The agent with a secret past

WASHINGTON — An illegal immigrant from Lebanon with relatives linked to the militant Islamic group Hezbollah paid a U.S. citizen to marry her and then lied her way through national security background checks to become an agent for the FBI and the CIA. She used her position to secretly access government computers for information about her relatives and a U.S. investigation into the group, authorities said Tuesday.

Nada Nadim Prouty, a 37-year-old Lebanese national, pleaded guilty to conspiracy, unauthorized computer access and naturalization fraud in federal court in Detroit and agreed to cooperate with authorities in an ongoing investigation into the security breaches.

Prouty's case is a major embarrassment for the FBI and the CIA, which supposedly had tightened their personnel screening and monitoring after CIA officer Aldrich H. Ames and FBI Special Agent Robert Hanssen were caught selling secrets to foreign governments. But officials emphasized that the investigation had not uncovered any evidence that Prouty gave Hezbollah or its operatives classified information.

Law enforcement officials said a multi-agency probe was underway to determine how the breaches occurred, what Prouty may have done with the information she accessed from FBI computers, and whether she improperly obtained information from the CIA.

"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," U.S. Atty. Stephen J. Murphy in Detroit said in a statement.

In her signed plea agreement, Prouty admitted to accessing FBI computer files on Hezbollah first in 2000 and again in 2003, when she accessed case files on a top-secret national security investigation into the militant group that the FBI was conducting.

At the time, Prouty's brother-in-law, who owned a Detroit restaurant where Prouty once worked as a waitress, was suspected of having strong ties to senior Hezbollah officials in Lebanon, where the group is headquartered.

Prouty also was accused of improperly taking classified information home while at the FBI, and of working with other Lebanese nationals in what appeared to be a conspiracy to gain U.S. citizenship through fraudulent marriages and then get government law enforcement, intelligence and military jobs with security clearances.