Screwed again

Michael Shear has two articles in The New York Times about the former head of the CIA:

David H. Petraeus (photo, above, left), the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and one of America’s most decorated four-star generals, resigned after an FBI investigation uncovered evidence that he had been involved in an extramarital affair.
Petraeus issued a statement acknowledging the affair after President Obama accepted his resignation and it was announced by the CIA. The disclosure ended a triumphant re-election week for the president with an unfolding scandal.Government officials said that the FBI began an investigation into a “potential criminal matter” several months ago that was not focused on Petraeus  In the course of their inquiry into whether a computer used by Petraeus had been compromised, agents discovered evidence of the relationship as well as other security concerns. About two weeks ago, FBI agents met with Petraeus to discuss the investigation.
Administration and Congressional officials identified the woman as Paula Broadwell
 (photo, above, right), the co-author of a biography of Petraeus  Her book, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus, was published this year. Broadwell could not be reached for comment.Broadwell, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, spent fifteen years in the military, according to a biography that had appeared on her web site. She spent extended periods of time with 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 Petraeus as her mentor.
Senior members of Congress were alerted to Petraeus' impending resignation by intelligence officials about six hours before the CIA announced it. One Congressional official who was briefed on the matter said that 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 FBI was investigating something else and came upon him. My impression is that the FBI 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 Petraeus' fourteen-month tenure at the CIA and the decision by President 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 Petraeus informed them.
“After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair,” 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.”
Petraeus’ 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 11 September attacks and was credited with turning around the failing war effort in Iraq.
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 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 CIA, 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. Petraeus was scheduled to testify before a closed Congressional hearing next week.
White House officials say they were informed on Wednesday night that Petraeus was considering resigning because of an extramarital affair. Intelligence officials notified the president’s national security staff. At the time, President Obama was on his way back to Washington from Chicago, where he had gone to receive election returns.
Just before a staff meeting at the White House, 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, Petraeus came in to see him, and informed him that he strongly believed he had to resign.
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 CIA director was the last thing that Obama was expecting, the official said.
The president, officials said, did not want Petraeus to leave. But he ultimately decided that he would not lean heavily on him to stay. On Friday, he called Petraeus and accepted the resignation, “agreeing with Petraeus' 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 email confronted Jay Carney, the press secretary, who tried to duck the questions.
“I think I’ll let General Petraeus address this,” Carney said. Shortly after the news broke, Obama released a statement praising 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, 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, 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.
Petraeus clashed with 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 Petraeus to command the war in Afghanistan, and later picking him to lead the CIA, effectively ended lingering concerns among Obama political advisers that the popular general might challenge his commander in chief during the election.
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.
Petraeus’ 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 Colonel Michael J. Meese, a professor at West Point who has known 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, 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.
Petraeus praised his colleagues at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, 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 Bush, Petraeus was credited for helping to develop and put in place the “surge” in troops in Iraq that helped wind down the war there. Petraeus was moved to Afghanistan in 2010 after Obama fired General Stanley A. McChrystal over comments he made to a reporter.
In his statement, Obama said that Michael J. Morell, the deputy director of the CIA, 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 Petraeus permanently is John O. Brennan, the president’s adviser for domestic security and counterterrorism. Brennan was considered for CIA director before 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 CIA paramilitary officer.

and this one:

Paula Broadwell, whose affair with the nation’s CIA director led to his resignation, 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.
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 Petraeus that Broadwell co-wrote.
Her name burst into public view after Petraeus resigned abruptly amid an FBI investigation that uncovered evidence of their relationship.
But Broadwell was hardly shy about her interactions with 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 Petraeus in the thin mountain air of Kabul, the Afghan capital.
Broadwell said, in an interview in February, that Petraeus was enjoying his new civilian life at CIA, 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. Broadwell was 39 at the time.
Her biography on the Penguin Speakers Bureau website 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, Broadwell became a fixture on the Washington media scene after the publication of her book about 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 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 website of Inspired Women magazine as a high achiever since high school.
The biography says that Broadwell received a degree in political geography and systems engineering from West Point, where she was ranked Number One overall 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 five percent if I’d been ranked as a male,” she said.
The official website for 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 website, 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 Broadwell’s book by saying: “I would say the real controversy here is, is he awesome or incredibly awesome?”A short time later, Broadwell challenged Stewart to a push-up contest, which she won handily. Stewart had to pay $1,000 to a veterans’ support group for each push-up she did beyond his total. Broadwell said that he wrote a check for $20,000 on the spot.
On Friday evening, her house in the Dilworth neighborhood of Charlotte, North Carolina, was dark when a reporter rang the doorbell. Two cars were in the home’s carport and an American flag was flying out front.

Rico says that All In might have been a poor choice of titles, since it appears he was... (But 'a model for a machine gun manufacturer'? Where are those photos?)