A U.S. official close to Gen. John R. Allen, the commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, said that there was no affair between Allen and Jill Kelley, the woman who received threatening emails from Paula Broadwell and who has reportedly exchanged hundreds of emails with Allen over the past few years, the Washington Post reports.
“He’s never been alone with her,” the senior official said. “Did he have an affair? No.”
The senior official also emphasized that the volume of communications between the two “was nowhere near” 20,000 to 30,000 personal messages. The official said the high page count reported by the FBI may have been the result of printing numerous individual messages that contained lengthy threads of earlier exchanges. …
Some of the e-mails may have prompted suspicions among FBI investigators because Allen sometimes used words such as “sweetheart” to refer to her, the senior official said. But the official added that Allen, who was raised in Virginia, employed that language as a term of platonic friendship, not romantic interest.
