Petraeus must be prosecuted

The U.S. Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation have recommended felony charges against David Petraeus for giving classified information to his biographer and mistress, Paula Broadwell. While not a crime, the affair put Petraeus, then-director of the Central Intelligence Agency, at risk of blackmail. He resigned from the CIA in 2012 shortly after the relationship became public.

The scandal came to light after Broadwell abused her proximity to Petraeus by threatening to use her CIA connections to make a perceived rival for his love, Jill Kelley, “go away” — spurring an FBI investigation. Investigators then stumbled upon classified documents in Broadwell’s possession, allegedly provided by her lover. She may have even gained access to Petraeus’ government email account, according to The New York Times. Given his position at the head of U.S. intelligence operations, the magnitude of such a breach, if confirmed, would be immense.

Yet U.S. lawmakers tasked with overseeing intelligence failed to even question Petraeus about his misconduct. Shortly after the scandal broke, he was summoned to testify before the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, but lawmakers limited their questioning to the 2012 attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. They did not even ask how Broadwell gained access to highly sensitive details about the Benghazi attacks (and the locations of CIA black sites), which she mentioned in a speech at the University of Denver just before the affair came to light.

Instead, the vice chairwoman of the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., urged the White House last week not to press any charges, claiming the general “made a mistake [and] has suffered enough” because of it.

But it is not clear how or even if he has suffered. His wife, Holly Petraeus, has stoically stood by him. In 2013 the City University of New York offered David Petraeus more than $200,000 to teach a single seminar. The salary was later dropped to $1 after widespread outrage, but he accepted a lucrative and prestigious fellowship with the Harvard Kennedy School in its stead. He continues to receive a military pension of about $200,000 per year, which he is allowed to keep because the affair with Broadwell allegedly began after he left the military (a claim that was never robustly investigated). He is widely sought after for public speaking engagements, at $100,000 to $150,000 per appearance. He is the chairman of the KKR Global Institute, a private-equity firm whose compensation likely brings an income well into the seven-digit range.

In short, Petraeus has been richly rewarded. An examination shows that this is more due to the cult of personality that surrounds him in Washington than his actual record. Even so, amassing such laurels and riches is not illegal. Passing classified information for personal gain, however, is. His aura of heroism cannot be allowed to shield him from justice.

The government’s handling of l’affaire Petraeus is in stark contrast to other cases involving leaks of classified information. Barack Obama’s White House has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning remains confined to 35 years in prison for leaking government abuses to WikiLeaks, and her civilian accomplice, Julian Assange, stranded at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, is suffering severe health problems as a result. He faces extradition to and indefinite detention in the United States if he leaves the premises. Similarly, former CIA agent John Kiriakou is serving three years in prison for exposing the excesses of agency’s torture program, thus far the only CIA agent charged with any crime related to the program. And former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden remains a de facto exile in Russia for exposing the illegal and ineffective U.S. bulk surveillance program. Petraeus, by contrast, is no whistleblower; he cannot claim to have shared government secrets to advance the public good.

Nor are his actions equivalent to those of current CIA director John Brennan and former Secretary of Defense and past CIA director Leon Panetta, who allegedly sharked confidential information to the press without legal consequences. Brennan’s and Panetta’s leaks were intended to move public opinion on issues critical to the Obama administration. By contrast, Petraeus was driven by the most banal pursuits conceivable: sex, money and adulation.

He divulged sensitive information about ongoing military and intelligence operations to bolster Broadwell’s career. She apparently considered leveraging her burgeoning profile and connections in order to run for U.S. Senate in North Carolina. Broadwell then used her privileged access to write a fawning biography of her lover and benefactor (aptly titled “All In”) along with a number of similarly cloying editorials in in Newsweek and The Boston Globe, among other outlets — likely in support of Petraeus’ own nascent political ambitions.

Petraeus rose to national prominence as the architect and champion of the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq (COIN), which was credited for dissolving extremist networks, empowering local governments and building trust between the military and local populations. COIN held the promise of allowing the U.S. government to bring a dignified end to its otherwise indefinite, ill-fated campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Shortly after Obama took office in 2009, Petraeus leaked a misleading account of the new administration’s drawdown plans (along with dire projected consequences) in order to pressure the commander-in-chief into devoting the necessary manpower and resources to expand COIN operations not only in Iraq but in Afghanistan as well. In effect, Obama was forced to escalate the wars he was elected to wind down, within months of taking office. The White House adopted the goal of the counterinsurgency campaign to make Iraq and Afghanistan stable enough to allow a “victorious” withdrawal of U.S. forces by 2011 (i.e., in the lead-up to the next presidential election).

However, attempts to emulate Iraq’s “successes” in Afghanistan failed abysmally — and even Iraq’s stability began to deteriorate shortly after Petraeus secured his “dream job” at the CIA.

Iraq’s disintegration was hastened by the stunning rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), whose ranks include former inmates at the U.S.-run prison Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. The camp was an integral part of Petraeus’ COIN strategy, intended to separate radical extremists from the broader population. However, by the time it closed in 2009, Bucca was known as a veritable “Al-Qaeda school,” where ideologues and former Baathists formed an unholy alliance and were given access to tens of thousands of disenfranchised Sunnis to radicalize, recruit and train for their impending campaign against Iraq’s government.  

During his tenure as CIA director, Petraeus oversaw the CIA’s operation that funneled weapons and resources to rebel fighters in Syria and Libya. Many of those fighters also ended up in the hands of Al-Qaeda and later ISIL. He radically expanded the CIA’s drone operations, which have proved enormously destabilizing for the affected countries and exacerbated terrorism across the region.

Petraeus’ track record of failures and blowback becomes glaringly under scrutiny. But he was and remains insulated by a cult of personality created by deftly co-opting key politicians, military leaders, academics and pundits and enabled by a public that is generally uncritical of and disengaged from its military.

These factors allowed Petraeus to emerge as a combat division commander in 2003, despite having no experience in direct fire. He was subsequently awarded a bronze star for combat valor, even though, as Col. Douglas MacGregor put it, he “never pulled a trigger and killed the enemy in combat.”

Petraeus leveraged deception after deception to rise to the top of the military and intelligence. But his ill-conceived policies bore catastrophic consequences for our troops — to say nothing of the residents of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya and Syria.

Ultimately, Petraeus’ betrayal of his country’s confidence far surpasses his giving classified information to Broadwell. However, while this manipulation was certainly immoral, it was not, in most cases, illegal. That makes it all the more important to prosecute Patraeus’ clear infraction of the law in this case. At long last, he must be held to account for something.