‘Shirtless’ FBI agent embroiled in Petraeus sex scandal investigated millennium bomber
Nov 14, 2012, 4:31 PM | Updated: 4:51 pm
The so-called shirtless FBI agent embroiled in the General David Petraeus sex scandal is described as a veteran counterterrorism investigator who helped put the millennium bomber behind bars, as The New York Times first reported Wednesday.
The Times named the agent as 47-year-old Frederick W. Humphries II.
Humphries was also involved in the investigation against James Ujaama, the Seattle man who pleaded guilty in 2003 to conspiring to aid the Taliban.
“Fred is a passionate kind of guy,” a former colleague told The Times. “He’s kind of an obsessive type. If he locked his teeth onto something, he’d be a bulldog.”
Humphries is believed to be the agent who was first tipped-off to emails that revealed a sexual relationship between the director of the C.I.A. and his biographer, Paula Broadwell.
Jill Kelley, a Tampa, Fla., military socialite and friend of the Petraeus family, came to Humphries after she received emails from Broadwell that accused her of being flirtatious with Gen. Petraeus at various events.
Convinced the F.B.I. was not taking the matter seriously; Humphries took the emails to Washington state Representative Dave Reichert, who passed them along to House majority leader Eric Cantor.
Colleagues in the F.B.I. believed Humphries had become personally involved in the investigation, and media outlets reported that he sent shirtless photos to Kelley.
Lawrence Berger, the general counsel for the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, told The Times that Humphries and his wife had been “social friends with Ms. Kelley and her husband prior to the day she referred the matter to him.”
He told the newspaper that Humphries sent a photo to Kelley years ago, but that it was a “joke.”
“That picture was sent years before Ms. Kelley contacted him about this, and it was sent as part of a larger context of what I would call social relations in which the families would exchange numerous photos of each other,” Berger told The Times.
