MORE ON THE CIA/FBI HEZBOLLAH SPY

How big a role did disgraced CIA officer have?
Prouty was assigned a sensitive post in Baghdad, NBC News has learned

There’s new information about the young Lebanese woman who pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges she lied about her background to get jobs at the FBI and CIA.

Current and former intelligence officials tell NBC News that Nada Nadim Prouty had a much bigger role than officials at the FBI and CIA first acknowledged. In fact, Prouty was assigned to the CIA’s most sensitive post, Baghdad, and participated in the debriefings of high-ranking al- Qaida detainees.

A former colleague called Prouty “among the best and the brightest” CIA officers in Baghdad. She was so exceptional, agree officials of both agencies, the CIA recruited her from the FBI to work for the agency’s clandestine service at Langley, Va., in June 2003. She then went to Iraq for the agency to work with the U.S. military on the debriefings...

Although no one claims Prouty worked for Hezbollah, her computer searches led U.S. officials to question her. She looked up files on her sister, Elfat El Aouar, and brother-in-law, Talal Khalil Chahine, both of whom attended a Hezbollah fundraiser in Lebanon — alongside Hezbollah spiritual leader Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, designated by the U.S. as a terrorist.

Chahine is currently a fugitive believed to be in Lebanon. He, along with Prouty’s sister and others, was charged in 2006 by the U.S. attorney in Detroit with tax evasion in connection with a scheme to conceal more than $20 million in cash received by La Shish restaurants in suburban Detroit and to route funds to persons in Lebanon with links to Hezbollah.

Moreover, as she was moving between agencies in 2003, Prouty accessed the FBI’s Automated Case Support system and obtained information on investigations into Hezbollah being conducted by the FBI’s Detroit Field Office.

National security experts say the combination of her being at one of the CIA’s most sensitive stations, working on some of the agencies' most sensitive cases, and having her relatives under investigation put her in a vulnerable position — and make the potential damage she could have caused far greater than either the FBI or CIA has admitted.