JOIN USRetired last week after 37 years in the Army, Petraeus was sworn in as the 20th director of the so-called silent service in a private ceremony today.
Silent is what some in the White House want the well-connected former four-star general to remain, said two current and one former US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive discussions at the National Security Council.
Admirers and detractors alike are watching to see whether Petraeus will use his influence with the media and Capitol Hill to pursue policies discordant to the White House officials who disagreed with him over the course of the Afghan war.
At a time when top figures close to President Barack Obama were arguing for a troop drawdown, Petraeus helped persuade Obama to increase troops in Afghanistan in a repeat of his counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, a strategy now credited with producing tangible if fragile progress.
That ran counter to the strategy favoured by Vice President Joe Biden, among others, to leave the job to a much smaller force of trainers and special operations troops to hunt terrorists.
Biden presided over Petraeus' swearing in.
There is some unease among intelligence officials as Petraeus assumes leadership of an organisation that has produced a series of grim assessments of conditions in Afghanistan, where the general oversaw the war directly or indirectly for more than four years.
Petraeus has acknowledged differences with CIA analysts in the past, saying in Senate testimony that he thought the analysts were forced to rely on data at least six weeks old;
He thought that skewed their analyses, whereas his battlefield data had been more current.
The most recent CIA assessment of the Afghan war could be used either to support or to reject Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy, which advocated a surge of troops to protect the Afghans and buy time to build a local force to do the same.
The CIA analysis predicted a grim, continued stalemate in fighting with the Taliban, according to one current and one former US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters.