VIENNA, Va. – The FBI and CIA have launched internal reviews to figure out how an illegal Lebanese immigrant managed to get jobs with the two agencies and obtain counterterrorism secrets about her family’s ties to Hezbollah.
Background checks, including lie-detector tests, failed to uncover Nada Nadim Prouty’s bogus marriage and fraudulent application for citizenship, officials said.
Prouty, 37, spent yesterday inside her red-brick home in the Washington suburbs a day after pleading guilty in Detroit federal court to secretly taking an unknown amount of classified information home with her.
But her husband, Gordon Prouty, 40, emerged briefly to take the couple’s daughter, Ava, to preschool, and later to discourage reporters who were camped outside his home.
“My wife is not going to say anything. I’m not going to talk,” he said.
Nada Prouty, who was married at least twice before, including a sham marriage to obtain citizenship, resigned from a mid-level job with the CIA last week as the two-year investigation of her betrayal headed to court.
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), a former FBI agent and member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the Prouty case would result in congressional hearings.
“We’re going to scrub this thing, and it deserves to be scrubbed,” he told the Detroit Free Press.
Investigators said Prouty managed to get past three security firewalls.
First, she obtained security clearance and a job as an FBI special agent. Then, she got clearance and a job at the CIA. ABC News said she worked at the agency’s National Clandestine Service, which runs covert operations.
And finally, Prouty penetrated the FBI’s classified database to obtain information about the federal probe of Hezbollah and of her sister and brother-in-law, who allegedly had ties to senior members of the terrorist group.
The FBI said Prouty passed a polygraph test during her background check but was not subjected to the high level of screening that was adopted after FBI agent Robert Hanssen was exposed as a Soviet and Russian spy in 2001.
Both Hanssen and CIA double agent Aldrich Ames passed lie-detector tests.
Neighbors in the Proutys’ neighborhood, where many federal employees live, were stunned over the case against the well-liked mother who they greeted when she took her cherubic daughter trick-or-treating two weeks ago.
“She’s a wonderful, doting mother,” said neighbor Sharon Sloane-Hornseth. “She’s a loving, lovely, beautiful lady. I’m just shocked.”
Neighbors said she was extremely smart and had recently spent months learning Farsi, which is spoken in Iran.