It's the Mata Hari Factor, Stupid!

Of course not.  However, all government representatives posted overseas are sent with the warning not to become involved in affairs, since emotional neediness can be used as a tool for manipulation in order to gain information.  They are warned against affairs especially with host-country nationals, as the representative is a target who may have information to be leaked casually, in error, in guarded bits and pieces to be put together later.

Another factor is that a person could become involved with someone who appears to be safe and whose instability later surfaces through changes in the romantic relationship or within him/herself and as such becomes someone whose actions could endanger the security of the US and its information.  The foreign service offices like to have people in proven long-term stable relationships as a countermeasure to becoming involved in affairs which could in some way endanger US interests.  In the 1950s, of course, was the surface issue of blackmail.  As we know, the instability of people with whom one becomes intimately involved can be a danger in itself -- another kind of blackmail: not a threat to reveal the affair but to reveal secrets that became known -- any manner of results can come out of emotional weakness/neediness and the illogical actions that it engenders.  That's the situation into which Petraeus found he had fallen. As an upstanding person, he recused himself, relieved himself of duty as soon as it became apparent that even he, no doubt to his surprise, had fallen into one of the traps about which he had been cautioned.  It all seemed all right at the time . . . .  it always does.  For that reason, he was sworn to upholding a high moral standard, keeping his emotions in check.  He probably did.  He knew and worked with the writer for a long time.  He knew she was not a spy.  However, he stepped over the line of what we call propriety into the inappropriate by becoming closer to her outside of their agreed-upon relationship: a man and his biographer. Now, looking back,could he have, in full trust, told her things "off the record" which she did keep off the record? He must wonder.  She entered into the relationship as a trusted biographer, and any further relationship than that steps into territory outside the bounds of security, unknowingly, of course. The boundary had become blurred and he didn't see it when he crossed over and stepped into a situation against which he had been warned and had no doubt warned others.  How embarrassing when it was revealed that she had become emotionally unstable, according to the standards of foreign service, and was now stalking another member of the "Intelligence Community," to which Petraeus, and not she, belonged.

That's why Petraeus resigned.  He fell into the trap.  It is so easily done.  Worse, traps are not intentionally laid.  That's what he forgot.  Now a bucket-load of silly behavior becomes public, and with it the possibility that security could well have been breached.  It was not; had this gone on undisclosed, it could have been.

No, it's not about blackmail.  In short, in foreign service, in Intelligence work, it's the Mata Hari principle.

It's about being human and swearing to hold oneself to a higher standard than ordinary humans. It's expected of priests, therapists, teachers, coaches, doctors, parents -- all of us who come into intimate contact with people, who are trusted with people's lives and by means of this unbroken trust help them to thrive.