Hezbollah Spy Fooled the CIA and the FBI
By Noah Shachtman November 13, 2007 | 5:55:00 PMCategories: Cloak and Dagger
How good are the FBI and CIA's background checks? Each agency requires its own separate investigation and polygraph before people are signed up to sensitive jobs. Each agency missed an absolute whopper...

A 37-year-old woman who previously worked as an FBI agent and a CIA analyst, pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges involving improper access of information...

Sources say Nada Nadim Prouty, a Lebanese national and resident of Virginia, entered the United States on a student visa and earned citizenship through a sham marriage. [In other words an illegal alien]

While officials say there is no evidence of actual espionage and no evidence that she was working as a spy, she used her access as an FBI agent to look up information about herself and her relatives, some of whom may have ties to Hezbollah. She also is accused of improperly taking classified information home with her.

It is hard to downplay the significance of such a case. As a credentialed FBI Special Agent and a fully-cleared CIA analyst, the volume and value of information she had access to was both deep and far-reaching. Hezbollah scored a double-whammy that I don't think even the KGB ever managed to pull off: an "intelligence community" agent that punked two counterintelligence scrubs.

-- Michael Tanji, cross-posted at Haft of the Spear
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/11/d ... koval.html