Paula Broadwell's DU Professor Is Shocked, But Calls Her 'Brilliant'

DENVER (CBS4) - There are now questions about whether the affair of former CIA Director David Petraeus threatened national security.

The woman named as Petraeus' mistress, Paula Broadwell, made a speech at the University of Denver last month, and her remarks have some people wondering if the general gave her classified information.

4 On Your Side Investigator Rick Sallinger spoke with one of Broadwell's former professors on Monday. Sallinger found there is high praise for Broadwell as a student and scholar while in Denver, but certainly shock and disappointment at her sudden high profile.

Broadwell made her mark at the University of Denver with a master's degree in international security in 2006. It was from the highly regarded Korbel School of International Studies, and Dr. Shaul Gabbay was one of her professors.

"I can say that as an individual she was a very high level individual with very high values," Gabbay said. "I was totally shocked given the actual details of the story; a married woman, a married man."

Just over two weeks ago Broadwell was one of the featured speakers at an alumni symposium on campus. Her comments on the U.S. consulate attack in Benghazi, Libya, have now raised eyebrows about where she got her information.

"Now, I don't know if a lot of you have heard this, but the CIA Annex had actually taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner, and they think the attack on the consulate was an effort to try to get those prisoners back. So that's still being vetted," Broadwell told the audience.

But a CIA spokesman said "any suggestion that the agency is still in the detention business is uninformed and baseless."

At the university where she studied and spoke in Denver there is surprise and dismay.

"Anyone in the school that has interacted with her, that I know, was totally shocked and was extremely disappointed, given the potential that this particular brilliant, I repeat, brilliant individual has," Gabbay said.

Broadwell's book on Petraeus, called "All In," is now receiving more attention than ever expected.

Broadwell also spoke at a party in early October honoring female Republican candidates for the Colorado state legislature. No one had any idea at the time she would soon become part of a news story generating major headlines.