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Natalie Khawam had been through a contentious divorce and had lost custody of her 4-year-old son after a bitter court battle against her ex-husband.

The judge in Washington who denied custody of the boy to Khawam last year had characterized her as a financially and emotionally troubled woman who had built many of her court arguments around false and dramatic claims of abuse.

The letters were unwise and inappropriate, according to military and intelligence analysts who say the expressions of support for Khawam have become symbols of questionable behavior by two of the nation's top warriors.

The letters from Petraeus and Allen - written as the FBI was uncovering the scandal - suggest they did not follow military and intelligence guidelines that warn senior officers to avoid linking their official work with personal activities in their civilian lives.

"I am shocked that they wrote those letters, and I am shocked that no one on their staff said to them, 'We need to find out more about these people,' " said Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University and a former adviser to the Defense Department.

Military lawyers would have told Petraeus and Allen that "the intervention of someone of your level in a pending litigation is going to be a big deal and get you into hot water," Brooks said. "... Other people's marriages are really complicated. Just the words ˜custody battle' in court should have been enough."More at http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-11-15/news/sns-rt-us-usa-gener
als-tampabre8af03k-20121115_1_natalie-khawam-paula-broadwell-david-petraeus]

As to the emails from Broadwell that Jill Kelley showed an FBI friend near the start of last summer, they

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were not jealous lover warnings like “stay away from my man." {Original reports said things like "The harassing e-mails Broadwell sent to the woman said things such as “I know what you did,” “back off” and “stay away from my guy,” a government official said."}

The messages were instead what the source terms “kind of cat-fight stuff.”

“More like, ‘Who do you think you are? … You parade around the base … You need to take it down a notch,’” according to the source, who was until recently at the highest levels of the intelligence community and prefers not to be identified by name.

{Apparently some of those messages were sexually explicit, including one now famous message that referenced "sex under the desk."}

The source reports that the emails did make one reference to Gen. David Petraeus, but it was oblique and offered no manifest suggestion of a personal relationship or even that he was central to the sender’s spite.

When the FBI friend showed the emails to the cyber squad in the Tampa field office, her fellow agents noted that the absence of any overt threats.

“No, ‘I’ll kill you’ or ‘I'll burn your house down,’” the source says. “It doesn’t seem really that bad.”

The squad was not even sure the case was worth pursuing, the source says.

“What does this mean? There’s no threat there. This is against the law?” the agents asked themselves by the source’s account.

At most the messages were harassing. The cyber squad had to consult the statute books in its effort to determine whether there was adequate legal cause to open a case.

The agents soon determined that the emails were coming from Paula Broadwell. They then would have had to consult with the U.S. Attorney’s office in order to secure a search warrant enabling them to go into Broadwell’s email.

The agents then determined that Broadwell and Petraeus had been communicating with each other via private email accounts. As the Associated Press reported on Monday, the pair would save unsent messages in their inboxes, and then log into each other's account to read them.

Some of the steamier messages made clear that it was an affair. The besotted Broadwell may have viewed the curvaceous Kelley as a threat. Excerpts from http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/12/exclusive-paula-broad
well-s-emails-revealed.html]

Then there's the agent who started all this:

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The FBI agent who started the case was a friend of Jill Kelley, the Tampa woman who received harassing, anonymous emails that led to the probe, according to officials.

supervisors soon became concerned that the initial agent might have grown obsessed with the matter, and prohibited him from any role in the investigation, according to the officials.

One official said the agent in question sent shirtless photos to Ms. Kelley well before the email investigation began, and FBI officials only became aware of them some time later. Eventually, supervisors told the agent he was to have nothing to do with the case, though he never had a formal role in the investigation, the official said.

The agent, after being barred from the case, contacted a member of Congress, Washington Republican David Reichert, because he was concerned senior FBI officials were going to sweep the matter under the rug, the officials said. That information was relayed to top congressional officials, who notified FBI headquarters in Washington.

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And the woman who caused the whole thing to break, Jill Kelly. She's pretty strange in her way, too. Apparently

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coalition countries represented at Central Command gave Kelley an appreciation certificate on which she was referred to as an "honorary ambassador" to the coalition, but she has no official status and is not employed by the U.S. government.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the case publicly, said Kelley is known to drop the "honorary" part and refer to herself as an ambassador.

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Then, when the media began to bother her, she called 911 (?): "...because I'm an honorary consul general, so I have inviolability, so they should not be able to cross my property. I don't know if you want to get diplomatic protection involved as well," she told the 911 dispatcher.

She isn't, of course, entitled to diplomatic protection, and has referred to herself as "social liaison", a title which doesn't exist:

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We reached out to ranking officers and they'd never heard of the position or the role either. One source familiar with Central Command says, "I have no idea what a "social liaison" is. Maybe a community organizer? Who knows?"

Though there are several official civilian 'liaison' positions that do exist, and are established on most military bases — for example the "School Liaison Officer" and "The Exceptional Family Program Liaison" — this is not one of them.

There are also several unofficial and official 'wives' networks that function with the military, but these tend to be headed by military wives/spouses; and when working on official business with the military, the spouses are checked out by base command to be sure of marriage status and standing in the community.

Finally, not even CENTCOM, the unit Jill Kelley supposedly represents, recognizes the position.

In an email sent to Business Insider, CENTCOM's official position is: "Mrs. Kelley has no official position with U.S. Central Command. She is a volunteer and a private citizen, not an employee; because of this, and because there is an ongoing investigation, we have no additional information to provide." The first sentence is key, "no official position," which means that her "job" as a social liaison is in all likelihood a self-appointed, loosely-recognized post.More at http://www.businessinsider.com/forget-what-jill-kelley-says-there-is-n
o-such-thing-as-an-unpaid-social-liaison-2012-11

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Apparently she's also involved in some kind of "bogus" cancer foundation and who owes millions of dollars to banks and has at least four lawsuits pending against her.

Geez, Kelley, Broadwell, the agent who may well have a "crush" on Kelley, her sister, Petraeus, Allen...

All in all I find this thing pathetic, as well as the media's willingness to feed the American people's taste for scandals, sex and salaciousness. Supposedly there's talk of some emails concerning stuff for which Broadwell didn't have clearance, but unless they can find something worthy of actual attention, what a sad situation this is, concerning some pretty sad, fucked-up people, and resulted in the end of a supposedly good man's career.

Looks to me like a lot of bad judgment on a number of people's part, including Petraeus (just having the affair was stupid, of course) and Allen. But beyond that...?