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Huawei has denied claims made by former CIA chief Michael Hayden that it has spied for the Chinese government.
Michael Hayden was quoted by the Australian Financial Review as saying that it was his “professional judgment” that the firm supplied intelligence to China.
However, Huawei said the claims were “unsubstantiated” and “defamatory”.
Huawei, one of the world’s biggest telecom equipment makers, has faced increased scrutiny in recent times.
Last year, US politicians claimed that the company posed a security threat because of its alleged links to China’s government and military.
Huawei has denied claims made by former CIA chief Michael Hayden that it has spied for the Chinese government
On Thursday, the UK government said that it would review Huawei’s involvement in a cybersecurity centre.
The concerns over its association with the Chinese authorities have been driven in part, by the fact that the company’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, was a former member of the People’s Liberation Army.
However, Huawei has repeatedly denied those claims and has stressed that it is 98.6%-owned by its employees.
In an article published by the Australian Financial Review, Michael Hayden claimed that Western intelligence agencies had information about Huawei’s “clandestine activities”.
Michael Hayden was quoted as saying that Huawei at a minimum had “shared with the Chinese state intimate and extensive knowledge of the foreign telecommunications systems it is involved with”.
However, Scott Sykes, head of international media affairs for Huawei, said that these remarks were “sad distractions from real-world concerns related to espionage – industrial and otherwise – that demand serious discussion globally”.
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Despite the ongoing FBI investigation into the extra-marital affair that led to his resignation as Director of the CIA, David Petraeus has agreed to testify this Friday before a House Committee on the Benghazi consulate attack.
The hearing, which will be held before the Senate Intelligence Committee, is closed to the public and the media and the retired four-star general will answer questions on the CIA’s knowledge and handling of the September 11th assault that left U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American dead.
Last night it was confirmed by the Committee that David Petraeus would appear before them at 7.30 a.m. putting an end to the speculation the former CIA chief would decline to testify following his resignation over the Paula Broadwell affair.
David Petraeus hopes that by offering to give testimony he will clear up some of the wilder rumors that are circulating.
“He did not like the conspiracies going around that somehow he had something to hide on Benghazi,” said retired Colonel Peter Mansoor who served as David Petraeus’ executive officer in Iraq.
“I think his offer to testify crossed with the Congress’ request to him to testify. But anyway, he looks forward to that.”
David Petraeus has agreed to testify this Friday before a House Committee on the Benghazi consulate attack
This comes as the former CIA director told his close friend Peter Mansoor that he was ignoring the media firestorm that has erupted in the wake of his resignation.
“He wants to maintain a distance and focus on his family at this time,” said retired Peter Mansoor to CNN.
“He realizes it was a severe and morally reprehensible action, but he violated no laws.”
Asked how David Petraeus, 60, was dealing with the scandal, Peter Mansoor said: “He describes it as putting one foot in front of the other, and then repeating the process. So it’s going to be a long, long road of healing for them. He understands that and he’s focusing on it.”
Sources have told CBS’ Margaret Brennan that intelligence officials will show footage from unmanned drones that were overhead during the assault.
“General Petraeus is willing to come before the committee and the details are being worked out,” Senator Diane Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said today. No date for his testimony has been set.
Dianne Feinstein has been among those in Congress who have complained that lawmakers should have been notified about an FBI investigation that led to the disclosure of David Petraeus’ affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell.
But she said that David Petraeus’ testimony to her committee will be limited to the Benghazi attacks that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others. David Petraeus was CIA director at the time of the attacks and visited Libya afterward.
David Petraeus was originally supposed to give evidence to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday before his resignation and subsequent investigation that has expanded to include General John Allen, the chief of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
When asked if there had been a national security breach with the Petraeus affair, Feinstein replied: “I have no evidence that there was at this time.”
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.
An anonymous Wikipedia editor may have tried to reveal David Petraeus’s affair with Paula Broadwell back in January this year
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.
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Holly Petraeus, wife of disgraced ex-CIA chief David Petraeus, can hardly imagine a life outside the military as she counts four generations of servicemen, “my great-grandfather, grandfather, father, husband, brother”.
Their son, Stephen Petraeus, 25, is in the army too.
Daughter Anne Petraeus, 29, teaches English overseas.
“I am privileged to have two extraordinary men — my husband and my father — in my life,” Holly Petraeus, now 59, said during an interview in 2009.
Her father, the late Army Gen. William A. Knowlton, was superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy when Holly met David Petraeus on a blind date in the fall of their senior year.
Holly Knowlton was a French and English major at Dickinson College. David Petraeus was a West Point cadet.
“He had no idea the blind date was with <<the boss’ daughter>> until it was too late to get out of it!” Holly Petraeus said.
Holly and David Petraeus married in 1974, two months after he graduated at the top of his class
Holly and David Petraeus married in 1974, two months after he graduated at the top of his class. For nearly 38 years, Holly Petraeus has been holding down the home front as her husband climbed the ranks.
Asked for adjectives that best describe her, Holly Petraeus supplies two: self-sufficient and reliable.
“I’ve never lived more than four years in one place,” she said.
Holly Petraeus has moved many times and lived multiple times in Washington, but never gets rid of books. She favors biographies. She has been reading about Islam and the Middle East, but has not been to Iraq.
Jill Kelley, Florida socialite at the centre of the David Petraeus sex scandal, has spoken for the first time and said she is an “innocent victim”.
Jill Kelley said: “I’ve done nothing wrong. I am the victim here. But it still feels awful.”
She has been called “the other woman” in the affair leading to speculation she was romantically involved with the former CIA chief.
Jill Kelley tipped off FBI agents about the affair when she handed over a series of anonymous emails sent by Paula Broadwell warning her to stay away from David Petraeus in the summer.
The 37-year-old spoke with her brother, a lawyer, as her name first became linked to the resignation of David Petraeus.
David Khawan told the Washington Post his sister telephoned him on Sunday and told him to switch on the TV because her name was all over news broadcasts.
He said his sister told him she was totally innocent and was not the “other woman” in David Petraeus’s life.
David Khawan is quoted as saying his sister said: “I’ve done nothing wrong. I am the victim here. But it still feels awful.”
Friends of Jill Kelley, a vivacious Lebanese-born mother of three known for her love of expensive designer dresses, said that she is devoted to her family and scoffed at suggestions that she was romantically involved with David Petraeus.
“This other woman obviously read all the signs wrong,” said a friend who knows Jill Kelley from their children’s private school.
“Jill is very attractive and can be touchy-feely. That’s just the way she is and there is nothing else.”
Jill Kelley, Florida socialite at the centre of the David Petraeus sex scandal, has spoken for the first time and said she is an innocent victim
Jill Kelley, a well known figure on the social scene in her hometown of Tampa, Florida, has hired a crisis management firm and top lawyer since being linked to the scandal.
This has led to speculation that further damaging details could be revealed in the fall out from David Petraeus’s resignation.
Sources have revealed that the emails she received from Paula Broadwell were “kind of cat-fight stuff”.
Jill Kelley went to the FBI with the emails – and triggered the investigation that led to the downfall of David Petraeus and his shock resignation as CIA chief.
The source told The Daily Beast the emails were: “More like, <<Who do you think you are? … You parade around the base … You need to take it down a notch.>>”
The Wall Street Journal reported that in one of the emails Paula Broadwell asked Jill Kelley if her husband was aware of her actions.
Another accused Jill Kelley of touching David Petraeus provocatively under a table.
The source also said Jill Kelley would often accompany David Petraeus’s wife Holly on shopping trips to the International Mall in Tampa.
Jill Kelley, whose husband is a top cancer surgeon, has dodged questions from the media.
Before leaving her home she called police to the $1.3 million mansion to ask media to respect her privacy.
Jill Kelley left the home in a silver Mercedes with the registration plate “Honorary Consul” – a nod to her work as an unpaid liaison officer for the military headquarters at MacDill Airforce Base.
It was during David Petraeus’s two years in Tampa at the CENTCOM headquarters that he became friends with Jill Kelley and her husband Scott.
The friendship continued after the general left Tampa with the Kelley’s visiting the Petraeus’s home in Washington DC.
Today it has emerged that former CIA chief David Petraeus charmed another female journalist, Linda Robinson, who was writing a book on him so successfully that she once praised him for “always poking, prodding, demanding”.
Linda Robinson was so impressed with the future head of the CIA that she called him a “whirling dervish” who had “tremendous energy”.
In interviews Linda Robinson also spoke of his “informality” and how he was so media savvy that he was “very proactive about his public relations”.
Linda Robinson wrote her take on David Petraeus and his war record in 2008 called Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq.
After the book came out she was rewarded with a post alongside David Petraeus at U.S. Central Command where she is thought to have provided strategic analysis for the Afghanistan-Pakistan Centre.
There is no suggestion at all that Linda Robinson and David Petraeus had an affair, but the similarities between her and Paula Broadwell – the brunette biographer who allegedly had an affair with Petraeus over the past year- are clear and her comments throw a spotlight on how Petraeus charmed those around him with almost cult-like qualities.
They spent time together under similar circumstances to the way he got to know mistress Paula Broadwell when she later wrote her biography of him.
Paula Broadwell spoke repeatedly at lectures about her book about how willing David Petraeus was to mentor young scholar-soldiers like herself, and one of his classic “moves” was to take them out for a jog to see how fit they were.
“Our first interview in person was on a run. And I had proposed this because I knew it was a rite of passage for many of his former aids, to kind of get in the inner circle you had to be a runner,” Paula Broadwell said at a lecture in October.
Linda Robinson, 58, is a respected former U.S. News and World Report correspondent who specializes in security and the military.
She is currently an adjunct senior fellow on foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and is a Nieman fellow at Harvard University.
Linda Robinson has also been a senior editor at the respected Foreign Affairs magazine and her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and a string of policy journals.
Over 18 months in 2007 and 2008 she conducted “extensive” interviews with David Petraeus to complete Tell Me How This Ends, so named after what Petraeus remarked when the war in Iraq turned into an insurgency.
At the time he was head of the Multi-National Force in Iraq and was credited for persuading former President George W. Bush to back the troop “surge”.
Linda Robinson writes that David Petraeus changed the military for the better from a “top-down” organization to a “bottom-up” approach.
Linda Robinson was so impressed with David Petraeus that she called him a whirling dervish who had tremendous energy
In a series of interviews she also heaped praise on the man himself, including one in 2008 with NPR in which she expressed her affection for him.
Linda Robinson said: “And I think that’s probably sums up what he did do, a man with tremendous energy.
“So, he also communicated those ideas in the variety of ways in the daily briefings, which I sat in on and he was very active and contrasted with some of the previous generals.
“He was always poking, prodding, demanding. I mean he’s just ceaseless, kind of a whirling dervish.
“He goes out, runs with his battalion commanders, gets information from them, tells them what he thinks they need to be doing and just deals with hundreds and hundreds of emails a day and just you know, he’s really trying to be everywhere at once.”
In the book itself Linda Robinson notes David Petraeus’ “intellectual rigor” and how it meant he would “mount a sustained effort to understand the problem”.
In an interview with C-Span in 2008, Linda Robinson also told how she endured 125 F heat in Baghdad that left her “drenched and exhausted” in order to see David Petraeus and interview him.
She said: “I got to know him and watched him over this last 18 months, what really struck me was his informality and his approachability.”
Linda Robinson also defended David Petraeus’ love of the limelight and claimed that it was merely because he was “very proactive about his public relations”.
She said: “You know, he’s always willing to go out and talk. And a lot of, I would call them sort of <<old school Army>> officers are less comfortable and less willing to be proactive on that front.
“And you hear people who say, <<oh, he’s looking for attention>>, you know, sort of characterizing Petraeus as the attention-seeking general.
“But it’s really, for him, a way of trying to shape what he calls the <<information environment>>.
“He certainly does mind his career and his public profile. But I think there’s a real substantive purpose to why he does what he does.
“And there are, I think, people in the Army who have had some heartburn over that.”
Praise was high for Tell Me How This Ends, with the New York Times calling it “a first-rate piece of work, probing and conscientious”.
Its review says: “Robinson leaves the reader feeling that, however the war turns out, our country owes David Petraeus a debt of gratitude.”
According to the review, Linda Robinson brings an insider’s perspective to the subject whilst John Nagi in Army Magazine said it was “likely to remain the best analysis of General Petraeus’ role in the decisive years of the war in Iraq short of the general’s own memoirs”.
Since the revelations about David Petraeus emerged, critics have begun asking how questions about his cozy relationship with reporters.
Writing on Buzzfeed, Michael Hastings said that David Petraeus had been brilliant at “making the public think he was a man of great integrity and honor”.
He wrote: “How did Petraeus get away with all this for so long?
“Well, his first affair – and one that matters so much more than the fact that he was sleeping with a female or two – was with the media.”
General David Petraeus took his mistress Paula Broadwell with him on a government funded trip to Paris after he was named director of the Central Intelligence Agency, according to news reports.
David Petraeus made the trip with 40-year-old Paula Broadwell, who has written a fawning biography of him, in July 2011, an unnamed source told Buzzfeed. He was heading to his new job as chief of the CIA at the time.
Sixteen months later, the four-star general has resigned from his post after his affair with Paula Broadwell was uncovered by the FBI.
Buzzfeed also reports that David Petraeus’s unofficial press agent, Tom Ricks, helped Paula Broadwell score a literary agent, a publisher and a six-figure deal for her biography.
Paula Broadwell isn’t the only biographer of David Petraeus’s who has gotten special treatment from him.
His first biographer, former U.S. News and World Reporter Linda Robinson, went to work for David Petraeus at U.S. Central Command shortly after publishing her book, Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq.
General David Petraeus took his mistress Paula Broadwell with him on a government funded trip to Paris after he was named CIA director
David Petraeus’s affair with Paula Broadwell was uncovered when the FBI began an investigation after suspecting corruption between the pair.
He issued a statement acknowledging the affair after President Barack Obama accepted his resignation, which was announced by the CIA soon after.
“After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair,” he said in the statement.
“Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours. This afternoon, the president graciously accepted my resignation.”
Four-star general David Petraeus was a star on the battlefield, commanding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but his impeccable judgement failed him when he engaged in an extramarital affair with biographer Paula Broadwell that led to his downfall as CIA Director.
Celebrated as a scholar and a warrior, the 60-year-old Princeton graduate is admired as much for his intellect as he was his tactical ability and charisma on the battlefield.
Seen as one of the top American leaders of his generation, David Petraeus became known as an “A list” celebrity, is credited with pulling Iraq back from the brink of all-out civil war and had a career so stellar he once seemed on course for the US presidency.
After his revolutionary counter-insurgency tactics saved Iraq, David Petraeus oversaw battlefield success in Afghanistan commanding a surge of 30,000 troops ordered by President Barack Obama in late 2009.
“I don’t think he was professionally overrated. His were genuine accomplishments,” said James Carafano, a war historian with the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.
Senator John McCain, the 2008 GOP presidential candidate and the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on Friday that David Petraeus is one of “America’s greatest military heroes”.
“His inspirational leadership and his genius were directly responsible – after years of failure – for the success of the surge in Iraq,” John McCain said.
Indeed, as the U.S presidential campaign heated up in 2011, there was genuine talk of the war-hero running as part of a Republican ticket, potentially as vice-president.
The rumors continued up until August of this year, when the White House was forced to deny a report that President Barack Obama feared Mitt Romney stumping for the then CIA chief as his running mate.
In fact, at the time of his nomination to the CIA post, some Washington insiders had said the White House wanted to find a high-profile position for David Petraeus to ensure he would not be recruited by Republicans as a challenger to the 2012 Obama-Biden ticket.
However, ever the loyal soldier, David Petraeus repeatedly distanced himself from ambitions of elected office.
“I am not a politician, and I will never be, and I say that with absolute conviction,” David Petraeus said on NBC’s Meet the Press in August 2010.
When he was nominated to lead the CIA there were some concerns in intelligence circles that the high-profile four-star Army general might not be able to lead from the shadows as appropriate for a spy chief.
But once he took over the head office at the U.S. spy agency, David Petraeus kept a decidedly low public profile.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, expressed regret about the resignation of “one of America’s best and brightest” and said it was an “enormous loss” for the country.
“At CIA, Director Petraeus gave the agency leadership, stature, prestige and credibility both at home and abroad. On a personal level, I found his command of intelligence issues second to none,” Dianne Feinstein said.
After accepting his resignation about a year-and-a-half after nominating David Petraeus to the CIA post, Barack Obama said: “By any measure, he was one of the outstanding General officers of his generation, helping our military adapt to new challenges, and leading our men and women in uniform through a remarkable period of service in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he helped our nation put those wars on a path to a responsible end.”
David Petraeus was sworn in as CIA chief in September 2011 by Joe Biden with his wife Holly at his side
In 2010, David Petraeus stepped into the breach as the new commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan to replace General Stanley McChrystal who was fired by Obama in a scandal over an article in which McChrystal and his aides made mocking comments about the president and some of his top advisers.
In 2009, David Petraeus was diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer and underwent radiation treatment. The media-friendly general joked at that time at a Washington event that reporters were only gathered “to see if the guy is still alive”.
David Petraeus, born in Cornwall, New York, lives in Virginia with his wife Holly. They have two grown children, a son who was an Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan, and a daughter.
Known for his intensely competitive nature, David Petraeus graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1974, was the top of his 1983 class at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and went on to earn a doctorate in International Relations at Princeton in 1987.
His commands included the legendary 101st Airborne Division during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and during that campaign he quickly secured the north of the country around Mosul.
The soldier headed up the American efforts to train Iraqi security forces and eventually returned to the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to write his counterinsurgency manual – which is now required reading.
From that point onwards he became the logical choice for President George W. Bush to lead his “surge” in January 2007 which allowed the United States to completely withdraw from Iraq four-years later.
David Petraeus’s wife, Holly, is an activist and volunteer who champions military families, and she continued that work after her husband retired from the military and moved to the CIA.
Holly Petraeus currently is assistant director of the office of service member affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where she tries to keep unscrupulous lenders from taking advantage of military personnel.
The bureau was championed by Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, who was elected to the Senate from Massachusetts this week.
Holly Petraeus is the daughter of four-star General William Knowlton, who was superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point when Petraeus was a cadet.
She briefed the press at the Pentagon on her efforts recently and was introduced by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who called her “a true friend of the Department of Defense and a dedicated member of our military family”.
David Petraeus has four Defense Distinguished Service Medal awards, three Distinguished Service Medal awards, the Bronze Star Medal for valor, and the State Department Distinguished Service Award.
