behind me? NAME WITHHELD



The details strangely match up to the Petraeus-Broadwell case, if you believe that their affair began in 2011, as the Wall Street Journal reported, and that the "project" in question is the U.S. military's involvement in Afghanistan.

Chuck Klosterman, the "Ethicist," responds with skepticism that the question was submitted in earnest.

Don’t expose the affair in any high-profile way. It would be different if this man’s project was promoting some (contextually hypocritical) family-values platform, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. The only motive for exposing the relationship would be to humiliate him and your wife, and that’s never a good reason for doing anything. This is between you and your spouse. You should tell her you want to separate, just as you would if she were sleeping with the mailman. The idea of “suffering in silence” for the good of the project is illogical. How would the quiet divorce of this man’s mistress hurt an international leadership initiative? He’d probably be relieved.

The fact that you’re willing to accept your wife’s infidelity for some greater political good is beyond honorable. In fact, it’s so over-the-top honorable that I’m not sure I believe your motives are real. Part of me wonders why you’re even posing this question, particularly in a column that is printed in The New York Times.

Your dilemma is intriguing, but I don’t see how it’s ambiguous. Your wife is having an affair with a person you happen to respect. Why would that last detail change the way you respond to her cheating? Do you admire this man so much that you haven’t asked your wife why she keeps having sex with him? I halfway suspect you’re writing this letter because you want specific people to read this column and deduce who is involved and what’s really going on behind closed doors (without actually addressing the conflict in person). That’s not ethical, either.

Only Klosterman knows if this reader was actually Scott Broadwell. Though if Broadwell used a fake name or email address, he might be in the speculative dark with the rest of us.



http://observer.com/2012/11/david-petra ... 0966571_n/


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[Fashionista]

Woman Linked to Petraeus Is a West Point Graduate and Lifelong High Achiever

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Published: November 9, 2012

Paula Broadwell, who wrote a biography of David H. Petraeus, moved into public view on Friday after an affair
with Mr. Petraeus was uncovered.

T. Ortega Gaines/The Charlotte Observer, via Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Paula Broadwell, whose affair with the nation’s C.I.A. director led to his resignation on Friday, was the valedictorian of her high school class and homecoming queen, a fitness champion at West Point with a graduate degree from Harvard, and a model for a machine gun manufacturer.

Paula Broadwell, who wrote a biography of David H. Petraeus, moved into public view on Friday after an affair with Mr. Petraeus was uncovered.

It may have been those qualities — and a string of achievements that began in her native North Dakota, where she was state student council president, an all-state basketball player and orchestra concertmistress — that drew the attention of David H. Petraeus, the nation’s top spy and a four-star general, as the two spent hours together for a biography of Mr. Petraeus that Ms. Broadwell co-wrote.

Ms. Broadwell’s name burst into public view on Friday evening after Mr. Petraeus resigned abruptly amid an F.B.I. investigation that uncovered evidence of their relationship.

But Ms. Broadwell was hardly shy about her interactions with Mr. Petraeus as she promoted her book, “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus,” in media appearances earlier this year. She had unusual access, she noted in promotional appearances, taping many of her interviews for her book while running six-minute miles with Mr. Petraeus in the thin mountain air of the Afghan capital.

Ms. Broadwell said in an interview in February that Mr. Petraeus was enjoying his new civilian life at the C.I.A., where he became director in September 2011. “It was a huge growth period for him, because he realized he didn’t have to hide behind the shield of all those medals and stripes on his arm,” she said. Ms. Broadwell was 39 at the time.

Her biography on the Penguin Speakers Bureau Web site says that she is a research associate at Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. She received a master’s in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

A self-described “soccer mom” and an ironman triathlete, Ms. Broadwell became a fixture on the Washington media scene after the publication of her book about Mr. Petraeus, who is 60. In a Twitter message this summer, she bragged about appearing on a panel at the Aspen Institute, a policy group for deep thinkers.

“Heading 2 @AspenInstitute 4 the Security Forum tomorrow! Panel (media & terrorism) followed by a 1v1 run with Lance Armstrong,” she wrote. “Fired up!”

On her Twitter account, she often commented on the qualities of leadership. “Reason and calm judgment, the qualities specially belonging to a leader. Tacitus,” she wrote. In another message, she said: “A leader is a man who has the ability to get other people to do what they don’t want to do and like it. Truman.”

She also used her Twitter account to denounce speculation in the Drudge Report that Mr. Petraeus would be picked as a running mate by Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate for president.

Married with two children, she was described in a biography on the Web site of Inspired Women Magazine as a high achiever since high school.

The biography says that Ms. Broadwell received a degree in political geography and systems engineering from West Point, where she was ranked No. 1 over all in fitness in her class. She benefited from a different ranking scale for women, she told a reporter this year. But “I was still in the top 5 percent if I’d been ranked as a male,” she said.

The official Web site for Ms. Broadwell’s book was taken down Friday, but comments from her echoed across the Internet.

“I was driven when I was younger,” she was quoted as saying on the Web site, noting her induction into her high school’s hall of fame. “Driven at West Point where it was much more competitive in that women were competing with men on many levels, and I was driven in the military and at Harvard, both competitive environments.”

“But now,” she is quoted as saying, “as a working mother of two, I realize it is more difficult to compete in certain areas. I think it is important for working moms to recognize that family is the most important.”

On “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart summed up Ms. Broadwell’s book by saying: “I would say the real controversy here is, is he awesome or incredibly awesome?”A short time later, Ms. Broadwell challenged Mr. Stewart to a push-up contest, which she won handily. Mr. Stewart had to pay $1,000 to a veterans’ support group for each push-up she did beyond his total. Ms. Broadwell said that he wrote a check for $20,000 on the spot.

On Friday evening, her house in the Dilworth neighborhood of Charlotte, N.C., was dark when a reporter rang the doorbell. Two cars were in the home’s carport and an American flag was flying out front.

Viv Bernstein contributed reporting from Charlotte, N.C.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/us/li ... er.html?hp



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[Fashionista]

FBI probe of Petraeus triggered by e-mail threats from biographer, officials say

By Sari Horwitz and Greg Miller, Updated: Saturday, November 10, 2:05 PM


The collapse of the impressive career of CIA Director David H. Petraeus was triggered when a woman with whom he was having an affair sent threatening e-mails to another woman close to him, according to three senior law enforcement officials with know­ledge of the episode.

The recipient of the e-mails was so frightened that she went to the FBI for protection and help tracking down the sender, according to the officials. The FBI investigation traced the threats to Paula Broadwell, a former military officer and a Petraeus biographer, and uncovered explicit e-mails between Broadwell and Petraeus, the officials said.

When Petraeus’s name surfaced, FBI investigators were concerned that the CIA director’s personal e-mail account had been hacked and that national security had been threatened. The officials said further investigation, including FBI interviews with Broadwell and Petraeus, led to the discovery that the two were engaged in an affair.

The identity of the woman who received the e-mails was not disclosed, and the nature of her relationship with Petraeus is unknown. The officials said the woman did not work at the CIA and was not Petraeus’s wife, Holly. The law enforcement officials said the e-mails indicated that Broadwell perceived the other woman as a threat to her relationship with Petraeus.

Attempts to reach Broadwell and her relatives have been unsuccessful, and she has not made a public statement since she was linked with Petraeus on Friday.

All three senior officials who described the impetus for the investigation spoke on the condition of anonymity because aspects of the inquiry are ongoing.

Petraeus, a retired four-star Army general who was once seen as a potential presidential candidate, said Friday that he was resigning as CIA chief because he had been involved in an extramarital affair. He has been married for 37 years and has two grown children.

Broadwell is married and has two young children.

In an e-mail sent to a longtime friend Friday night, Petraeus expressed regret for letting down his family and the nation. The friend, who described the contents of the message on the condition of anonymity, said Petraeus conveyed profound remorse in the message.

“He was deeply sorry for the pain he has caused his family,” the friend said. “He also noted how much he loved his job at the agency. He said he really relished the intellectual challenge there.”

Other details emerged Saturday indicating that the Petraeus allegations became a secret election-night drama for the Obama administration. That evening, the Justice Department informed the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., that their investigation had unearthed compromising information about the CIA director, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official.

Clapper then spoke with Petraeus and urged him to resign, notifying the White House the next day. That sequence has become a source of controversy, raising questions among some members of Congress about why key intelligence committees were not notified earlier and why the FBI waited before informing the administration about a probe that had stumbled onto embarrassing details about the CIA chief.

The law enforcement officials did not provide an exact timeline for the investigation, but they said the inquiry started several months ago. They said investigators thought they were dealing with a routine harassment case until some communications were traced to a private e-mail account belonging to Petraeus.

The sexually explicit nature of the communications caused investigators to suspect that someone had broken into Petraeus’s e-mail account, leading to concerns about potential national security breaches, according to the officials. As the investigation proceeded and more evidence emerged, including Broadwell’s role, FBI investigators realized they had uncovered an affair between Petraeus and Broadwell, the officials said.

The e-mails from Broadwell indicated that she thought the other woman was becoming involved with Petraeus, according to the officials. They said the e-mails were “threatening and harassing” but not specific enough to warrant criminal charges.

One of the officials said that the recipient of the e-mails complained to Petraeus about them and that the FBI later obtained e-mails between Petraeus and Broadwell in which they discussed the harassment.

The investigators first interviewed Petraeus about two weeks ago, the officials said. They reviewed the evidence with him but did not suggest that he should resign or that he would be charged with a crime, according to the officials.

One of the officials said Justice Department officials were unclear on what steps to take after they concluded that there would be no charges against the CIA director or Broadwell and that there had been no breach of national security.

“What was our responsibility?” said one of the officials. “We were in an area where we’d never been before.”

The notification finally came Tuesday evening, while polls were still open across the country in an election that would return President Obama to office for four more years.

“Director Clapper learned of the situation from the FBI on Tuesday evening around 5 p.m.,” a senior U.S. intelligence official said. “In subsequent conversations with Director Petraeus, Director Clapper advised Director Petraeus to resign.”

The official declined to say whether Petraeus had considered resigning at that point, but he said it was quickly clear to Clapper that stepping down was “the right thing to do.”

The official said that Clapper has been fully briefed on the FBI investigation and has not called for his office or CIA to conduct a follow-up probe or damage assessment — indicating that Clapper does not see the case as a security threat.

“There are no investigations beyond” that initiated by the FBI, the intelligence official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. The official would not address why the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and others were not notified earlier of the FBI investigation and its link to Petraeus.

The emerging details suggest that Petraeus was not involved in the decision to notify the White House that he had been ensnared in an FBI probe.

Instead, it was Clapper who told the White House late Wednesday, with Obama learning about it a day later. A senior administration official defended the decision not to notify the president earlier, saying that staff “needed to get their arms around” the matter before briefing Obama, who had returned from his election trip to Chicago on Wednesday night.

Obama summoned Petraeus to the White House on Thursday and “made the decision alone overnight” to accept his CIA director’s resignation, the official said.

“Petraeus was pretty clear in his intent to resign,” the official said. He “wasn’t looking to be talked out of it.” Friday morning, Obama notified his senior staff, then made two calls, first to Petraeus and then to the man now serving as acting CIA director, Michael J. Morell.

CIA officials declined to discuss how events unfolded inside the agency’s headquarters, but a senior U.S. intelligence official said that “this was a sudden announcement internally as well as externally.”

Petraeus has already stopped duties as director and begun a transition process that will determine, among other things, how much personal security he will keep as a private citizen.

White House and intelligence officials said again Saturday that there was no connection between Petraeus’s resignation and the controversy surrounding the deaths of four Americans in Libya in September.

Still, the timing of Petraeus’s departure, and the apparent decision by the FBI to withhold information about its probe, is already coming under question and criticism from Capitol Hill.

Senior Senate aides said that the Senate intelligence committee did not learn of the matter until Friday, just hours before the Petraeus resignation was announced. Even then, the first word came from news reports, prompting the committee to press the White House and CIA for answers.

By law, agencies are required to notify the committees of significant intelligence developments. Some questioned how a probe that turned up compromising information about the CIA director did not qualify.

“This is a very personal matter, not a matter of intelligence,” the senior U.S. intelligence official said. “There are protocols for this. I would imagine things have to cross a certain threshold before they are reportable.”

Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nat ... ory_2.html

[Fashionista]

Meet The Woman Who Exposed David Petraeus' Affair With His Biographer



State Department official Jill Kelley alerted authorities when she began receiving threatening emails.
The FBI traced the emails back to Paula Broadwell, uncovering the affair along the way. posted about a half hour ago

The AP has identified 37-year-old Jill Kelley as the woman who complained about receiving emails from Paula Broadwell, leading to an FBI investigation into Broadwell's relationship with former CIA Director David Petraeus.

There's no evidence Kelley was having an affair with Petraeus as well — just that she had received emails from Broadwell that warranted a complaint against the 40-year-old married biographer.

Kelley is reportedly the State Department's liaison to the military's Joint Special Operations Command. She lives in Tampa, Florida. From October 2008 to June 2010, Petraeus was commander of the United States Central Command, which is headquartered in Tampa.

Photo of the Kelleys in Tampa Bay magazine. (h/t Meena Hart Duerson)

A 2010 society item from the Tampa Bay Times reveals Jill and her husband Scott were friendly with David and Holly Petraeus, inviting the couple to their home for Tampa Bay's annual Gasparilla Pirate Fest.

Another story from 2007 indicates Jill and Scott Kelley, a surgeon, live in a "regal brick mansion" with their three children — at the time, aged 4, 2 and 1. Their home is estimated to be worth $1.37 million.

**********

Jill Kelley (pictured right, circled, with her husband Scott, Gen David Petraeus, his wife Holly and her twin sister), is a social liaison at US Centeral Command, the military unit that
oversees all operations in the Middle East. She appears to have a longstanding friendship with the retired general, who quit as CIA director in disgrace last week. Ms Kelley is the
target of threatening emails allegedly sent by Petraeus' mistress Paula Broadwell, left, which sparked the CIA investigation that uncovered the affair.

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[Fashionista]

Lawmakers Question F.B.I. Handling of Petraeus Affair

By BRIAN KNOWLTON
Published: November 11, 2012


WASHINGTON — Lawmakers with authority over intelligence and national security expressed consternation on Sunday that the F.B.I. investigation that led to the resignation of David Petraeus as director of central intelligence could have been conducted without the knowledge of officials in the White House or Congress. They also voiced puzzlement that it came to a head within hours of President Obama’s re-election.

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, a Democrat and the intelligence committee chairwoman, said she wanted to know why the F.B.I. had not notified her and other intelligence committee leaders about Mr. Petraeus’s affair; she said she learned of it only from news reports Friday and was dumbstruck when he confirmed it later in a phone call with her.

Questioned on “Fox News Sunday,” Ms. Feinstein said that she would investigate why the F.B.I. did not notify her committee beforehand.

The incident “could have had an effect on national security,” Ms. Feinstein said, “we should have been told.”

She also that there was “absolutely not” a link between the resignation of Mr. Petraeus and the Sept. 11 attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya. The C.I.A. has been criticized for providing a flawed early report about the attack.

“It seems this has been going on for several months,” said Representative Peter King of New York, a Republican and chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, “and yet now it appears that they’re saying the F.B.I. did not realize until Election Day that General Petraeus was involved. It just doesn’t add up.”

“The timeline has to be looked at and analyzed,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union. “Because obviously this was a matter involving a potential compromise of security and the president should have been told about it at the earliest stage.”

Lawmakers appearing on Sunday television programs broadly praised Mr. Petraeus personally, lauding him in warm and even emotional terms as a leader of rare talent, his resignation a loss to the nation, his personal flaws a secondary concern to some.

“David Petraeus is a great leader, a great patriot, and he is a guy who has probably contributed more to the safety of the United States of America over the last decade than any one single individual,” Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, a Republican and vice chairman of the intelligence committee, said on the ABC program “This Week.”

He said he believed that Mr. Petraeus had been “straight up” with the committee during his confirmation hearing last year. He was confirmed by unanimous vote of the Senate on June 30.

But there was no shortage of questions Sunday about the investigation and the timing of the thunderbolt that was Mr. Petraeus’s resignation.

Mr. Chambliss said that the committee might at some point want to hear from Mr. Petraeus about Benghazi but that the acting C.I.A. chief and Mr. Petraeus’s erstwhile deputy, Michael J. Morell, should be an adequate substitute during a closed briefing scheduled for Thursday.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican and member of the Armed Services Committee, said he was ready to move past Mr. Petraeus’s personal story but wanted to hear his testimony on Benghazi, which Mr. Graham called a “national security failure.”

Speaking on the CBS program “Face the Nation,” he called for the establishment of a joint select committee of Congress to investigate the episode, in which Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans died.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/us/la ... ir.html?hp


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[PerryPeabody]

National Security
Spyfall
By Barton Gellman, Nov. 15, 2012
Time Magazine cover story



Paula Broadwell stepped off the stage at the Aspen Security Forum on July 28, fresh from criticizing the news media for heedless disclosure of secrets. The afternoon program of seminars was packed with admirals, generals and Cabinet chiefs, but Broadwell had pressing business elsewhere. She ducked out of the conference, slipped into running shorts and jogged off in search of a once-in-a-­lifetime birthday present.

Broadwell and CIA Director David Petraeus had fallen into an extramarital affair after years of close contact as biographer and subject. Born two days and 20 years apart, they had big benchmarks approaching—his 60th, her 40th—and Broadwell was looking for a suitably momentous gift. As she had tweeted proudly a few days before, Broadwell had a date for a “1v1 run with Lance Armstrong.” What she did not mention was her plan to recruit Armstrong for a surprise birthday bike ride with the fitness-mad Petraeus. If all went as she planned, the retired four-star general would ride into his seventh decade alongside cycling’s greatest star.

(LIST: Who’s Who in the David Petraeus ‘Love Pentagon’ Scandal)

That particular ride was not to be. By then, though they did not know it yet, disgrace was bearing down on all three of them. Tampa socialite Jill Kelley, alarmed by a series of disturbing e-mails from someone self-identifying as “kelley­patrol,” had filed an FBI complaint in May. Electronic metadata pinpointing the times and places and IP addresses associated with Kelley’s hidden correspondent identified Broadwell as the author. Investigators scooped up gigabytes of content from her other accounts—some under Broadwell’s name, others under aliases. As FBI agents sifted through the harassing e-mails, they found discussion of the movements and activities of high-level military officials—and of Petraeus. “So that sparked the interest of the investigative agencies,” says a law-enforcement official. Some of the exchanges were sexually charged. By that point the implications extended far past a domestic dispute into the highest reaches of national security.

Already the costs have been stunning. Marriages and reputations have been fractured. Multiple careers, including those of the CIA director and a four-star general, have been damaged or destroyed. The decision by FBI Director Robert Mueller and Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. to withhold notice about the case until Election Day has turned congressional attention once again on the inner workings of the Obama Administration. Intelligence Committee members in Congress are furious at having been kept in the dark, and the furor has strained relations between lawmakers and the White House at the very moment voters want to see them sit down together to get something done. The U.S.’s entire security apparatus seems rattled. And every news cycle brings new questions about the judgment, morals, methods and command focus of some of America’s most powerful public servants.

Obama lost his CIA director just as the rest of his national-security team was in motion as well: Hillary Clinton is preparing to leave the State Department, and replacing her is likely to involve further shuffling of key players. And this was not just any CIA director but a man with long experience of command in the Middle East and South Asia, at a moment of intense focus on Libya, Syria and the looming pullout from Afghanistan. Obama was also losing one of the most experienced operators of and thinkers on lethal drones for targeted killing, the President’s chosen tool against al-Qaeda. And all this comes as complex problems in Iran and China await Obama’s attention. A President who had hoped to pivot to a second term of bipartisan purpose found himself dodging questions about how his team had handled the far-reaching implications of a love affair.

(MORE: Jill Kelley: Military Liaison and Whistleblower in Petraeus Scandal)

“The Party Is Canceled”
For Petraeus, there would be no birthday celebration. On Nov. 7, the day he turned 60, he was preparing for his meeting with Obama the following afternoon, when he would tender his resignation. Two days later, when Broadwell turned 40, Petraeus publicly announced that he was stepping down after “engaging in an extramarital affair.” Broadwell was at a birthday dinner with her husband at the Inn at Little Washington in Virginia on the night news reports identified her as the woman involved. A hasty e-mail that evening from her husband to guests invited for a larger celebration said simply, “The party is canceled on Saturday. Thanks!”

Yet that was just the beginning. Friends and family said Jill Kelley was filled with remorse at her complaint’s unexpected impact on Petraeus, a longtime friend. The same forensic techniques that led to Petraeus’ resignation unearthed what Defense Department officials described as 20,000 to 30,000 pages of messages between Kelley and Marine General John Allen, who was deputy chief of the ­Tampa-based U.S. Central Command and then succeeded Petraeus as commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan. Those astonishing numbers, government experts said, greatly exaggerated the ­frequency of communication because the strict formatting requirements for documentary evidence mandated the inclusion of full headers, signatures and repetitive e-mail chains. Even so, there were at least hundreds of exchanges.

Allen, through associates, denied an affair with Kelley, a married mother of three. Some officials hinted, without specifying how, that the e-mails and other exchanges raise questions of impropriety. The brou­haha was enough to put Allen’s nomination as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander on hold. While Obama issued a statement expressing confidence in Allen, it is no longer certain who will hold the top U.S. military assignment in Europe.

Meanwhile, Kelley’s life and family were singed by the spotlight. Reports cast doubt on the charitable work of the Doctor Kelley Cancer Foundation that Jill and her husband Scott Kelley had established, which spent little of its money on its declared missions “to conduct cancer research and to grant wishes to terminally ill adult cancer patients.” Instead the foundation devoted most of its dollars to meals, entertainment, travel and auto and office expenses. Altogether, Kelley looked as if she were auditioning for the lead in The Real Housewives of Tampa.

The media excavation of the Kelley family fortunes further revealed that Petraeus and Allen took the step, unusual for current and former four-star officers, of intervening in a civilian child-custody case. District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Neal Kravitz found Kelley’s sister Natalie Khawam had misrepresented “virtually everything.” But Petraeus and Allen averred that she was an honorable, loving and reliable mother. Kravitz apparently did not give them much credence. He awarded custody of Khawam’s son to her estranged husband Grayson Wolfe, who once worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

By that point the public was obsessed with the details of a case whose players themselves seemed obsessed: law-­enforcement officials revealed that the FBI special agent—Frederick Humphries II, according to the New York Times—who took Kelley’s case to the Tampa field office in the first place had a personal ­friendship with her that included his sending a ­shirtless photograph of himself. Law-enforcement sources said he repeatedly intervened to advance the case, to which he was not assigned, and in late October he telephoned two House Republicans, Dave Reichert and Eric Cantor, to report his ­belief—­erroneous, law-­enforcement officials insist—that Obama’s Justice Department was covering up the case for unspecified political reasons. Humphries, according to the Wall Street Journal, is now the subject of an ethics probe by the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

(MORE: Beneath Glowing Public Image, Petraeus Had His Critics)

As for Broadwell, she instantly became an object of mass fixation, on everything from her Dickensian name to her fitness (she out-push-upped Jon Stewart on The Daily Show) to her vast “ambition,” which depending on the headline writer was either an asset or a slur. Everything about the story twisted into knots the standard narratives about sex and power and values and victims and who exactly gets cast as the protagonist when two married people stray. A homecoming queen from North Dakota whom classmates voted “most likely to be remembered,” Broadwell, like Petraeus, graduated from West Point, with academic, fitness and leadership honors. She earned advanced degrees at Harvard, where she first met Petraeus, and the University of Denver, and she was recalled to active duty three times after 9/11. On Twitter, she describes herself as an author, national-security analyst, Army vet, women’s rights activist, runner, skier, surfer, wife and “Mom!” About three years ago, Broadwell settled in Charlotte, N.C., with her husband Scott, a radiologist in a local medical group, and their two sons. “Yes, I wear a number of hats,” Broadwell told Inspired Woman magazine in February. “But my most important title is mom and wife.”

Discretion or Protection?
Thus far it is undisputed that word of the Petraeus affair first reached the White House on Wednesday, Nov. 7, the day after Obama’s re-election, in a telephone call from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Jr. to National Security Adviser Tom Donilon. Obama was celebrating with his family and staff in Chicago, and Donilon decided to hold the news until Thursday morning. Hours later, in the Oval Office, Obama told ­Petraeus he was not ready to accept the CIA chief’s resignation. “He wanted to sleep on it,” an Administration official says.

By Friday, there was no saving Petraeus. The Justice Department informed the White House Counsel’s office of the discovery of Allen’s voluminous correspondence with Kelley. Allen’s nomination for the NATO job, with Senate hearings set to begin within days, was put on hold and risked being withdrawn. It was the second time in three days that Obama had been caught unaware by long-simmering investigations within his government. “The President,” said White House spokesman Jay Carney, “was obviously surprised.”

Should Attorney General Holder have informed the President sooner? “I am withholding judgment,” the President told reporters. The unexpected discovery of Petraeus in the Kelley case put the Justice Department in a bind. Nobody wants to return to the days when J. Edgar Hoover used the secrets in his files for political advantage, so deciding what to tell the White House about the private lives of public figures requires great discretion. White House advisers say they are content for the Justice Department to follow its established protocols. But federal officials have offered conflicting and sometimes inaccurate explanations of what the protocols say.

One senior law-enforcement official says a 2007 memo by Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey set strict limits on White House–Justice communication in criminal investigations. “Alerting the White House of an ongoing investigation? That’s a huge no-no,” the official says.

But the Mukasey memo said something quite different. In criminal cases, it said, Justice should balance the value of secrecy from the “law enforcement perspective” against the information “important for the performance of the President’s duties.” And in national-security cases, the memo specifically stated that no such restriction applied. Mukasey tells TIME that an ongoing extramarital affair by the CIA chief is a potential national-security issue. “They know enough at the point that his name turns up,” Mukasey says. “He’s doing it on a Gmail account, which any intelligence agency in the world would want to know about, and if they did know about, would feel in a position to use.”

The voice on the phone was heavy and slow, with a sadness that retired General Jack Keane had not heard from Petraeus before.

“I really screwed up,” Petraeus told his old mentor over the weekend as the scandal swelled around him. That was something of an understatement, as his 37-year career, the future leadership of the CIA, the performance of the FBI and the Attorney General and the career of a top U.S. combatant commander were all suddenly thrown into jeopardy. “This is my fault, and I’m devastated by the pain and suffering that I’ve caused,” Petraeus told Peter Mansoor, one of his old brain-trust colonels. He said that “what he did was a morally reprehensible action,” Mansoor says.

Mistakes have not been a Petraeus hallmark. After graduating from West Point in 1974, Petraeus clambered up the Army’s greasy pole, moving from field assignments to graduate school—he earned a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1987—and serving as an aide to powerful generals, including an Army chief of staff, a NATO military chief and a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He began to lap his comrades in 2003, when he led the 101st Airborne into Iraq and north to Mosul. His star rose even higher in 2007–’08, when he returned to Iraq and shifted, midwar, to a counterinsurgency strategy based on protecting civilians with help from a 30,000-strong U.S. troop surge. His success in aborting an Iraqi civil war prompted President Bush to put him in charge of the entire U.S. Central Command in 2008, where he oversaw the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But in military circles, Petraeus had always been a more controversial figure than his reputation suggested. He developed a cultlike staff, which isn’t unusual among generals, though Petraeus’ retinue seemed excessively devoted to their boss. He was as adept at cultivating politicians and reporters as he was at engaging the enemy. Neoconservatives saw him as their standard bearer as the Iraq conflict they had championed bogged down. “Petraeus is a remarkable piece of fiction created and promoted by neocons in government, the media and academia,” argues Douglas Macgregor, an outspoken retired Army colonel. “How does an officer with no personal experience of direct-fire combat in Panama or Desert Storm become a division commander?”

(MORE: The Rise and Fall of ‘General Peaches’)

Petraeus’ move from rock-star four-star to head of the CIA in 2011 came as a surprise in Washington. He had served only a year in Afghanistan and seemed destined to rise to the top of the military at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But former CIA director Bob Gates told him otherwise: Obama’s White House did not want him in that role. It was Petraeus’ idea, in response, to move to Langley, a close friend says. That solved a lot of problems for Obama, allowing him good use of the general’s talents and diverting him from a possible presidential bid. Cashing in the uniform he had worn since West Point to decamp to the wooded enclave of Ph.D. analysts and hardened spy runners at Langley was not just a dramatic career shift for Petraeus; it was also a move that had little precedent in recent agency history. Gates told Petraeus before he arrived to leave his boarding party behind: past directors who had arrived with an entourage, like Porter Goss and John Deutch, had not been well received. At his confirmation hearings, Petraeus said he’d use his star status to recruit the best agents and analysts available for the agency. He also suggested he would lose his posse: “If confirmed, I will, in short, get out of my vehicle alone on the day that I report to Langley.”

But many senior officers, even those who aren’t as accustomed to aides and horse holders as Petraeus was, can find leaving the Army a challenge, and Petraeus seems to have had some trouble adjusting to the CIA. The agency is strange, rigorous and demanding, as moody as it is secretive. “The agency is not a militaristic organization,” says a senior former intelligence official. “They don’t welcome people barking orders without debate.” Petraeus turned up at one event in a suit with his Army medals pinned to his jacket.

“The Election Played No Role”
By the time Petraeus got to the CIA, Broadwell had been working closely with him for years. Her sugary ­biography of him, titled All In, came out in January 2012. She allowed herself more freedom than most to use nicknames for Petraeus that others might not have chosen to write down: Dangerous Dave, even Peaches. But she was careful to position herself as a serious biographer, not a fan. In a February appearance with celebrity interviewer Arthur Kade, she volunteered, unprompted, “You know, it’s not a hagiography. I’m not in love with David Petraeus, but I think he does present a terrific role model for young people, for executives, for men and women.” Former Petraeus aide and Army Brigadier General Peter DeLuca thinks he understands what happened. “The guy is supergifted, superdetermined, supercommitted. He’s the closest thing most of us have ever met to a superman, but he’s still a man.”

Nor was Broadwell without a larger plan. After running with Lance Armstrong in July, she volunteered her secret purpose to at least six new acquaintances at the Aspen conference. That evening, over drinks, she told a small group that she had been arguing with her mentor about the direction of her career. Republican moneymen, she said, had approached her about a Senate run in North Carolina. She was tempted. Petraeus, she said in an irritated tone, rejected the idea out of hand. What was her position, he asked, on abortion? Climate change? Gun control? Gay marriage? Tax cuts? Social Security vouchers? Her answers, he told her, would not fit either party, and she should not sell herself out.

MORE: Exit Petraeus — and His Famous Military Doctrine

How did Petraeus stay on as top spy after case agents notified FBI Director Robert Mueller last summer that Petraeus was concealing an extramarital affair? And that his e-mail habits were hardly prudent? Vulnerability to blackmail or extortion is usually seen as the paradigmatic counterintelligence threat. After Mueller and Holder were notified, it was about two months ­before the two men dispatched FBI Deputy Director Sean M. Joyce to notify Clapper late on Election Day.

Adultery is prohibited under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And “depending on timing, it’s very significant for the head of the CIA,” argues Glenn Fine, the Justice Department’s former inspector general. The regulations left Mueller and Holder wide discretion. “We struggled with this,” said a participant in the internal debate, but they satisfied ­themselves early on that “there were no national-­security concerns. He hadn’t been hacked, hadn’t shared classified information, and [other than that] you don’t reveal ongoing criminal investigations, because people get tipped off or there may be investigative things you want to do that are then precluded.” Why, then, tell Clapper about the adultery at all, even when the case was ready to close? “We wrestled with that,” the official says. “Ultimately we made the determination that although we felt there was not a national-security threat, it was for Clapper to know this stuff or somebody to know this stuff and then decide what to do with it.”

(MORE: Petraeus Stumbles Off the Stage)

Agents confronted Broadwell with their findings on Friday, Nov. 2. The agent’s interview report, on form FD-302, did not reach headquarters until late afternoon on Monday, Nov. 5. Mueller and Holder reviewed it the morning of Election Day and decided that the time was ripe for informing Clapper of the case.

Pure coincidence? “The election played absolutely no role,” the official says.

Decline and Fall
There was plenty about the Petraeus affair that played more as farce than as tragedy. But virtually everyone involved exits the stage badly damaged. Jill Kelley’s days as a liaison to any government agency or official are over, a caution to every base commander in the military. Allen’s future is on ice; he may someday become the top U.S. general in Europe, but his nomination is frozen and his fate is now in the hands of a Pentagon investigation that is unlikely to give him an easy pass. The hard-­charging Broadwell denies having unauthorized access to secrets but could face new questions after an FBI search of her Charlotte house. And that discovery, in turn, could raise fresh questions. Did agents miss anything comparable in their parallel investigation into the Petraeus-Broadwell relationship or into the CIA chief’s exposure to hacking risks? The bureau, which for decades has done an excellent job protecting its interests on Capitol Hill, owes the nation accountability for its performance in this most delicate and unpleasant of ­investigations. Some of that should be in open hearings. But only a detailed chronology of the investigation, offered behind closed doors to the relevant committees, should satisfy Congress.

Most troubling is the judgment made at the highest levels of law enforcement not to inform the President. It’s hard to see why Obama wouldn’t expect his FBI director and the Attorney General to inform him when the country’s spy chief is recklessly exposing himself and his mistress to potential blackmail, whatever the special rules and protocols in the binders at Main Justice. That’s common sense in a democracy. The White House says such a call could have raised concerns about political interference, but given the national-security stakes, the absence of a call raises greater concerns about proper Executive oversight of national security.

With regard to Petraeus, who did such an amateurish job of hiding an affair while working as the nation’s top spy, the scandal stunned many in and out of uniform. But it was a measure of how out of touch Petraeus had become that he and apparently a number of other people thought he could stay at the agency after the affair had become known and partially exposed. That is misjudgment of the highest order and has generated considerable shock among former agents and officials, even among those who view Petraeus’ downfall as a personal tragedy. “A lot of power comes from moral authority,” says former CIA boss Michael Hayden, “because you are asking people to do stuff that is really on the edge legally and politically, and they have to sense that you’re the guy they can trust.”

David Petraeus has never been shy or retiring, particularly in a crisis, and it is unlikely that a man who takes his public image so seriously will remain silent for­ever. Friends say he is pondering how best to take responsibility in a fuller, more public way. Until then, the most celebrated general of his generation has just answered the question he famously asked in a very different context nearly a decade ago: “Tell me how this ends.”

—with reporting by Massimo Calabresi, Jay Newton-Small, Alex Rogers, Michael Scherer and Mark Thompson / Washington, Time Magazine