http://www.nydailynews.com/news/wn_repo ... y_s-1.html

Busted illegal alien was great spy, say sources

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BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

Friday, November 16th 2007, 4:00 AM


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WASHINGTON - An illegal Lebanese immigrant who lied her way into FBI and CIA jobs was so well-regarded that she got an undercover assignment in Iraq to aid U.S. counterinsurgency efforts, intelligence sources said Thursday.

Nada Nadim Prouty, 37, who pleaded guilty Tuesday to fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship and snooping on FBI files on Hezbollah, worked in the CIA's Baghdad station sometime between 2003 and 2006 and had a knack for passing as a local.

She also demonstrated a talent for breaking captured Al Qaeda "high-value targets," an intelligence source told the Daily News.

"She was not only good at debriefing HVTs [high-value targets], she was able to pose as a native Arab and easily blend in," said the source.

Prouty was a covert CIA operations officer "just like Valerie Plame," the source added, referring to the spy infamously outed in a 2003 newspaper column.

She was so good that some in the agency want to hire Prouty back one day, the source said.

Officials again yesterday insisted Prouty is not suspected of espionage or of being a mole for the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah. "There is no indication at this point that she was engaged in espionage" for Hezbollah while at the CIA, said a senior U.S. official familiar with the case.

In fact, the CIA fears she'll be assassinated for her U.S. spy work if she's ever deported to Beirut, two sources said.

Other knowledgeable sources are convinced otherwise. Her brother-in-law is a fugitive Hezbollah fund-raiser who helped her lie to win U.S. citizenship seven years before she joined the FBI in 1999.

She scoured FBI files for his name, Talal Khalil Chahine. She once worked for him in Detroit. Her defenders say she was rifling files out of worry for her sister, who married him in 2000.

Once fingered as an illegal, there was no choice but to fire her. "You're supposed to be a saint before you join CIA - then you're trained to be a liar," said an agency veteran.