TORONTO – There’s a new twist to the sex scandal involving retired U.S. general and former CIA director David Petraeus.
The Pentagon now says its top commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, is under investigation for alleged “inappropriate communications” with Jill Kelley.
She’s the woman who is said to have received threatening emails from Petraeus’s alleged mistress, Paula Broadwell.
As more details emerge and the list of those thought to be involved continues to grow, Global News takes a look at “who’s who” in the Petraeus sex scandal.
Former CIA Director – General David Petraeus
Petraeus rose through the Army ranks in a series of assignments, including executive assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and stints in Haiti and Bosnia. He was tapped to head U.S. forces in Iraq in 2007 and is widely credited with saving the country from civil war by orchestrating a surge in U.S. troops.
At the close of his time commanding U.S. forces in Iraq, at the height of a legendary military career, Petraeus was lauded by his boss, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, as “one of our nation’s great battle captains.”
He retired from the Army to become CIA director in the summer of 2011, shortly after completing 13 months as the top commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan.
Petraeus, 60, and his wife, Holly, have two children: a daughter, Anne, and a son, Stephen, who led an infantry platoon in Afghanistan as an Army lieutenant.
The depth of admiration for Petraeus’ decades of accomplishment in uniform make it all the more remarkable that barely a year after retiring to head the CIA, he resigned in disgrace over a supposed extramarital affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell.
Extramarital affairs are viewed as particularly risky for intelligence officers, though it is not a crime, because they might be blackmailed to keep the affair quiet.
Biographer and alleged mistress – Paula Broadwell
Broadwell first met Petraeus in the spring of 2006, when she was a graduate student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Broadwell served in the United States Army Reserve and was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 2012.
It was Broadwell’s threatening e-mails to Jill Kelley, a Florida woman who is a Petraeus family friend, that led to the FBI’s discovery of communications between Broadwell and Petraeus indicating they were having an affair.
Petraeus denies giving Broadwell any sensitive military information. The FBI later had concluded that there was no security breach.
The other other woman – Jill Kelley
Kelley, a Florida socialite, set the FBI investigation into Petraeus in motion last spring when she complained to a friendly agent in Florida about menacing, anonymous e-mail showing up in her inbox.
Kelley and her husband, Scott, were longtime friends of Petraeus and his wife, Holly.
FBI agents traced the alleged cyber harassment to Broadwell and during that process discovered she was exchanging intimate messages with a private Gmail account. Further investigation revealed that account belonged to Petraeus, under an alias.
Friends and former staff members of Petraeus told The Associated Press that he has assured them his relationship with Kelley was platonic, although Broadwell apparently saw her as a romantic rival. They said Petraeus was shocked to learn last summer of Broadwell’s e-mails to Kelley.
General John Allen
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta revealed that the Pentagon had begun an internal investigation into e-mails from General John Allen to Jill Kelley.
Allen succeeded Petraeus as the top American commander in Afghanistan in July 2011, and his nomination to become the next commander of U.S. European Command and the commander of NATO forces in Europe has now been put on hold, as the scandal seemed certain to ensnare another acclaimed military figure.
In the latest revelations, a Pentagon official traveling with Panetta to Australia said “inappropriate communications” – 20,000 to 30,000 pages of emails and other documents from Allen’s communications with Kelley between 2010 and 2012 – are under review. He would not say whether they involved sexual matters or whether they are thought to include unauthorized disclosures of classified information. He said he did not know whether Petraeus is mentioned in the e-mails.
Allen has denied any wrongdoing. If Allen was found to have had an affair with Kelley, he could face charges of adultery, which is a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
The FBI agent
In another bizarre twist, an FBI agent who was a friend of Kelley and who passed along information from her to the agents who conducted the investigation was subsequently told by his superiors to steer clear of the case because they grew concerned that the agent had become obsessed with the investigation, a federal law enforcement official said.
The Associated Press reports that before the case involving Petraeus got under way, the agent had sent Kelley shirtless photos of himself, according to this official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the investigation.
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