A Hizbullah Mole?

Indeed, the bizarre details of the Prouty investigation—which include connections to both Hizbullah and a multimillion-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 Hizbullah, 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 nonimmigrant student visa. After her visa expired she illegally remained in the country, residing in Taylor, Mich., 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 restaurants in the Detroit area owned by a Lebanese businessman, Talil Khalil Chahine, who later came under federal investigation for his suspected ties to Hizbullah.

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 Hizbullah being conducted by the Detroit field office.