Institutions in freefall

The story, at least for now, is this: just two days after the presidential election, retired general David Petraeus—the most celebrated American soldier of his generation—abruptly resigned as the director of the CIA after news broke of his affair with Paula Broadwell, his biographer turned mistress.

Broadwell (described by the New York Times as “the soccer mom, married to a radiologist, who serves her family dinner by candlelight”) appears to have grown jealous, sending a host of threatening emails to Jill Kelley, a Florida socialite and Petraeus family friend. Kelley reported these emails to the FBI, who traced them to Broadwell; the entire house of cards came crashing down, taking Petraeus’s reputation and career with them.

As Jane Mayer has written in the New Yorker, there are many unanswered questions, particularly about the scandal’s timing: Petraeus resigned two days after an election in which the CIA’s role in failing to prevent the murder of American diplomats in Benghazi was a critical issue. On a broader level, though, it is odd that the FBI investigated the head of the CIA without so much as notifying Congress or the White House. Finally, since the FBI’s investigation concluded that neither Petraeus nor Broadwell broke any law, it’s unclear why its results were made public at all, or even why Petraeus had to resign.

But these ignore a critical aspect of “l’affaire Petraeus”: its effect on the future of the CIA itself. As Tim Weiner explains in Legacy of Ashes, his history of the agency, the CIA, founded in 1947, grew out of a fledgling wartime intelligence service that needed to be stronger for the standoff with Soviet Russia. President Harry Truman imagined it would be a source of information, enabling him to govern more efficiently. But as Weiner writes, “his vision was subverted from the start.”

During the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, the agency came under fire when it was discovered that former CIA agents had broken into the Democratic party’s headquarters and that President Richard Nixon then used the agency to subvert the FBI’s own investigation of the break-in. Soon after, the journalist Seymour Hersh revealed some of the “family jewels” secret reports detailing the agency’s illegal activities, such as the assassination of foreign leaders and the spying on thousands of Americans who opposed the war in Vietnam. Its reputation has never recovered, especially in the wake of the Ames scandal of 1994, when Aldrich Ames, an agency operative, was revealed to have been a Soviet spy. Legislators on Capitol Hill, tired of controversies and continued agency secrecy, frequently call for its disbandment. How, one has to wonder, will the unforgiving American public react to a tawdry affair from its head officer?

In the end, the scandal is as much about the CIA as it is about David Petraeus. Both are American institutions that have fallen from grace—probably forever.