This Day In History, 1989: Fall Of The Berlin Wall/2012: Patraeus Resigns

FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL: On this day in 1989, thousands of Germans celebrated at the Berlin Wall as East Germany opened its borders, allowing East and West German citizens to travel freely between the two countries. https://t.co/C3ktLEYGwZ pic.twitter.com/H1wyF2JI6K

— CBS News (@CBSNews) November 9, 2019

Remnants of the Berlin Wall can be found across the globe-- including at Headquarters, where a three-section piece has now stood for nearly as long as it did in Germany before its fall 30 years ago. This important artifact now resides in the CIA museum. https://t.co/d3oCsQtbQE pic.twitter.com/PgaLCQrwpU

— CIA (@CIA) November 9, 2019

And speaking of the CIA, it was on this date in 2012 that CIA Director David Patraeus resigned due to an extramarital affair. Click here to see a summary of Patraeus' career.

Will The General Go To Jail?

Back in November, 2012 General David Petraeus was caught in a sex scandal and forced to resign as Director of Central Intelligence. I wrote about it at the time; now there's news that he's reached a plea deal with the Department of Justice. Why? Here's how The Daily Beast is covering it: 

Retired four-star general David Petraeus reached a deal with the Department of Justice and plead guilty to one count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified information. The charge filed Tuesday carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison (it's not clear what penalty, if any, he'll receive). The deal will avoid an embarrassing, protracted trial for Petraeus, who was once the top U.S. military commander during the Iraq War and credited with success during the 2007-08 "surge." Petraeus was made director of the CIA by President Obama but resigned in 2012 after it was discovered he was having an extramarital affair with Paula Broadwell, a former Army Reservist who wrote a biography of him. Petraeus is still married to his wife, Holly.

Talk about unintended consequences. Will he go to jail? Stay tuned. 

This Is The Real Scandal.

I've been trying hard to keep up with all of the info about the expanding Petraeus scandal and there's a lot to keep up with. My reactions have been all over the place, from laughing to head-scratching to eye-rolling at the stupidity of it all. This is the part that made me cry:

As a military spouse, I wish the spotlight would fall on the real tragedies and crises military families face every day. They don’t require FBI investigations or White House notification. Simply drive down the main road at Walter Reed Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. (or any local VA hospital), where a young man whose body consists of a head and a torso blows into a straw to steer himself through the crosswalk on the way into the hospital. This is where the reporters should be. Stop by the base post office, where a young man, face down on a stretcher, waits in a line for his mail. Step over to Dunkin Donuts, where another young man with four prosthetic limbs attempts to hand the cashier a $5 bill, which keeps slipping out of his metal claw.  Pass a young veteran in a wheelchair trying to push his infant’s stroller with one hand while wheeling himself forward with the other. In this city of amputees, and in the scores of American towns that will house and attempt to heal them for decades to come, the dirtiest secret of wartime is already out in the open, for everyone to see.

As of now this is a Petraeus-free blog.

Unintended Consequences

If you think the Petraeus sex scandal is just a sex scandal, consider:

• Both "other woman" Paula Broadwell and "other, other woman" Liz Kelley have now hired high-powered defense attorneys. Kelley has also hired a well-known crisis communications/PR guru. 
• Broadwell's home was searched by FBI agents last night and they carried out boxes of documents, a laptop computer and a briefcase.  
• A second 4-star general is now being investigated, on the basis of having exchanged 20,000 or more pages of e-mail communications with Ms. Kelley over the last couple of years.  
• The FBI agent to whom Ms. Kelley initially expressed her concerns about the threatening e-mails that turned out to be from Ms. Broadwell, had sent Kelley pictures of himself "shirtless." When the investigation didn't proceed as quickly as he thought it should, he leaked the story to a member of Congress, who told Eric Kantor, who told the director of the FBI.
• Broadwell's father says there's a lot more to this story and that the truth will eventually come out. 

Yikes. Are you still with me? Do we need a flow chart? In my original post about the scandal I said that things were sure to get juicy. I had no idea.

It's safe to say that when General Petraeus decided to get naked with his biographer, he didn't anticipate this. When Broadwell sent the original e-mail messages to Kelley, she didn't anticipate this. When Kelley asked the FBI to check into those e-mails, she didn't anticipate this. And what the heck were Kelley and General John Allen talking about in their 20,000+ e-mail messages anyway? Even if they were only discussing the weather and her daughter's upcoming multi-cultural Thanksgiving pageant, it's safe to say that the General may have been distracted from his important work making the world safe for democracy, or some such thing. It's entertaining to speculate about and heaven knows it's manna from heaven for a blogger, but still. Real people, with real families are at the center of this and their lives, and probably their careers, will never be the same. You never know where things will lead when people start secretly getting naked... 

I Couldn't Resist...

Juice, Juicier, Juiciest...

If giving a concession speech is the hardest thing a public figure has to do, surely getting caught in a sex scandal and being forced to resign is the second hardest. As is always the case with these things, details about what forced CIA Director Petraeus to quit are trickling out and as always, there's plenty of embarrassment, bad judgement and stupidity to go around.

It didn't take long for the identity of the "other woman" to surface. No surprise, she's a lot younger and, yes, a lot prettier than the General's wife of 38 years. One of the things that always intrigued me about the Charles/Diana/Camilla dynamic was that Charles continued to be obsessed with Camilla, who was older, chubbier and dowdier than his younger, thinner, stylishly fashionable wife. None of that here. Compared to the glamorous Paula Broadwell, who's 20 years younger than the General, poor Mrs. Pretraeus looks old and tired.

Apparently yesterday was Broadwell's 40th birthday; she's married to a doctor and has two kids. Did she know that her secret was about to go public in a very big way? She recently wrote a hagiographic biography of General Petraeus and did a book tour to promote it. Videos of interviews from the tour are now going viral, and watching them now, it certainly looks like her relationship with her subject may have been more than strictly professional.

The Washington Post says that rumors of infidelity have followed General Petraeus for years. Really?  As I think about it, it seems strange that this didn't surface when he was under consideration to be CIA Director. On the other hand, "Pulitzer Prize-winning WaPo Pentagon correspondent" Thomas Ricks was on CNN yesterday talking about the scandal and when Wolf Blitzer asked if he was surprised by all this he replied, "Not at all. In the CIA, if you haven't had an affair you're not a player." Wow. Who knew?

Finally, there's this. Someone wrote into the New York Times' Ethicist column in July, saying that his wife was having an affair with a "government executive." With what we now know, it sounds like the letter could have been written by Mrs. Broadwell's husband. Was he trying to "out" his wife and her lover?

CIA Director Resigns, Was Having An Affair

I read a lot of thrillers and spy novels, and the headline on this post sounds like the basis for a good one. In truth I'm not making it up. There's a "breaking news" headline at msnbc.com, saying that David Petraeus has submitted a letter of resignation due to an affair. First thought: With the security that surrounds a CIA Director, how on earth could anyone sneak away for a tryst with a woman he's not married to? I haven't read any of the details yet, but this is bound to be juicy.