Reporter's heartfelt email over diplomat affair

[Deleted]

news.ninemsn.com.au/world/8484640/reporter-sends-heartfelt-email-over-diplomat-affair

A prominent US war correspondent who resigned last week amid revelations she had an affair with a high-ranked diplomat in Iraq has said she was truly sorry for her actions.

Gina Chon resigned from her job at the Wall Street Journal this week after it was revealed she had a relationship with a married official from the National Security Council who is now her husband.

Both Chon and Brett McGurk have since divorced their previous spouses and married each other, but leaked emails showed the two were a couple earlier than they had disclosed.

Now Chon has written an impassioned email denying Mr McGurk leaked any classified information to her after they began their affair in 2008, and apologising for her behaviour.

Published by the US site Buzzfeed, Chon said she felt she had become "collateral damage" to a bid to derail her husband's nomination as the new US ambassador to Iraq.

"People were hurt along the way and for that, I am truly sorry," she wrote.

"I made stupid mistakes four years ago in Iraq while working for the Wall Street Journal and for that, I’m also sorry.

"I had to leave my job at a news organization I love and for that, I am heartbroken."

Chon said she had never felt "so vulnerable, so targeted and so exposed as I have in the last two weeks."

"But underneath the half-truths and outright lies is a fairly simple tale of two people who met in Baghdad, fell in love, got engaged and later married," she wrote.

Mr McGurk needs a clear majority of support in the US Senate to be named ambassador to Iraq. Six senators have announced that news of the affair has influenced their decision to oppose his nomination.