DESPITE a torrent of lurid detail emerging from the FBI investigation that led to the fall of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, David Petraeus, and attempts to attach significance to the delay in informing the president of his chief spy’s plight, the political consequences are likely to disappoint Barack Obama’s enemies.

Conspiracy theorists see a connection between the resignation of the nation’s most famous soldier on November 9th over an extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, and congressional investigations that were ongoing this week into the deaths in Benghazi last September of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. But while the CIA over-relied on the security supposedly provided by Libyan militias, there is no evidence that rescue attempts were deliberately delayed by the agency’s leadership or the White House.

The shock-wave caused by the departure of General Petraeus might indeed have been an unwelcome distraction from an election campaign that was going Mr Obama’s way, but he was above all a hero to Republicans. He had even been seen as a possible vice-presidential pick before his appointment to the CIA job 17 months ago.





From war hero to zero


As its director, General Petraeus was an enthusiastic advocate for the increasingly paramilitary CIA that has evolved over the past decade. He recently asked for a further ten aircraft to be added to the agency’s fleet of 40 or so Predator/Reaper drones. But concerns have grown, even within the administration, over the perceived lack of accountability underpinning the CIA’s remote killing of terrorist suspects. Whoever succeeds General Petraeus, possibly the current acting director, Michael Morell, or possibly John Brennan, Mr Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, may want to do things differently, perhaps handing over the main responsibility for drone attacks to the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command and re-emphasising the agency’s traditional intelligence-gathering role.

For all his great public service, his intellectual dazzle and his uncanny ability to win over both hard-bitten reporters and sceptical lawmakers, General Petraeus may not actually be much missed.