The love affair jolting Washington

General Petraeus, his wife Holly, and Paula. When the two got married in 1974, Paula was two years old (Picture: The London Telegraph).

Jill Kelly, the woman who blew up things. Both women at the center of the sex scandal involving generals are married to medical doctors.

(Picture: New York Daily News)

Mobhare Matinyi, Washington DC   The Citizen, Tanzania   Thursday, 15 November 2012 23:38

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Less than a week after US President Barack Obama won a resounding victory, the nation is busy trying to understand what befell the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) until last Friday, retired General David Petraeus, 60.

Petraeus resigned in disgrace after admitting to an extra-marital affair with a 40-year-old married woman, Paula Broadwell. The general and his wife, Holly, 57, a daughter of the late General William Knowlton, have two grown-up children, Anne, and Stephen, an officer in the US Army since 2009.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), functionally the equivalent of India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) or Tanzania’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID), is the agency that uncovered the scandal forcing the CIA chief to quit.

The FBI has the authority to probe anyone in the US if they break the law. It was the FBI that finished President Richard Nixon during the Watergate Scandal in 1974, and his Vice President, Spiro Agnew, in a corruption scandal earlier in 1973. The law rules supreme in this nation.

So who is Paula, the woman who brought down such a powerful man? Well, she is an intelligence officer in the US Military Reserves, a biographer of General Petraeus, and a doctoral student in military-related affairs at Kings College in London. She met the general for the first time while pursuing her Master’s degree in public policy at Harvard University in 2006.

Nobody really knows which came first, her interest in Petraeus, or her interest in his biography; but the story goes that a big chunk of the biography applies to her doctoral dissertation. Her medical doctor husband, Scott Broadwell, 43, is an interventional radiologist in North Carolina; a supportive-husband who took care of their two young children while she was writing the biography and perhaps having a good time with the general in Afghanistan and later in Washington DC, according to the press, even visiting and jogging with him at the CIA premises.

How did the genie come out of the bottle? Sometime in the summer, Paula sent threatening emails to another woman in Florida, Jill Kelly, 37, accusing her of parading herself in the military base, touching “him” inappropriately, and interestingly Paula wondered if Jill’s husband was aware of all this stuff.

Coincidentally Jill, a mother of three and a socialite who volunteers to organise parties for military families, is also married to a doctor, actually a surgeon, going by the same first name of Scott!

So Jill tipped her friend, so to speak, an FBI agent Frederick Humphries, 47, who once sent his shirtless picture to her. The agent made this issue a big deal so much that his superiors were mad at him. In the end Paula’s name popped up and so was her romance with the general.

The FBI went on to uncover another possible pillow-talk between Jill and another general, John Allen, who succeeded Petraeus in Afghanistan last year. Currently, the FBI is still reviewing thousands of emails that were exchanged between them since 2010, either to clear Allen or finish him as well.

The press also has found that in the recent past the two generals became involved in a child custody battle between Jill’s twin sister Natalie and her former husband, Grayson Wolfe. They independently wrote letters to the court witnessing Natalie’s ability to care for the child. Truly, a friend in need is a friend indeed.

So, what do all these noises mean to Obama’s second term? First, the FBI is busy trying to figure out a possible prosecution against Paula and anybody else after collecting boxes of classified documents at her home. Where did she get them? Has she revealed anything that would compromise national security? President Obama said on Wednesday that he has no evidence that the sex scandal has impacted national security.

Recently, while speaking at the University of Denver, Paula said that the attackers of the US consulate in Libya in August were trying to free their comrades from a CIA secret prison which Obama had outlawed in 2009. The CIA has dismissed that claim, but what does this mean? Will Obama administration officials end up facing angry lawmakers?

General Allen was about to become the next commander of the US European Command and the commander of NATO forces in Europe, but that has now been put on hold. Apparently, he is the fourth general from Afghanistan war zone to get into trouble within the first four years of Obama’s presidency.

Now Obama may have to appoint new people to replace these scandal-tainted individuals and deal with the Libyan issue once again after escaping an embarrassing critique during the recently-ended election campaign. Nobody is going to blame Obama directly, but in any case this is not a good start after a tough election.