Wow. Just wow.
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.
It only takes that paragraph for Isikoff & Hosenball raise the $billion question:
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?
Before we dive into that question, let's quickly recap how Prouty got to the point where she ended up an CIA agent:
Prouty lived in a Vienna townhouse with her family, including a young daughter.
According to court documents, Prouty came to America 18 years ago on a student visa. She hired an unemployed U.S. citizen to marry her the following year.
After obtaining citizenship, she divorced the man.
At first, Prouty worked at a Michigan restaurant, but then managed to pass an FBI background check and become an FBI special agent in Washington. Four years later, the CIA hired her as a case officer.
OK? Back to I&H:
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?
Yes, especially since Bush has been spying on everyone and their grandmother since he stepped into office. Could it be that he was (gasp) abusing his power as president? This Prouty incident isn't really a big deal, right?
"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.
OK, maybe he's right...but then again, he's a U.S. attorney who isn't towing the Bushco company line; I'm sure he'll be fired in two weeks. Well, at least we know what she did, right?
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.
So...why haven't we impeached Bush yet?
UPDATE: As I mentioned in the comments, Prouty joined the CIA in 1999. That may give some a cause to pass the blame, if you don't consider the great national distraction that was going on at the time. The bottom line is: the Bush Administration promised to create programs and laws to root this sort of thing out, and instead of catching spies they've stripped our civil liberties in order to listen to private phone calls (and worse).