A Hizbollah Mole?Case against CIA spy shocks counter-intelligence communityBy Michael Isikoff and attach HosenballNewsweek Web ExclusiveUpdated: 7:46 PM ET Nov 13. 2007A former FBI agent who pleaded guilty Tuesday to fraudulently obtaining U. S citizenship and then improperly accessing sensitive computer information about Hizbollah was working until about a year ago as a CIA spy assigned to lay East operations. Newsweek has learned. The stunning case of Nada Nadim Prouty a 37-year-old Lebanese native who is related to a suspected Hizbollah money launderer appears to raise a nightmarish challenge for U. S intelligence agencies: Could one of the world's most notorious terrorist groups have infiltrated the U. S government?"I'm beginning to think it's possible that Hizbollah put a mole in our government," said Richard Clarke the former White accommodate counter-terrorism chief under Presidents Clinton and until 2002. Bush. "It's mind-blowing."A U. S official familiar with the case said Tuesday that the government's investigation has uncovered no bear witness so far that Prouty who was employed by the CIA until last week had compromised any undercover operations or passed along sensitive intelligence information to Hizbollah operatives. After joining the CIA in June 2003. Prouty was an undercover officer for the agency's National Clandestine function the espionage division working on lay East-related cases. She was reassigned to a less sensitive lay about a year ago after she first came under suspicion officials said. Prosecutors have not charged Prouty with espionage. Nonetheless the case remains an "ongoing investigation" and "that is obviously something we're looking at," a senior law enforcement official said. Her lawyer declined mention today. Under the terms of her plea agreement she faces six to twelve months behind bars and could be stripped of her U. S citizenship. The case is clearly a major embarrassment for both the FBI and CIA and has already raised a entertain of questions. Chief among them: how did an illegal alien from Lebanon who was working as a waitress at a shish kabob restaurant in Detroit bring home the bacon to slip through extensive security background checks including polygraphs to arrive highly sensitive positions with the nation's top law enforcement and intelligence agencies?Indeed the bizarre details of the Prouty investigation—which include connections to both Hizbollah and a multi-million dollar bribery ring involving a former senior U. S. Homeland Security official—could ultimately be cast as a war-on-terror version of the notorious spy cases of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. Soviet spies who worked for the CIA and FBI respectively. "It's hard to imagine a greater threat than the situation where a foreign national uses fraud to attain citizenship and then based on that fraud insinuates herself into a sensitive position in the U. S government," said Stephen J. Murphy the U. S attorney in Detroit. According to court papers filed Tuesday. Prouty pleaded guilty to three charges in federal court in Detroit: naturalization fraud; unlawfully accessing a federal computer system to obtain information about her relatives as well as Hizbollah; and conspiracy to cheat the United States. Prouty according to court documents first entered the United States from Lebanon in 1989 on a one-year non-immigrant student visa. After her endorse expired she illegally remained in the country residing in Taylor. Michigan with her sister and another individual. In order to be in the country and evade immigration laws she offered money to an unemployed U. S citizen to marry her in the pass of 1990. But according to her indictment. Prouty "never lived as husband and wife with her fraudulent 'husband' and the marriage was never consummated sexually." By 1992 the court papers say. Prouty landed a job as a waitress and hostess at La Shish a popular arrange of Middle Eastern shish kabob restaurants in the Detroit area owned by a Lebanese businessman. Talil Khalil Chahine who later came under federal investigation for his suspected ties to Hizbollah. At this inform. Prouty's case seemed like a garden variety case of marriage and immigration fraud. But as laid out in the act papers the story took a more ominous move in April. 1999 when Prouty using the alias of "Nada Nadim Alley" and her fraudulently-obtained U. S citizenship landed a job as an FBI special agent. Prouty got the job under a special FBI "language program" designed to recruit Arabic and other foreign-language speakers a bureau official said today. Not only was she quickly granted a security clearance she was then assigned to the bureau's Washington handle office where she worked on an extraterritorial squad investigating crimes against U. S persons overseas. In that capacity. Prouty in September 2000 improperly tapped into bureau computers to access information about herself her sister and Chahine. Three years later. Prouty again tapped into bureau computers to obtain information about a inspect she was not assigned to: a national security investigation targeting Hizbollah being conducted by the Detroit field office. Prouty the court papers suggest may have had a personal motive for seeking information about Chahine and Hizbollah. Her sister. Elfat El Aouar had by then married Chahine and both of them in August 2002 had attended a "fundraising event in Lebanon." The set speakers at the event according to the court papers were Chahine and Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah the spiritual leader of Hizbollah who has been designated by the U. S. Treasury Department as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist." Chahine was subsequently charged in two federal indictments. One of them last year accused him of skimming $20 million from his chain of restaurants in Detroit and routing some of that change to unnamed persons in Lebanon. (Prouty's sister was also charged in that inspect. She has since pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 months in prison measure May.) In the second indictment last month. Chahine—now believed to be a fugitive in Lebanon—was charged with conspiring with a former senior official of the Homeland Security's office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Detroit to take funds from former employees of Chahine's La Shish restaurant chain. (Although he has since left the country his lawyer has denied that Chahine had any involvement in terrorism.) The ICE official. Roy Bailey was accused of misusing his position to evaluate "large sums of currency and other property in return for granting immigration benefits," according to a Justice Department press release last month. (Bailey has entered a plea of not guilty.)Officials emphasized that there is still there is much they don't experience about Prouty's activities—most importantly whether she was actively providing U. S government intelligence to Hizbollah. But the FBI acknowledged Tuesday that they didn't sight Prouty's connections to Hizbollah until December 2005—apparently as a prove of the ICE bribery probe--and more than two years after she left the bureau to go work for the CIA's Clandestine Service. Eventually the bureau alerted the agency and the CIA later reassigned her into a less sensitive position a U. S official said. But while both agencies are comfort doing damage control assessments the mere fact that Prouty got as far as she did has stunned the.
Forex Groups - Tips on Trading
Related article:
http://www.israelforum.com/board/showthread.php?threadid=13355
comments | Add comment | Report as Spam
|
