Suspicious Minds

Like most people, I was surprised to hear of General Petraeus’s sudden resignation on the account of an affair. Not so much that he’d had one (I don’t spend time thinking about such things), but I didn’t know that even CIA chiefs would resign due to them. I will note that some are suspicious that this had more to do with his pending testimony on Banghazi, but it’s nonetheless noteworthy that this is the explanation that was given. Anyhow, Dr. Phi – having spent time in the same room as the man – is not the least bit surprised.

Back in high school there was a coach. Coach Montgomery. We never actually saw anything occur, but the… I don’t know… familiarity with which he presented himself to the female students did not go unnoticed. Well, we partially noticed because during indoor free periods the less popular among us were having basketballs thrown at our heads while he was too busy talking to female students to notice. We didn’t like Coach M. Partially due to the fact that he wasn’t there to instill order when it was needed. But also because when he was paying attention to us, he terrified the crap out of us. He honestly struck us as a roidhead. A roidhead who would probably sleep with a female student if he had the chance.

A couple years after he graduated he was arrested. It was actually his suicide attempt that got him in the news. Our response to this was… not generous. We thought it was funny as heck. We could just imagine Big Strong Coach M scared spitless of what was an impending arrest and taking the proverbial coward’s way out. I can’t say I am remarkably proud of this response. In one sense, I am not hugely bothered by what he did. She was sixteen. A teacher (or coach) should be fired for such a thing, but I’m not sure about arrested (a subject worthy of exploration in the future) absent a degree of coercion beyond the basic power differential. A year or so after that I would be exposed to the destruction of suicide (not mine, obviously) and the funny part didn’t seem so funny anymore.

But before my better angels got a chance to catch up with me, I have to believe that I would smile all over again at having my negative confirmations of a man I disliked intensely being confirmed.

So a question for all y’all… has this ever happened to you? Wherein you’re looking at something that just doesn’t quite seem right and later it turns out that everything is unraveled in a rather public fashion?

At some point in the past, I remember seeing some interaction between a colleague of my wife and his nurse and getting a definite vibe of something. As far as I know, nothing ever came of it. It was probably nothing. Of course, if you’d asked me in all seriousness in high school, I probably would have said the same of Coach M.

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

35 Comments

  1. I’m always the last to know or figure these things out. Years ago, I got a late night call from my then boss (a very tall, very striking woman) about a bug that was affecting an important customer. When she turned on the speakerphone, one of the QA guys was there with her. In addition to fixing the bug, I got a great piece of inter-office gossip. Or would have, if everyone else hadn’t known they were dating for three months.

  2. “I didn’t know that even CIA chiefs would resign due to them.”

    Funny, I had the opposite reaction. I would think of all the political positions one might have that you wouldn’t want keeping secret, compromising life choices they didn’t want revealed to the public, the one in charge of your intelligence would be number one. It might be the only position I can think of where you’d fire them for having an affair with a non-employee.

    But as to your bigger question, there have been a few. Many, many years ago in a previous life my company hired a guy that just seemed… wrong. You couldn’t quite put your finger on what it was that made him seem wrong, but everyone said he seemed off, or odd, or creepy. He had been hired as the CFO. Several months into his tenure, one of his employees was going through records to find copies of some cancelled checks and stumbled upon checks that the CFO had written out to the CFO.

    He was arrested the next morning when he arrived at work, by which time it was calculated that he had stolen just shy of $100,000. His home address was fictitious – he and his wife lived in an RV. He had big gambling and substance addictions.

    • That seems backwards to me, if infidelity becomes a resign-able offence it becomes even more effective as blackmail material.

      The CIA should do its very best to make clear than embarrassing-but-legal actions on the part of its staff will not be held against them. That way they make for poor leverage.

      • As long as they can also guarantee that the spouse, the paramour’s spouse, the children, the paramour’s children, the extended family,the paramour’s extended family, the media, and the rest of the world will treat it as a minor peccadillo, sure.

        • So… not disagreeing exactly, but… serious question: what if the secret is homosexuality?

          My thoughts, expressed elsewhere, are:

          Peter, I have mixed feelings. If it’s justified anywhere, it’s with the head of the CIA. On the other hand, it also seems to me that you can learn a lot from their paper trail and what they didn’t and didn’t say. The answers to that could be more reassuring than marital fidelity.

          • Will,
            Upwards of 50% of congress is currently blackmailed.
            The powers that be prefer it like this, so they have strings to pull in times of need.

          • Ever meet the DC Madam? (I’m told she was quite a bright and vivacious lady)
            I heard she died under mighty suspicious circumstances…

          • *snort* I never claimed to live in DC.
            If you want to talk to some people who have, I understand there are at least a couple around here.
            The “at least reported” circumstances of her death are public knowledge.

          • If you join the CIA, you’re actually required to disclose your sexual orientation and any other sexual proclivities you have, specifically to avoid exactly that sort of blackmailing.

      • I know of somebody who had an extramarital affair show up in a routine background check. The investigator’s response was, “If your wife will tell me in person that she already knows about this, it’s OK. If not, we’re done here.” The only issue was the blackmail potential.

        It’s true that they are also interested in divorces, but the reasons were different. They just want to know why. Is it just the usual stuff, or was it something like gambling debt or criminal activity that could be a problem in the future?

        • exactly.
          Naturally this doesn’t fix the problem of “made up blackmail”…
          (faked photos, faked video)
          Were I running things, we’d check for that too.

  3. has this ever happened to you? Wherein you’re looking at something that just doesn’t quite seem right and later it turns out that everything is unraveled in a rather public fashion?

    Rather often. Some of them have to do with things were communicated to me in attorney-client situations (or, more to the point, not communicated to me or only partially communicated to me), most of which wound up exploding in the clients’ faces because they were not forthright with me about them in time to let me defuse the situation. I think that comes with a litigator’s line of work.

    Other times I can think of related to intra-office affairs and shenanigans the likes of which are the more direct subject here.

    It’s a bit of a strain not to jump to conclusions after seeing people try to be cagey about something and kind of succeeding, only later to find that early disclosure of an awkward fact and the unpleasant consequences thereof would have been the wiser policy than trying to keep a lid on something that would not be contained.

    As for Director Petraeus, I’m disappointed. I thought the man had integrity and good judgment based on his remarkable military career. But it turns out he’s only human after all. If his extramarital affair did not result in an actual security compromise, though, that’s about all there is to say about the whole thing. Best of luck to his family in a tough time.

    • I guess that’s why he didn’t run for president. lord knows they were grooming him for it.

  4. She was sixteen. A teacher (or coach) should be fired for such a thing, but I’m not sure about arrested (a subject worthy of exploration in the future) absent a degree of coercion beyond the basic power differential.

    Are you kidding? That’s close to statutory; when you add in the power differential it becomes really creepy. It’s a serious abuse of power, and yes, it should be criminal.

    • I don’t know about the US, but down here 16 is the age of consent. It’s surely professional misconduct, and that teacher should be forced out of the profession, but criminal? That makes no sense to me.

      • It was illegal in the state in question. I have issues with whether or not it should be. If it should be, then I don’t think it should be of the felonious sex-offender-registry-for-life variety. That it would more-or-less forbid him from getting a job in the teaching profession or around children again strikes me as sufficient.

        Coach M didn’t go to jail. I was initially a little disappointed when I discovered this. It does appear to have derailed his life pretty substantially, however.

        Incidentally, a female teacher in Texas was sentenced to jail for five years for having sex with a student that was 18 (and therefore legal). Apparently, it’s the law there that teacher-student sex is forbidden in any event. I feel the same way towards that as I do Coach M (once I take my petty spite out of the equation). She deserved to be fired, and blacklisted, but not much more than that. The difference between 16 and 18 is not so severe that one deserves criminal punishment and the other doesn’t.

        At least, that’s my current thinking on the subject.

  5. Very similar situation to the one you describe, actually. Except it was our high school band director.

    I never liked him. He would pick on people over the loadspeaker during marching practice. He would make fun of the other schools that were smaller and less affluent than ours. He was a dick when I had to choose between band and choir and opted for the latter.

    As it happened, he also got hired by my church to be music director. When one of the people in charge of hiring for the position asked his students that attended the church what we thought of him, I quietly shared some of the above with her. They hired him anyway (which was probably appropriate, as I was just one high school kid).

    Turns out he had slept with several students at our school, plus at least one at a previous job.

    I suppose if I were a better person I would not have taken a small degree of pleasure in his downfall. But he was a teacher, and he wasn’t nice to me during a vulnerable time in my life, and take pleasure I did. Of all my shortcomings, this one doesn’t bother me much.

  6. A person at my HS was involved in scandal a few years after I graduated.

    When the charges became public knowledge, my parents asked if I had ever heard or seen anything of that nature in my time there.

    I said yeah, I’d heard stuff, but paid little attention; it’s high school – you hear all kinds of crazy rumors every day, 99% of which are complete BS.

    Unfortunately, these weren’t. I knew several of the wronged parties fairly well – and one of them was very well-known and -trusted to me. When I learned this person corroborated the charges, all my doubts went away.

    So this is all a long way of saying, my spidey-sense on these things is not great.

    • Fifth Amendment. If he’s a member of the military, then if he refuses to answer questions he’ll be sent to prison. If he’s a civilian then it takes a lot more effort to compel his testimony–like, “criminal charges against a sitting President” level of effort.

      • Yes, but as the head of the CIA, he really doesn’t have to say anything in a trial he doesn’t want to. The military bit doesn’t count; he retired from the armed forces when he became a spook. I’m not sure, but I think this is compulsory, I don’t think you can be the head of the CIA and a sitting military officer at the same time.

  7. My brother-in-law used to hold a very high security clearance. By the time it was granted, it was clear that if he had had a mistress he would not have received the clearance (blackmail risk), and that if he acquired a mistress in the future and the security people found out, the clearance would be revoked. I have given up on any hope that the people up at the top of the power ladder will act as if the same rules that apply to the rest of us apply to them.

  8. The American cult of personality, and its odd confusion of marital fidelity and professional morality has always baffled me.

    The fact that almost no one in the American press seems to think his resignation is anything but wholly justified baffles me. He is hardly a risk for blackmail when everyone in the free world knows that he has a mistress. And it has no impact on his ability to do his job, but for the fact that everyone seems to think it should.

    I had assumed he had actually compromised national security some way when he resigned, only to find out his deep dark secret. He slept with a woman, who wrote nice things about him, (something the rest of the media did as well, really). Honestly, the coverage has more to do with the immaturity of the press and their delight in a rise-and-fall, feet-of-clay narrative more than anything else.

    Baffling.

    • I’m inclined to agree, I don’t see why marital infidelity has anything to do with his job.

      Unless maybe he was fired for getting caught, after all he’s supposed to be sneaky, right?

    • He is hardly a risk for blackmail when everyone in the free world knows that he has a mistress.

      How long had she been a secret? What sort of judgment does that show?

      • Well, since he got outed by by his second woman for going after a third, it apparently shows he doesn’t know when to call it quits.

        Joking aside, I don’t see the relevance of how long she was a secret. Care to elaborate on your point?

        Your other question seems equally irrelevant. What bearing does his adultery have upon his development of the counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq, his leadership in the Afghan war, and his time as Director of the CIA? Surely they can be considered on their own merits. It is not as if his sexual peccadilloes have been in any way demonstrated to have affected his performance of his duties.

        At least Clinton perjured himself to inspire the witch hunt. Petraeus seems like a fairly self-serving guy, but other than in failing to be as perfect as the morons in the press corp thought him to be, I do not see why his resignation is the only publicly acceptable response. He’s not an elected official, for heaven’s sake. He doesn’t owe the public anything but competence, which, as far as I can tell, he delivered in spades.

        This entire episode strikes me as profoundly immature, and a distraction from the more interesting analysis of Benghazi, where it might turn out that Petraeus, or someone else, actually did drop the ball.

        • Keeping personal secrets is a fatal flaw in an intelligence person. Besides, which country runs a cathouse in washington again?

          • What an interesting statement. Everyone has personal secrets.

            How does it constitute a fatal flaw in an intelligence person in particular? Elaborate.

          • Intelligence people are our eyes and ears — they’re probably WORSE than blackmailing any particular Member of Congress or even our President.

        • He was a risk for blackmail the whole time she was a secret (or any of the others, if there were others.) The fact that he’s not at risk at this very moment doesn’t excuse him for putting himself in that situation.

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