BIZARRE LOVE PENTAGON

DAVID HOWELL “BETRAYUS” PETRAEUS, former head of what the Americans call the CIA and the Four-Star General overseeing command of US operations in Afghanistan, as well as having been a PhD lecturer teaching International Relations at the United States Military Academy and Fellow of Georgetown University, ought to know that good strategy demands that one should not shit on one’s own doorstep.

 

YET THE GOOD GENERAL APPEARS not to have been aware of the fact that the chattering classes in the press and “on the wires”, as our colonial cousins in intelligence sometimes used to term it when I was involved in counter-espionage, would “dog”, “hound” and “nail” him if he was in a “compromise situation”.

 

IN A WAY THIS SHOWS THAT TRUE LOVE is still alive. Petraeus was apparently doing the naughty with muscular Paula Broadwell, ostensibly his biographer, unbeknown to his wife, in what would perhaps be acceptable behaviour for a military man of importance, somewhat similar to our ruling classes in Britain, where either one shags a girl from among one’s female serving staff or one is considered to be a bit of a wimp by one’s wife. In short, he thought he could get away with this triangle.

 

IN AMERICA, OF COURSE, THIS IS DONE in a more open and light-filled manner, as shown by the most important officer in the American forces throwing away the most successful career in American intelligence since the days of J. Edgar Hoover by getting the occasional sexual relief from a bulging trout-pouted underling in his wood-panelled office.

 

THIS LOVE TRIANGLE AT FIRST widened when Four-Star Marine General John Allen was brought into the mix, as a suspected element knowing that something was amiss after e-mails between him and Floridian socialite Jill Kelley had been revealed, suggesting that the good general, a married man, like Petraeus, and entrusted to upholding “truth, justice and the American way”, was somehow underhand in his activities.

 

THE LOVE PENTAGON WAS MADE COMPLETE as it became five-sided when it became known that Kelley, presumably Allen’s lover, was sending e-mails to Broadwell, now known as Petraeus’s mistress, threatening her and telling her to “stay away from my man”: this presumably being Petraeus, unless we wish this to become a love hexagon. In theory, Allen would become Petraeus’s successor, but common sense suggests that at the highest levels of intelligence activity among the Washington community it would be wiser just to hand over the reins of power to a new breed of highly trained clever young women who are, without wishing to be sexist, ”attractive”. They will not be drawn into pillow talk as easily as men of a certain age whose wives look like yesterday. Who knows where this will end?