The story of Nada Prouty (RWC)

On the subject  of FBI agents, a female former FBI agent who had been recruited to work in counter-terrorism as a covert CIA operations officer, has turned out to be an illegal alien who bought her US citizenship through a sham marriage and falsified other details of her background.

Nada Prouty was caught after she accessed classified files on Hezbollah, apparently looking for the names of relatives in Lebanon.

Prouty was a Lebanese citizen who came to the US in 1990 as a college student.  She then paid an American cash to marry her so she could get citizenship.

Though I’m just guessing at this, I’ll bet she was on a scholarship from the now-dead Rafik Harriri, the rich and very crooked ex-prime minister of Lebanon and remarkable toady to the Saudi Royal family, who sent thousands of Lebanese students to the US over the years.  Nobody has mentioned the name of the American man who took money to marry her but they ought to send him to the slammer, too.

Prouty, who is now 37 years old and lives in Vienna, Virginia with a second husband, became a Special Agent of the FBI in 1999, obtained a top level security clearance, and was assigned to the FBI’s Washington Field Office to investigate crimes abroad.

In June 2003, I’ll bet because of her language skills in Arabic, she joined the CIA’s Covert Operations division and may, or may not –the government hasn’t said, worked undercover.

She had both a full field background investigation with the Bureau and another with the CIA, which she passed, and she was vetted.  She also passed a lie detector test as part of her employment.

It was her attempt to access secret Hezbollah files, for which she had no professional “need to know” that tipped off CIAcounter-intelligence officers, though it took them years to build a case against her.

Prouty was also caught taking classified files home with her.

There is no known evidence that she fed secrets to foreign powers but she has pled guilty in federal court in Detroit to conspiracy, naturalization fraud and other charges.

She will likely be fined and deported to Lebanon though there is a possibility of a prison term. 

Why the government is dithering on that subject, given the seriousness of this breech, is beyond me.  We can hope they have more than an arm up their sleeve.

If you can go to prison for holding a few rocks of crack cocaine, or not paying child support, you sure ought to be able to go to prison for threatening our nation’s national security in this time of war.

Prouty has close relatives in Lebanon, including a sister and brother-in-law who were spotted attending a Hezbollah rally led by the terrorist Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, the ideological leader of Hezbollah. Her family –they are Druze-have been associated in Lebanon with extremist politics. She hs a brother-in-law in Detrroit who has been arrested in a terrorism money-laundering case.

The arrest of Prouty and her conviction raises pretty serious questions about the infiltration of two of America’s primary agencies that investigate and fight terrorism.

“It is hard to imagine a greater threat than the situation where a foreign national uses fraud to obtain citizenship and then based on that fraud, insinuates herself into a sensitive position in the US government,” said the United States Attorney in Detroit about Prouty.

The government says the “investigation is continuing.” 

Sometimes that phrase is meaningless, and just thrown out to deflect pesky questions from reporters, but in this case it well be continuing.

Prouty’s ex-husband and many of her friends were interviewed by the FBI and CIA when they did their background investigations on Prouty years ago.  On its face, it appears that some of them lied for her in their security interviews.  They ought to pay a price for that.