Petraeus affair didn't cause a security breach, it revealed an overlooked national security issue

By REG CROWDER

Not surprisingly, the aspect of the sex scandal that forced Gen. David Petraeus to resign in disgrace from his job as director of the Central Intelligence Agency is the one that is most likely to sell newspapers and persuade people to watch television programs.

There’s nothing shocking about that. Publishers and broadcasters in order to survive in business must attract readers and viewers to sell advertising. Its just business.

What is unfortunate, although quite natural, is the grave danger to the national security of the United States that hasn’t been fully appreciated.

That danger is the reckless approach the U.S. has taken with regard to its relations, both public and private, with South Korea and North Korea.  There is no place in the world more likely to trigger a thermonuclear exchange between the world’s major nuclear powers than the Korean Peninsula.

For some time the U.S. has been sending wildly confusing mixed messages about its intentions with regard to North Korea and South Korea. The governments of North Korea and South Korea have a desperate need to understand the U.S. government’s intentions toward them. The U.S. isn’t doing much to help.

The Petraeus scandal didn’t cause this problem. It simply forced it into the open.

With that troubling fact in the background, we now discover that Jill Kelley, an honorary consul for South Korea, has carried on lengthy flirtatious e-mail exchanges with Petraeus, who has resigned from the CIA, as well as Gen. John Allen, commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

Mrs. Kelley and her husband hosted many social events for senior officials of the U.S. Central Command, which is headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.  Until recently she was authorized to travel freely within the base without an escort. Because of the Central Command’s mission, representatives of as many as 50 foreign allies of the U.S. are often present at the air base and at other locations nearby.

Tampa television station WTSP Channel 10 reported that Mrs. Kelley often traveled on military aircraft. She accompanied Gen. Allen on at least one of those flights, according to the report.  Lt. Col. Jack Miller confirmed Mrs. Kelley was on one flight on an Air Force KC-135 in May of 2010.

Mrs. Kelley has visited the White House three times since September. Her activities while on the White House grounds included having breakfast and lunch at the White House mess, an exclusive dining room run by the U.S. Navy, which is located in the White House basement next door to the Situation Room.

It should be noted that the Executive Office of the President sometimes moves potentially sensitive or controversial meetings to an office building a short distance from the White House grounds. When the White House staff makes public information about activities at the White House, these off-campus meetings are not mentioned.

Adam Victor, vice president of TransGas Development Systems, has said publicly that Mrs. Kelley offered to help him make a $4 billion deal with the government of South Korea in return for a fee of $80 million. He met her at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. Victor told his story to Larry McShane, a reporter with the New York Daily News.

“The only reason we talked to her was Gen. Petraeus — 1,000%,” Victor told McShane. “The magic name was Petraeus. And it was coming from third parties, as well as from her.”

None of this should lead to the conclusion that Jill Kelley has been working for South Korea, North Korea, China, Iran, Cuba, or any of the other countries that have a legitimate need to understand the United States’ intentions toward them.

Mrs. Kelley will likely go down in history as the most enthusiastic e-mail name-dropper of the 21^st Century.  However, it borders on madness that the U.S. military departments and intelligence agencies would not consider the possibility that a person serving as an honorary consul for South Korea has an objective that goes beyond putting on wonderful parties.

Even more fundamentally, there is the problem of the incomprehensibility of U.S. policy toward North Korea. (This is something we definitely can’t blame on Gen. David Petraeus.)

In the interest of transparency and confidence building, North Korea formally invited the U.S. to send observers to one of its recent missile tests. North Korea wanted to demonstrate that it is solely pursuing non-military applications for its missile program. The U.S. declined, while at the same time continuing its endless hand wringing over North Korea’s intentions.

Consider the difficulty confronting North Korea when it tries to analyze U.S. criticism of North Korea’s nuclear program, when it knows that a long-time associate of former President George W. Bush added to his already considerable fortune by selling nuclear technology to North Korea. Most American’s don’t know about this but the North Korean government certainly does.

Donald Rumsfeld was involved in the sale of nuclear technology to North Korea almost up to the day that his nomination to the post of U.S. Secretary of Defense was announced. He served on the board of directors of the huge Swiss technology firm ABB when the company signed a deal in early 2000 to build two nuclear power plants for North Korea.

The publication SwissInfo.ch reported that weapons experts believe the plants could produce material for nuclear “dirty bombs.”

Rumsfeld was on the board of ABB from 1990 to February 2001, when he departed to devote all of his time to job of U.S. Secretary of Defense, SwissInfo.ch reported.

FORTUNE magazine quoted a director of ABB saying that Rumsfeld was asked to lobby in Washington in the mid-1990s on behalf of ABB because an American firm complained about the Swiss company getting lucrative contracts to sell nuclear technology to North Korea.

The heart of the problem

Those who have studied war in a serious way tell us that many wars have started because one of the parties to the conflict misunderstood the intentions of its adversary.

The leadership (and I use the term “leadership” with grave reservations) of the United States has maximized the opportunities for North Korea to misunderstand America’s intentions toward it. U.S. policy toward North Korea is incomprehensible.

I know some nice people in South Korea. I don’t like the idea that they could die in a senseless and unnecessary war because every night is Amateur Night at the Pentagon, CIA headquarters and The White House.