article: There are many things about it that have attracted comment from US columnists to the blogosphere: that he oversaw such controversial and costly wars but should ultimately fall on a matter of personal behaviour; that President Barack Obama was not apparently informed until election day that Gen Petraeus was under investigation by the FBI; and that the issue is now drawing in more people, including General John Allen, who replaced Gen Petraeus as the commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan. The inquiry resulted from complaints by a woman that she had received threatening e-mails from Paula Broadwell, Gen Petraeus' biographer and for several months apparently also his lover. The FBI investigation is now moving on to issues such as whether the author had unauthorised access to classified material. Some have written of the general's vanity, suggesting he liked to be surrounded by admiring staffers, academics and indeed journalists. Having met and interviewed him several times, I can certainly confirm that he took particular care of his image (for example preferring to be filmed favouring the patch on his right shoulder - the combat one of the 101st Airborne Division, which he commanded during the 2003 invasion of Iraq), and that lately his staff tried hard to discourage challenging lines of questioning, whereas during our earlier meetings he had proven more than happy to tackle whatever we threw at him. It was during one of these later meetings with Gen Petraeus that he introduced me to Mrs Broadwell, who at that time was working on her book about him and with whom, it emerged last week, he was having an affair. I will not pretend that I had any great presentiment or intuition about what was going on, but did note that during our off-camera conversations, he and I reflected in a humorous way on the ageing process and how it played out in men. Gen Petraeus had gone through cancer treatment in 2009 and it is in this context that a friend of his, a fellow general, sought to explain to me today what had happened: "Almost everyone considered him to be immortal, but he had been shaken by the cancer business and continually deployed for five-and-a-half years." The same officer concluded that while his friend was right to offer his resignation once the extramarital affair with Ms Broadwell had come to light, that "the president shouldn't have accepted it". Some reports today suggest that the CIA director did not even himself feel it was a resigning matter, but was persuaded to write the letter by the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. The head of the wider US intelligence community apparently felt it would not be possible for Gen Petraeus to discipline CIA staff accused of marital indiscretions, if he had shown himself fallible in the same regard. General Stan McChrystal, Gen Petraeus' predecessor as Nato commander in Kabul, also suffered a public fall from grace in 2010, stepping down after staff members were quoted by Rolling Stone magazine being critical about the Obama administration. Some used a similar formula at
summary: The fall of David Petraeus, director of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the general who successfully commanded America's troop surge in Iraq during 2007-8 is a modern morality tale, even if it did arise from one of the most ancient human failings, marital infidelity.