David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell: anonymous Wikipedia editor tried to reveal CIA chief’s affair in January

An anonymous Wikipedia editor may have tried to reveal General David Petraeus’s extramarital affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell back in January this year.

In January, Paula Broadwell appeared on the Daily Show to pitch her book about the CIA director titled All In.

The day after Wikipedia editor Vanobamo created a page for the author, which is common practice on the user-contributed online encyclopedia.

But less than an hour later an anonymous editor logged on to the website and wrote: “Petraeus is reportedly one of her many conquests.”

It was the anonymous user’s first and only Wikipedia edit, reports Gawker.

Their post, with the IP address 64.101.72.113, was deleted within an hour by editor Dsutton, who flagged it as “libel/vandalism”.

At the time news of their affair had not surfaced and Wikipedia reserves the right to delete libelous material posted on the website.

But now in hindsight, is unknown if Paula Broadwell’s Wikipedia outing was speculation by a Daily Show viewer, or if the poster had secret knowledge of David Petraeus cheating on Holly his wife of 37 years.

Since news of the posting was released, several attempts have been made to track the IP address and determine the poster.

An IP address is an address assigned to every computer and other devices are logged onto the Internet to uniquely define them.

When Gawker ran it through the American Registry for Internet Numbers, they failed to come up with a name, but the result showed a company called Cisco Systems, Inc.

They explained that this means “Cisco, the tech giant based in San Jose, was given that IP address, but anyone could have been using it, and it could have been ported to another location around the world”.

Before last Friday Paula Broadwell’s Wikipedia page was quite bare, but then former CIA director David Petraeus resigned.