NY: It is the question that, among so many in the tumble of allegation and revelation, just keeps on getting asked. How did she ever get so close?
How did she get close enough to take classified military documents home as she has now admitted to doing? So close that she felt somehow entitled to send harassing emails to Jill Kelley, telling the Florida socialite to 'back off' the man she clearly considered hers.
Even before Paula Broadwell's affair with General David Petraeus emerged it was a point which bothered talk-show hosts, perplexed interviewers and left onlookers faintly bewildered at the string of appearances which constituted Broadwell's publicity tour for that book, All In.
Her own explanation, such as it was, is glib at best. They met, she repeatedly trotted out, at a dinner for West Point alumni back in 2006.
After dinner there were drinks and at drinks he gave her his business card and they just kept in touch.
Two years later, in 2008, she was working on a dissertation on theories of leadership and so, she told Jon Stewart, 'I shot him an email, and said, "I'm gonna to go for it."'
Petraeus's reaction was to invite her well and truly into his camp - a decision he rues today. He has told his friend Colonel Peter Mansoor that he considers his actions, 'morally reprehensible'. Though, interestingly could not resist a flick of self-defence, pointing out that he had 'violated no laws'.
He says he is ignoring the media storm and on Friday will testify before a House Committee on the Benghazi consulate attack. He will do so behind closed doors.
Still, the inescapable fact remains, that for a man of such experience the extent to which he let his guard down with Broadwell is breathtaking.
But then Broadwell is nothing if not convincing when it comes to outlining her own credentials and, given the glowing portrait of 'strategic leadership' she penned as Petraeus's biography, nothing if not flattering.
In one television interview she recalled approaching General Petraeus and asking him to be a case-study for her dissertation. She wanted to show, 'What Petraeus's role was in forcing the military to adapt to win the wars we were in'.
'There was no room for a conversation of shortcomings of the Petraeus theology. She wasn't a reporter. She struck me as an acolyte,' one advisor to Petraeus is quoted as telling the New York Post.
And while Broadwell stroked her subject's ego with one hand she shored up her own credibility with the other; part Mata Hari, part blue-stocking.
Another in the Petraeus camp noted, on meeting her, 'I was underwhelmed. It was surprising to me that she was his official biographer.'
But, when it came to promoting her book, for Paula establishing her own academic, military and security credentials came second only to establishing whether General Petraeus was, as Jon Stewart put it, 'awesome or incredibly awesome'.
She dropped academic qualifications and security clearance the way a socialite might pepper her conversation with boasts of parties attended and 'BFFs made.
According to Broadwell, being embedded in Afghanistan with Petraeus was not the huge leap many imagined because, she explained, 'We had previously met through academia’.
She herself was a graduate of West Point and a specialist in counter-terrorism with black ops experience, high security clearance, 'and then some'. How the suspension of that much vaunted government clearance must smart.
She was High School Valedictorian, All State Basketball player, top of her class at West Point, holder of a masters from Harvard...and how do we know all of this? Because Broadwell has taken great pains to tell us.
We know that her husband Scott Broadwell is not 'just' a radiologist but an 'interventional radiologist'.
Writing in The New Republic, Noam Scheiber states, 'When my friend met her, she was fond of pointing out that her husband was no mere radiologist but a special breed known as as "interventional radiologist." She would draw out the word "interventional" for emphasis.'
We know that she can run six-minute miles and do hundreds of press-ups, that she has 13 per cent body fat and is an ironman triathlete and marathon runner.
We know all this because she has told us. We know that she hosted a charity BBQ for wounded veterans because she invited Jon Stewart and the assembled press.
Meanwhile, until she stopped posting, her Twitter feed was a dizzying mixture of her following both world-causes and the world-famous.
According to the Times she recently tweeted,'Heading 2 @AspenInstitue 4 the Seucirty Forum tomorrow! Panel (media & terrorism) followed by a 1v1 run with Lance Armstrong'.
The political, professional and academic platform on which she now teeters is one entirely of her own, formidable, construction: itself an exercise in strategy to rival Petraeus's own.
She has set out her credentials relentlessly with faux humility, referring to herself as a mere 'mentee' of Petraeus on one hand then telling the Charlotte Observer in her hometown in North Carolina, ‘Petraeus once joked I was his Avvatar’ a breathtakingly arrogant aside.
Margaret Thatcher once noted that if you had to tell people you were a lady, you probably weren't. But self-effacement seems the only class that Paula ever sat out.
And the more impressive Broadwell made herself the more flattering her interest in Petraeus must surely have been. What better way to appeal to a man in power than to appeal to his vanity?
Noam Scheiber, describes Petraeus as a man of 'overachieving impulses and intellecutal pretensions'.
Recognising that, Broadwell seems to have taken those dubious attributes as her own template for what she described in several publicity interviews as her 'new path of the soldier-scholar'.
As such she has been a keen writer of opinion pieces and regular poster on the West Point Alumni Notes page.
Writing in the Boston Globe in 2009 she tackled the issue of fraternisation bewteen the sexes on the front line, 'Human sexuality will always present a challenge to organisational discipline. In isolated outposts [it] could create a situation where issues of sex impede an organization's survival skills'.
Rather presciently she concluded, 'Banning sex is futile and impossible; the best approach is to set rules regarding fraternization, maintain awareness of relationships within the command, and strictly and fairly discipline transgressors.'
On many occasions Broadwell has noted of Petraeus that he, 'spoke truth to power'.
But if the events of the past week have shown anything it is that the court of the man known as 'King David,' lacked anyone willing or able to do the same to him.
Because where Petraeus 'spoke truth to power' Paula wanted to dissect that power and to get close to it.
Revealingly, in a recent address to the University of Denver she claimed to have been drawn to the military as an 'instrument of power' and that she wanted to understand how that instrument worked - presumably so she could play it.
