Sex scandal rocks the CIA

What happened

The national security establishment was thrown into turmoil this week after a spiraling sex scandal forced the resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus and entangled Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Petraeus, 60, acknowledged “extremely poor judgment” in cheating on his wife of 38 years and conducting an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, 40. The affair came to light after a jealous Broadwell sent threatening anonymous emails to Jill Kelley—a 37-year-old Tampa socialite and volunteer event organizer for the military’s Central Command—accusing her of flirting with Petraeus. Kelley complained about the emails to a friend at the FBI, and the agency opened an investigation.

Agents traced the emails back to Broadwell and then discovered her sexually explicit correspondence with the CIA chief. Both Petraeus and Broadwell admitted their affair, but the FBI found no breach of security or evidence of criminality, and the agency and Attorney General Eric Holder decided not to inform Congress or President Obama. But the FBI agent who was a friend of Kelley complained of a cover-up to Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who called the FBI in late October. Soon afterward, James Clapper, director of national intelligence, told Petraeus to step down. Congressional intelligence committees are demanding to know why they were kept in the dark, and the Pentagon has launched an investigation into Allen, who, the FBI found, had exchanged thousands of flirtatious emails with Kelley.

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What the editorials said

Petraeus’s resignation “is a serious blow to the nation’s national security leadership”—but he had to go, said The Washington Post. He was utterly reckless in communicating with his mistress through an insecure Gmail account—an act that disqualifies him as head of the CIA. Petraeus’s foolishness is flabbergasting, said Bloomberg.com. Why, oh why on earth “did one of the smartest men in the country,” a military innovator who recast our Iraq strategy and ran the agency that tracked down Osama bin Laden, “think his romantic emails could remain secret?”

More importantly, why did law-enforcement officials wait weeks before telling Obama that Petraeus was compromised? asked The Wall Street Journal. It seems strange, “not to say politically convenient,” that Holder “kept this problem bottled up until President Obama was safely re-elected.” Congress must conduct a thorough investigation of the scandal’s handling. “No one wants to see Petraeus or his family further humiliated, but there are security implications that need to be explained.”

What the columnists said

Petraeus “made a very human mistake,” but his resignation should have been rejected, said Trudy Rubin in The Philadelphia Inquirer. As commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, he promoted a counterinsurgency strategy that “prevented an even more grisly civil war.” Why, then, at a time when the CIA plays a critical role in anti-terrorism operations in Pakistan, Libya, Syria, and throughout the world, should the country lose his skills? We were better off in the days when “national leaders were judged on performance, and their private lives remained just that.”

Petraeus’s famously large ego may have done him in, said Fred Kaplan in Slate.com. He was known for cultivating acolytes, and Broadwell first came to him as a brainy, super-fit, and glamorous West Point graduate who wanted to do her doctorate on his leadership style. She was “exactly the sort of aspiring officer-intellectual that Petraeus was keen to mentor.” In the course of working together on her fawning biography, All In: The Education of David Petraeus, “she may have made herself irresistible.”

The real scandal here isn’t sex—it’s what we’ve learned about America’s “unaccountable surveillance state,” said Glenn Greenwald in Guardian.co.uk. Based on a few nasty emails, the FBI was able to access all of Broadwell’s email accounts, dig into Petraeus’s Gmail, and examine 30,000 pages of digital correspondence between Allen and Kelley. They did all this intrusive snooping without “the need for any warrant from a court.” What strange justice this is: The crown prince of “America’s national security state” has just been consumed by the very system he thought he controlled.