Commentary: The Petraeus affair is a story straight from Catch-22

As news stories go, the tale of the spy chief, the sniper siren, the socialite and the army commander knocks even the soap opera of the BBC into a cocked hat.

The news of the resignation of the CIA chief and former Afghanistan hero David Petraeus broke on election day in America. This, apparently, was no coincidence.

The steely spy boss had been having an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, a former soldier. The FBI had been tipped off by going through her emails following a complaint of harassment by Jill Kelley, a Tampa socialite with a penchant for senior soldiers. Broadwell was suspected of sending emails telling Kelley to keep her hands of her man.

Now we learn that the FBI trawl through Ms Kelley’s emails and those of Petraeus revealed that Kelley had been having close relations with General John Allen, Petraeus’s successor as US and international commander in Afghanistan. Petraeus resigned and Allen has been told he too will have to go. You couldn’t make it up. But now we are told that an FBI investigator, another close friend of Ms Kelley, who may have started the whole email treasure hunt for whatever motive, is to be stood down for inappropriate conduct. So this bedroom in khaki is turning a little sinister at the edges.

Petraeus is one of the most forceful and impressive military figures I have ever met. He met Paula Broadwell, like him a graduate of West Point, when she was doing postgraduate research at Harvard on — guess what? — the generalship of David Petraeus.

The accounts of Ms Broadwell read like the descriptions of General Dreedle’s nurse in Catch-22. “Her expressive green eyes,” drooled the Daily Beast, and the Washington Post alerted readers to her “tight shirts”.

But why does this all come out now? Petraeus was due to face awkward questions before Congress about the CIA cock-up which led to the murder of the US ambassador in Benghazi, covert operations in Iran, and drone strikes. Now he won’t have to talk about such untidy matters. The torpedoing of Gen Allen’s career seems no accident of timing, too. There is now evidence of a vicious cycle of backbiting and backstabbing between senior generals and official in Washington. “It’s all vanity,” a retired British general observed.