Editorial: Case reveals security lapse

Thursday, Nov. 15, 2007 | 6:55 a.m.

A week after resigning from the CIA, a Lebanese woman pleaded guilty in federal court Tuesday to illegally accessing government files and other charges that could send her to prison for 16 years.

Her case raises urgent questions not only because of the nature of the charges, but also because she is a former special agent for the FBI.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that the case "appeared to expose grave flaws in the methods used by the CIA and FBI to conduct background checks on its investigators."

The woman, Nada Nadim Prouty, went to work for the FBI in 1999 and in 2003 accepted a position with the CIA. She came under scrutiny in December 2005, about the time her brother-in-law in Detroit - then a restaurateur and now a fugitive - was being investigated on suspicions of tax evasion, bribery, extortion and maintaining an association with at least one leader of the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah.

Court papers reveal Prouty came to the United States in 1989 on a one-year student visa but remained illegally. In 1990 she paid an American man to marry her and later used the fraudulent marriage and forged documents to obtain status as a permanent resident.

On Tuesday she pleaded guilty to fraud, criminal conspiracy and illegally accessing FBI computers to examine government files on her relatives and on Hezbollah.

That Prouty passed an FBI background check in 1999 is bad enough. But it is simply outrageous and astounding that she gained a sensitive position with the CIA in the post-9/11 era.

Grave flaws, indeed.