Thread: A Hizbollah Mole?

A Hizbollah Mole?
Case against CIA spy shocks counter-intelligence community
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 7:46 PM ET Nov 13, 2007

A 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 Middle 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 question 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 House 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 evidence 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 Service, the espionage division, working on Middle East-related cases. She was reassigned to a less sensitive position 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 comment 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 host 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 manage to slip through extensive security background checks, including polygraphs, to land 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 defraud 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 visa expired, she illegally remained in the country, residing in Taylor, Michigan with her sister and another individual. In order to stay in the country and evade immigration laws, she offered money to an unemployed U.S. citizen to marry her in the summer 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 chain 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 point, Prouty's case seemed like a garden variety case of marriage and immigration fraud. But as laid out in the court papers, the story took a more ominous turn 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 field 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 case 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 keynote 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 cash to unnamed persons in Lebanon. (Prouty's sister was also charged in that case. She has since pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 months in prison last 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 extort 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 accept "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 know 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 discover Prouty's connections to Hizbollah until December 2005—apparently as a result 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 still doing damage control assessments, the mere fact that Prouty got as far as she did has stunned the counter-intelligence community. "This is not good," said one chagrined senior official, who, like all officials quoted anonymously in this story, declined to speak on the record owing to the sensitivity of the subject.

Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman, said: "The CIA, among other federal agencies, cooperated with the investigation. Ms. Prouty was a mid-level employee who came to us in 2003 from the FBI, where she had been a special agent. The naturalization issue occurred well before she was hired by the Bureau. She formally resigned from the federal service as part of her plea agreement."
http://newsweek.com/id/70309

Hizballah Mole Case Reflects Depth of Threat
By Bill West
http://oneoldvet.com/?p=3639

The emerging prosecution case against the former FBI and CIA officer in Detroit who has just pleaded guilty to various Federal felonies stemming from her apparent fraudulent infiltration of those agencies demonstrates the threat posed by operatives and sympathizers of terrorist organizations penetrating the front-line national security departments defending America from those very terror organizations. This is nothing new. This is the way skilled hostile intelligence organizations conduct espionage during wartime. This particular case, disturbingly, may be indicative of the level of sophistication Hizballah’s intelligence apparatus, surely with the assistance of the Iranian government, has reached.

Equally disturbing is how the accused defendant employed, with apparent ease, immigration fraud to remain in the United States after first entering on a temporary student visa (and how many hundreds of thousands of others like her from terrorist producing countries have similarly entered the US in recent years?). She then engaged in a sham marriage to obtain permanent resident status and ultimately obtained naturalized US citizenship via fraud. Having obtained US citizenship, she applied to the FBI and became an agent and later transferred to the CIA. A more potentially damaging security scenario would be hard to imagine.

While the Federal law enforcement authorities who brought this case to fruition should be commended, there are apparent systemic problems presented by this case. [color=red][b]The background investigation process for such positions, one might have assumed, should have identified her original illegal immigration status. Was that even a “red flagâ€

This is big news, the woman is an illegal alien. I suppose Rick Sanchez would like her too....

Originally Posted by jp_48504

This is big news, the woman is an illegal alien. I suppose Rick Sanchez would like her too....

Yeah, he'd be giving her a big hug and doing another hit piece on
William about it.

Prosecutors: Illegal immigrant worked for FBI, CIA, stole info
Woman was sister-in-law of fugitive La Shish restaurant owner, stole info on investigation
November 13, 2007
By DAVID ASHENFELTER
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

The sister-in-law of the indicted fugitive owner of the La Shish restaurant chain got sensitive jobs at the FBI and CIA, despite being an illegal immigrant, federal prosecutors said in court documents unsealed today in Detroit.

The woman, Nada Nadim Prouty, 37, of Vienna, Va., also tapped into a sensitive FBI computer to find out what federal investigators knew about her, La Shish restaurant owner Talal Chahine, and her sister, who is married to Chahine.

Prosecutors said she took an unknown quantity of classified information home with her. It’s unclear what happened, or what she did with the information, prosecutors said.

The information pertained to a federal investigation of Chahine and his possible involvement with Hizballah, which has been declared a terrorist organization by the U.S State Department.

In 2002, Chahine and his wife, Elfat El Aouar, attended a fundraising event in Lebanon, where the keynote speakers were Hizballah leaders.

Prouty pleaded guilty to conspiracy, unauthorized computer access and naturalization fraud during a 30-minute hearing before U.S. District Judge Avern Cohn. The most serious charge, naturalization fraud, carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Under the terms of a plea deal with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Prouty would face a prison sentence of 6-12 months, be stripped of her U.S. citizenship and be ordered deported. Prouty hired an unemployed U.S. citizen to marry her in 1990, a year after she entered the country and overstayed her student visa.

However, prosecutors said she won’t be allowed to leave the U.S. because she used to work for the FBI and CIA and has access to sensitive information vital to homeland security.

It remained unclear why background checks the FBI and CIA conducted before hiring her didn’t reveal her illegal immigration status. Also unclear is why the forerunner agency to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn’t find out about the marriage fraud.

Court documents said Chahine, who fled to Lebanon in 2005 to avoid tax-evasion charges, vouched for the legitimacy of her marriage.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/arti ... 8/0/NEWS03

Ex-FBI Employee Improperly Accessed Files on Hezbollah
Lebanese Woman Enters Guilty Pleas

By Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, November 14, 2007; A03



A Lebanese national who fraudulently gained U.S. citizenship through a sham marriage managed to obtain sensitive jobs at both the FBI and CIA, and at one point used her security clearance to access restricted files about the terrorist group Hezbollah, according to court documents filed yesterday.

U.S. officials say there is no evidence that Nada Nadim Prouty, 37, passed secrets to Hezbollah or to other groups the United States considers terrorist. But Prouty's ability to conceal her past from two of the nation's top anti-terrorism agencies raised new concerns about their vulnerability to infiltration.

"It is 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 U.S. Attorney Stephen J. Murphy in a statement announcing a plea agreement with Prouty.

Prouty lives in Vienna and has worked for the CIA since 2003. She pleaded guilty in federal court in Detroit to charges of conspiracy, naturalization fraud and unauthorized computer access. In addition to losing her CIA job, she has agreed to forfeit her U.S. citizenship and to face additional penalties, possibly including fines and a prison term.

Prouty came to the United States as a college student and paid an unemployed acquaintance to enter into a false marriage in 1990 so she could gain U.S. citizenship, according to court documents. She got a job as an FBI special agent in 1999, gaining a security clearance and a post with the bureau's Washington Field Office investigating overseas crimes.

In 2000, she accessed restricted FBI computer files on Hezbollah, according to court documents, apparently to see whether family members had been linked to the Lebanon-based group. Prouty also improperly took home unspecified classified documents, according to her plea agreement. Justice officials said there is no indication that the classified records were shared with others.

In June 2003, she left the FBI to join the CIA's operations division, accepting what was described as a mid-level position that would have included multiple security clearances and the ability to work undercover.

FBI spokesman Stephen Kodak said Prouty underwent a full background investigation before she was hired, including interviews with her current and former husband and with family and friends in Lebanon. Prouty also passed an FBI polygraph test with "no deception noted," Kodak said.

"These are some of the challenges that we have to realistically face when we're out there trying to hire so many people, especially those who have foreign-language backgrounds or who weren't born in this country," Kodak said. He said that no one else has been charged in the case but that "the investigation is ongoing."

Prouty's sister and brother-in-law at one time attended a fundraiser in Lebanon featuring a speech by Sheik Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, whom the U.S. government identifies as a terrorist and as an ideological leader of Hezbollah. But a U.S. official, who requested anonymity because details of the probe remain classified, said that "at this point, there is no reason to treat this as a counterterrorism case" involving a hostile group.

The case marks yet another serious security breach at the FBI, which has come under repeated criticism for lackluster security procedures after the 2001 arrest of Robert P. Hanssen, a longtime Soviet and Russian spy. In an October report, the Justice Department's inspector general concluded that the FBI is still vulnerable to espionage because it has not implemented several key security measures after that case, including improvements to its background check system.

The report said that lapses in the FBI's internal security program prevented its officials from detecting breaches by Leandro Aragoncillo, a former FBI intelligence analyst who provided national defense documents to former and current Philippine officials. He was arrested in 2005 and in July was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Prouty's case is also notable because of her ability to gain improper access to files in the Automated Case System, the FBI's antiquated computer network. The FBI has bungled repeated attempts to replace ACS and is unlikely to have a new system in place for several years.

www.washingtonpost.com

Added to Homepage:
http://www.alipac.us/article-2715--0-0.html

Schlussel's been following this for a couple of years now. If Dearborn isn't being thoroughly surveilled we're in a whole lot of trouble. And having lived in that area most of my life I can say that realistically.

November 13, 2007
**** UPDATE: Muslim FBI/CIA Agent Spy for Hezbollah is Sis-in-Law of Hezbollah's $20 Million Financier; FBI/CIA Allowed Her to Remain on Job for FOUR! Years ****; Shocker: Hezbollah Said They'd Infiltrate the FBI & They Did; When a Spy is "Not a Spy";



By Debbie Schlussel

**** UPDATE: I was right, yet again. I've read Muslim FBI Agent/Hezbollah spy Nada Nadim Prouty's plea agreement (read it here). And guess what? Surprise!--She's the sister-in-law of Hezbollah's $20 million dollar financier Talal Khalil Chahine (owner of "La Shish" restaurants which remain open!), whom U.S. Attorney Stephen Murphy allowed to flee the country. Prouty is the SISTER of Chahine's wife, Elfat El-Aouar. Yup, LUUUV those great FBI and CIA Background Checks of agents.


Nada Nadim Prouty: Hezbollah's Illegal Alien FBI/CIA Agent Spy

And get this: The FBI and U.S. Attorney Stephen Murphy (and before him, U.S. Attorneys Craig Morford and Jeffrey Collins) knew Prouty was a spy for Hezbollah back in 2003, but they allowed her to work for the FBI and CIA for over FOUR Years! They did not remove her from the job until the end of this past September--1.5 years after her brother-in-law was indicted for financing Hezbollah!!!!!!

And I was right on another thing. She will do no or almost no jail time. Read the plea agreement, linked above. As reader Tim points out:

Nada Nadim Prouty is facing less than 12 months of jail time, or no jailtime at all, and three years of supervised probation and a fine totaling $2,225 under the plea agreement.

For infiltrating the FBI and CIA and spying for Hezbollah.

****

I'm not sure why everyone is so surprised with today's prosecution of Nada Nadim Prouty, an American Arab FBI agent and CIA analyst, for spying for Hezbollah and passing information on to the terrorist group. Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, and other Islamic terrorist groups have long said they'd infiltrate the FBI and other American law enforcement organizations and they did.

That's no surprise. In fact, what is surprising is that this woman is among the first they've caught. She's a drop in the bucket. As long as we continue to hire Muslims to be translators and analysts, as long as we continue to give money to Arabic and Muslim schools to teach their kids Arabic instead of non-Muslim, non-Arab Americans, as long as the FBI (and ICE) continues to turn down Sephardic Jews and Maronite Lebanese Christians who speak Arabic and who've applied for jobs in favor of extremist Muslims, that's the result we will get. Spies, spies, and more spies.
fbi.jpghezbollah4.jpg

As my late Dad used to say, "Cast thy s*it upon the waters." That's what they did, even after 9/11 and even today. And that's why they--and sadly, we--reap it back tenfold and more.

And this will continue until we change and until the FBI and the White House and the President and everyone else of authority in between continues to kowtow to the Barbarians inside our gate. Oh, and kudos to the FBI for, once again, doing another bang-up job in background checks. Do you think a non-Muslim, non-Arab would get such a lax once-over? Think again.

And we trust these Famous But Incompetents to protect us against terrorists? Heck, read the article. She was spying, and they still can't admit she was spying. Good Luck, America:

A 37-year-old woman who previously worked as an FBI agent and a CIA analyst, pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges involving her disclosure of information to people outside the government, CBS News has learned.

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.

While officials say there is no evidence of actual espionage and no
evidence that she was working as a spy, she is accused of passing
information to sympathizers of Hezbollah, a group the U.S. has labeled a terrorist organization.

Sources say she came under suspicion after performing a number of
computer searches unrelated to cases she had been assigned to.

According to a Justice Department press release [DS: which is filled with self-congratulations by agents and DoJ officials who allowed her to remain on the job for FOUR years after they knew she was a spy], Prouty pleaded guilty
in the Eastern District of Michigan to charges of fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship, which she later used to gain employment at the FBI and CIA; accessing a federal computer system to unlawfully query information about her relatives and the terrorist organization Hezbollah; and conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Oh, and by the way, a later draft of the same CBS report says this:

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.

Nice. She works for the FBI, AND she and her family work for Hezbollah. Like I said, hurray for those awesome FBI background checks of agents. Alhamdillullah [Praise Allah]!

Let's see what kind of sentence she gets. Don't hold your breath for them to throw the book at this poor Hezbollah-loving traitor. I predict a lot of lenience and a relatively paltry sentence for her.

The fact that she's being "prosecuted" in the Eastern District of Michigan, the domain of Hezbollah-sympathizing U.S. Attorney Stephen Murphy III a/k/a Abu Porno, means that they probably knew for several years that she was spying for Hezbollah and waited until she got all the goods before they moved on her. That's Murphy's standard M.O. for his Hezbo buds.

And please explain this part to me:

While officials say there is no evidence of actual espionage and no evidence that she was working as a spy, she is accused of passing information to sympathizers of Hezbollah, a group the U.S. has labeled a terrorist organization.

Um, call me stupid, but if "passing information to sympathizers of Hezbollah" is not "evidence of actual espionage" or "evidence that she was working as a spy," then what the hell is? That quote above is one of the dumbest yet I've read coming out of the incompetent "Justice" Department.

Posted by Debbie at November 13, 2007 03:34 PM
http://www.debbieschlussel.com/archives ... zboll.html

Hizballah's Penetration of the FBI, CIA
By Steven Emerson

As noted by Michael Cutler, the sister-in-law of Hizballah-linked fugitive Talal Chahine pled guilty today to fraudulently obtaining her citizenship, using her illegally acquired status to attain employment with both the FBI and CIA, and illegally using government computers to gather Hizballah-related intelligence.

Nadia Nadim Prouty, aka Nadia Nadim Al Aouar, came to the U.S. in 1990 on a non-immigrant visa, overstayed her visa and entered into a fraudulent marriage in Michigan to a U.S. citizen. Prouty submitted a series of fraudulent affidavits, notably from her sister Elfat Al Aouar and her husband, Talal Chahine, attesting to the validity of Prouty’s marriage. According to the federal government, “As planned, [Prouty] never lived as husband and wife with her fraudulent ‘husband’ and the marriage was never consummated sexually.â€

Prouty Case Shows Citizenship the "Keys to the Kingdom"
By Michael Cutler

I do not know how many times I have made the point that United States citizenship represents the "Keys to the Kingdom." United States citizenship opens all sorts of doors to those who do not wish to share the "American Dream" but rather create a nightmare for our nation and our citizens. United States citizenship enables the alien who acquires United States citizenship to be able to work at any job he or she is qualified to do. It enables the person in question to be given security clearances that provide access to highly sensitive intelligence and enables such individuals to embed themselves in our nation and hide in plain sight among us.

Time and time again, we have seen how terrorists and spies have gamed the immigration system to acquire legitimate immigration status and even United States citizenship in furtherance of their nefarious objectives. This Justice Department press release chronicles the most recent example of how Nada Nadim Prouty, an individual linked to a terrorist organization, managed to become a resident alien based on her marriage to a United States citizen and then, ultimately naturalize. This made her eligible to hold a high security clearance and use that access to intelligence and information against our nation.

I find it a bit ironic that, as I have often noted in public appearances including when I have testified before Congressional hearings that as someone once noted, "An effective spy is someone who would not attract the attention of a waiter or waitress at a greasy spoon diner." I have gone on to say that in point of fact, the same could be said of an effective terrorist and, indeed, it might well be that the waiter or waitress in such an establishment might be, in fact, a spy or terrorists.

You will note in the highlighted sections of the DOJ press release that the defendant and terrorist in this article, Nada Nadim Prouty, a naturalized citizen from Lebanon was, in fact, identified as being a waitress who was, in reality, affiliated with Hezbollah, a known terrorist organization.

This is why it is patently absurd to think that as the President and other open borders advocates have continually said that if we allowed those aliens into our country who simply want to work and do the jobs "Americans won't do," we will be safer because then law enforcement and the intelligence community can focus on the terrorists who seek to enter our country to do us harm. Here is a startling clear example of a terrorist who apparently wanted to do nothing more serious than get a job. She was facilitated in her quest to embed herself in our country by a division of DHS, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in providing her with United States citizenship even though she had committed naturalization fraud.

Last year, you may recall, Senators Chuck Grassley and Sue Collins commissioned an investigation into allegations that USCIS claims to have "lost" 111,000 alien immigration files of aliens seeking a wide variety of immigration benefits including some 30,000 such aliens who were naturalized without their relating files! You can access this press release issued by Senator Grassley concerning this critical issue and the GAO report findings. You can also access a press release issued by Senator Sue Collins on this matter. Additionally, on March 10, 2006, Representative James F. Sensenbrenner, the then-chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, issued a press release concerning a GAO report that was issued on the day of his press release into the national security implications of immigration benefit fraud.

What we need to know is what is being done to create a system that possesses true integrity where the granting of immigration benefits is concerned. In point of fact, little is done to ferret out the fraud in the immigration benefits program. This must change. Immigration is not simply about building a fence on the border or even going after employers who knowingly employ easy to exploit illegal aliens. For immigration enforcement to be truly effective our government must also create an immigration benefits program that possesses meaningful integrity that identifies those who commit fraud to deter future such criminal violations. This would require that ICE employ many thousands of additional special agents who conduct effective proactive investigations into immigration benefit fraud. To ignore this critical component of immigration is to leave the door open to this sort of situation
http://counterterrorismblog.org/