A Lebanese immigrant explains her work as a high-level CIA and FBI agent, the bogus case that ruined her career, and why she still loves this country. Excerpt from “Nada Prouty: Jihad Jane or Patriot?”

NADA PROUTY, Former CIA Agent; Author, Uncompromised: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of an Arab American Patriot in the CIA

In conversation with JONATHAN CURIEL, Author, Al’America: Travels through America’s Arab and Islamic Roots

CURIEL: Your life is one of the most incredible lives that people will probably meet this literary year. Can you set the stage for us in how and where this all began?

PROUTY: I open up the book with a scene. It was 2003, in Baghdad, and I was a CIA covert operations officer. I was given a mission to exit from the Green Zone, gather intelligence, and come back and report the intelligence. I got a call that day from a contact, and the contact told me that he needed to see me immediately. I told him I would, and I did just that.

There’s a process when you leave the Green Zone. I’ve got my Glock, I’ve got my Colt Commando, I’ve got my handheld radio, I’ve got my GPS, and I’ve got my bulletproof vest. Within the Green Zone I picked up a junker car. The reason I wanted to drive a junker car is that I did not want my SUV to be highlighted outside the Green Zone, because you would be known as American and you would be targeted. I get out of the Green Zone, I conduct the meeting, I gather intelligence – and at that time intelligence was really important, because it was about planned attacks. We wanted to give enough information to our troops patrolling the streets for them not to be targets of attacks, whether it’s a sniper, an explosion, whatever it was. So I finish the mission, and I’m on my way back.

At that time, in 2003, cars would line up right outside of the Green Zone, and they would be ushered in, one car at a time. They would ask you for your ID and all of that. My car broke down right at the entrance of the Green Zone. I [was wearing] an abaya to disguise all my weapons and hide all my stuff, and to hide the baby, because I was pregnant, too. So I radioed for help, and I was waiting for help. The Iraqis are all parked behind me, and they’re just beeping, “Get out of the way!” and yelling at me, and I did not want to get out of the car, because I didn’t want them to see my weapons. So, one at a time, I ushered them [ahead of me], and they passed, and I was the last car. Then, I saw him. There was a Marine, looking at me suspiciously. I was in a suspicious car, and he didn’t know why I had been parked there for such a long time. So he starts approaching me, one step at a time. My heart’s beating,
and I said to myself, “Oh, my God, I think he thinks I’m the bad guy.”

He gets his weapon – he still hasn’t pointed it at me yet – and he’s walking toward me, saying, “Get outta the car; get outta the car!” and I’m rolling down the window that doesn’t really work, and I’m screaming, “I’m American! I’m American!” There was nobody there at the time to see me, but I
was screaming – because I wouldn’t scream that way in front of the Iraqis. So I’m screaming, “I’m American! I’m American!” and I thought, “Oh, let me grab my badge, which is stuck deep down inside under my bulletproof vest and all my disguise.” So as soon as I grab my badge, what is he thinking? I’m going to blow him up. I’m pulling a detonator, and I’m going to blow him up. So he lifts his weapon; points it right in my face; finger that was resting on the frame of the gun moves right to the trigger; and he is ready to shoot me. He’s sweating; I could see the sweat. I’m drenched in sweat; you would think I just got out of the shower.

I kept saying, “OK.” I put my hands up. I thought I was going to die, but I didn’t. So I put my hands up, and I started talking to him. I said, “Let me reach for my badge. One second; let me reach for my badge,” and just engaging him in this conversation gave him a little pause, so I slowly reached down, and I got the badge, and I showed it to him. He’s shaking a little bit; I’m trembling like a leaf; and then he says, “Welcome to the Green Zone,” and he lets me in.

This is back in 2003, and these are the circumstances for both the CIA officers that would leave the safety of the Green Zone to collect intelligence, and the circumstances for men and women in the military. You really don’t know. So after that incident, we changed the way we approach the Green Zone to let the folks that are protecting the Green Zone know, basically, that we are the good guys. I can’t tell you how we changed it, but I can tell you that we did change it.

CURIEL: Your life seems like it’s a cross between the Bourne adventure series and maybe Syriana. But you were studying to be an accountant. A professor told you you might want to think about a career in the FBI. At that point, you had been in this country five years or so, so you hadn’t thought about saving lives on such a global scale. Here you were actually saving lives, but also having your life in jeopardy.

PROUTY: I’ll back up a little bit. I was born in Lebanon, a war-torn country, and I was also born to an abusive father. I was attending the American University of Beirut when the last round of bombing closed up the school, so I decided to apply and come to the States and get my education. My thought at the time was, I was going to come to get educated, and I was going to go back to Lebanon and show people. I was going to get a job; I was going to become independent.

But I came to the States, and I started studying accounting at Detroit College. My dad had planned an arranged marriage for me. I did not want to be part of that arranged marriage, and when I came here, my father did not financially support me. As you know, the foreign student tuition is very expensive. I was working as a waitress. I was making a whole $2.50 an hour. I tried to make ends meet, and I tried to save money. I ate the leftover foods of the customers, because I just couldn’t afford to buy food.

I shoveled snow, and I did everything possible, but I was not able to afford the college student tuition. So I went back to the Arab-American community in Dearborn, Michigan – you get a lot of advice from the Arab-American community.

I was talking to a colleague, and I said, “I can’t afford the college tuition. I’ve done everything I can. Every hour that I’m not in school, I’m working. What can I do?” So the advice started coming. One of them’s like, “If you sell drugs – you don’t have to do drugs – but if you sell drugs, you’ll make a lot of money.” I’m like, “No, I don’t want to do that.” Another [piece of ] advice: “I bet you make a lot more tips if you work as a topless dancer.” I’m like, “No …” I did not want to do that. Finally, someone said, “If you marry an American citizen, you would be considered a resident, and you would be paying the resident tuition; you wouldn’t be paying this super high tuition.” Things got really bad, and I ended up doing just that.

After staying in the country, the one thing that I did not plan on is falling in love with America. I hadn’t thought about it when I first came here; I hadn’t really considered living in the States for the rest of my life. But it was the everyday things that I fell in love with. I was free to say whatever I wanted. A cousin of mine [in Lebanon] had criticized the Syrians and the next day disappeared, was killed. We don’t know, to this date, what happened to him. So I was free to express my opinion; I was free to wear whatever it is that I wanted to wear. Between the freedom and the democracy that we have here – it’s hard for someone who has not had these in-love feelings with the country of their birth to explain it. I guess the best way I could say it is [that] if you haven’t experienced injustice, you really don’t know what justice is.

I decided to go through with the sham marriage, and after falling in love with the States, I decided I wanted to give back to my adopted country and serve my adopted country.

I applied to the FBI and was accepted for the position of special agent. Now, I did list that sham marriage on that first page of my FBI application, and I called them to discuss the circumstances, and I was told not to worry about it. For the two years that it took to complete my FBI background [check], this never came up, so I thought that they had adjudicated it. They had accepted me [in spite of ] my past bad deed. It wasn’t a strange thing for me, because of the application at the time. The standards were, if you’ve done marijuana 15 times or less, you can still apply to the FBI. Or, if you’ve done hard core drugs three times or less, you can still apply for the FBI. So I thought, “OK, well, I’ve made a mistake; I was 19.” So I applied and they took me in.

When I first got there, because I was an accounting student, I thought, “Here I am; I’m ready to sit on a desk, and I’m going to find out where people are hiding the money.” But instead I ended up chasing the terrorists. There’s a little bit of switching there, for an accountant [to go] from desk work to actually being out on the field. I was assigned a squad that investigated crimes against U.S. citizens and U.S. interests overseas. Within just a couple of months after I got there, I was interviewing Hani al-Sayegh – he was indicted for his role in the 1996 Khobar Tower bombings, where 19 of our servicemen died – and shortly after that I was in London on the investigation of the 1998 kidnapping of U.S. citizens and British tourists in Yemen, and then after that it was the USS Cole – I arrived there the day after the bombing. I had so many different cases. The two other cases that come to the top of my head were the 2003 bombing of three apartment buildings targeting Americans in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the last assigned case, [which] was the 2002 assassination of Laurence Foley, U.S. foreign aid diplomat in Jordan, who was gunned down in front of his house. The plot was planned by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who later became very famous for his role in al-Quaeda in Iraq. So I did a lot of these FBI investigations, reporting to the crime scene, bag tag. Obviously I worked on 9/11, the Pentagon [attack]; my office was a little less than five miles from the Pentagon, and I arrived to the Pentagon to secure the scene to start conducting the investigation.

CURIEL: So far, Nada, you’ve talked about the “rise” part. Can you get into a little bit of the “fall” part? The “fall,” in this sense, is of you being accused – falsely, in so many ways – of betraying the country; and accused by people who, it turns out, had political agendas.

PROUTY: In 2003, I had been exposed a lot to CIA officers overseas, because my work was about 90 percent overseas. One of them told me, “You work for the FBI; you come and investigate crimes overseas.” I said, “Yes.” He said, “You arrive after the fact. Why don’t you join the CIA, where you can collect intelligence to prevent that attack, so people don’t have to come here and do this investigation?” And I did. I
joined the CIA.

I worked for the CIA for a number of years, and I came back to the CIA headquarters and was getting ready to go [to] a second place – I can’t tell you where it is, but I was learning Farsi, and I became a fluent Farsi speaker – and then this is when the fall happened. I was doing such a great job for the CIA at headquarters that I was getting
kudos from the White House.

Federal prosecutors in Detroit had this dream that I was guilty of passing intelligence to the terrorist group Hezbollah. They didn’t have any evidence, and I didn’t know why they were going after me at the time. [Not] until later did I figure out that there was a political motivation behind it. They started with their investigation, and they did all the techniques that I – having been on the inside – am familiar with. These techniques are long investigation; it drains you of your financial resources. As a government worker, let me tell you: we don’t make a lot of money. You really have to love your country and have your heart in the mission to do that kind of work. It was one threat
after the other. They went after my family, went after my friends, to put a lot of pressure for me to basically plead guilty to something I did not do.

They devised a scheme where every time I’ve used my U.S. passport to travel overseas, on the government’s behalf – to be in harm’s way – they were going to charge me with a felony, because it’s fraudulent use of a U.S. passport. They were very proud to have counted the hundreds of times that I’ve traveled on the government’s behalf, and that was going to put me in jail for the rest of my life. They were very proud that they were able to do that. And I fought and I fought. I’m like, “I can’t say that I did something I didn’t do. How could you?”

Deep down, I was very torn. Why would I say that I believe in the justice system? Why would I, in a sense, betray the justice system and say that I did something that I didn’t do?

The last threat came through, and that threat was: “We’re going to deport you to Lebanon, and we’re going to tell everyone that you work for the FBI and the CIA.” For anyone slightly familiar with what that really means, it is plain and simple; it’s a death threat. And I had a child. And I had a lot of guilty feelings, because I had put my baby girl’s life in danger in Baghdad for so long; I was shot at several times. I remember we’d get out of the Green Zone, or would be on a mission, or whatever it is, she’d be kicking left, right and center, like, “Be careful, Mom.”

So, you know, I had a lot of guilty feelings, and that caused a lot of stress on her. She could read body language; kids are very good at that. I had to make a decision as a mom; I had to make a decision as a wife; and I had to make a decision [as to] whether I would be killed or not. Who was going to raise my daughter? I had already thought about that once before, when I was in Baghdad, and I had to have that discussion.

I felt very, very guilty, and with that last threat, I plead guilty. I plead guilty to the immigration charges to which the statute of limitation had long expired, and I had listed it on my [FBI] application; I thought everybody knew about it. Where they figured, “Oh, we just discovered this,” it just made no sense to me. But that was part also of twisting your arm to plead guilty to something you didn’t do. The other charge that I plead guilty to was accessing an FBI system without authorization, but that wasn’t enough for them. They went to the media; they leaked all kinds of information to the media that I was a spy for Hezbollah, and that was a very rough period for my family. The press were camped outside of our house for weeks at a time; neighbors would not talk to me; my daughter was stressed. I would drop her off at the school, and I wanted to talk to a teacher. I wanted to tell them, “You know, my kid is stressed,” and they wouldn’t talk to me; they’d just walk away from me. Friends, both from the FBI and the CIA – not all of them, but some of them – just wouldn’t want to talk to me. It was a very, very rough time.

CURIEL: Valerie Plame, who was outed as an undercover agent, wrote a blurb for the back of your book: “Nada Prouty served our country loyally with distinction, and, as universally acknowledged by her colleagues, with great personal courage as a CIA covert officer.” Now, like Valerie Plame, who also went through a kind of redemption, your redemption has been not without some low points. But there has been a redemption, and I have to say that the redemption was instigated by you as well. Redemption, for example, starts with a “60 Minutes” profile of you. Why did they do that? Because you approached them. You don’t give up. Instead of having your father arrange a marriage for you, you arranged your own marriage. That’s what you did.

PROUTY: Yes. It was a really bad time. And then the CIA conducted an investigation. You don’t want to be part of a CIA counterintelligence investigation. Basically, it was two weeks [in which] I had to explain everything from the day that I was born until the day that I was talking to the CIA officer. They concluded the investigation. There are two parts of the investigation. The first part is the unclassified part, and it’s available as part of the
public record. I was exonerated. The second part, which is the classified part that I don’t have access to but the former CTC chief on “60 Minutes” alludes to it, and he said, “She was completely exonerated.”

I was [fined] $750 for an investigation that cost the taxpayers – I estimate it [at] hundreds of thousands of dollars. Anyway, that’s not a good return on your investment, from an accounting standpoint here. The judge on the day of the sentencing had requested additional information from the prosecutor’s office. He said, “OK, she plead guilty to viewing a document. Did she print it out?” “No, she didn’t print it out.” He started asking more and more questions, and he had come to the conclusion that this really was a setup. The day of the sentencing was a movie scene. I’m standing in front of the judge. He rebuked the prosecution team. The prosecutor’s office, every two or three months, would leak some more information to the media, and all of it would start all over again. On that day, all of the media is in the court; the judge had letters that were written on my behalf from FBI agents, from CIA officers, from people that have supported me from day one, from higher ups – I can’t tell you who they are, but very senior CIA folks. He took that, and he looked at the media, and he said, “For any one of you here that wants to write about Nada Prouty –” Poof! He throws it at them. He said, “Read this before you write anything.”

You would think, after all of this – after all this exoneration – things would change. But that actually angered the prosecutors, so they started putting more pressure on me. They said that I was not allowed to travel outside a 50-mile radius from my home. They froze my bank accounts. Just playing games. You would think, “Now she’s been
exonerated; now this is all good.” No. I believe that they were so afraid that the truth is going to come out and expose them, that they wanted to put so much pressure on me, that I would leave to Lebanon and disappear. The truth will disappear with me.

For a CIA officer, you’re trained to avoid the media, so it was a very, very hard decision for me to return the call from “60 Minutes.” Everybody under the sun had called me, and they wanted to have an interview. Every show – radio, TV shows from overseas – and I had refused to talk to anyone. I wanted to give the government the chance to correct its actions. Finally, I decided I have given everybody a chance to correct what has happened. Nobody was doing it. I was just forgotten. So I contacted “60 Minutes,” and I didn’t know it at that time, but I was told, “You get on ‘60 Minutes’ for two reasons: you’re really, really good; or you’re really, really bad.” They thought I was really, really bad.

[“60 Minutes”] conducted an investigation, too, and when they saw all the information that was out there, they were [surprised]. They are not supposed to show their feelings, but I could just feel that their blood was boiling. I appeared on “60 Minutes,” and shortly after that, people looked back into the case. They reviewed what has happened, and [eventually] the [U.S.] attorney general, the director of the CIA, and the secretary for homeland security all signed a memo to grant me back my U.S. person status, because part of the deal is that I was stripped of my U.S. citizenship. They all signed a memo to grant me back my – and I’m currently pursuing – my U.S. citizenship.

CURIEL: You were raised in the Druze tradition, right? One of our audience members asks about this sense of being Druze, and where that situates you in the overall religious scene. Druze are often seen as being a sect of Islam, when in fact it’s much more complicated than that. Also, you talk about converting to Catholicism. How did that play into your Americanism, as it were?

PROUTY: There’s not one good description to explain the Druze, and I was not brought up Druze, but it’s a combination of Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. It’s a secretive religion. In fact, I don’t know a lot about the faith. You receive information about the Druze life at the wise age of 40. My parents did not practice it; I went to an evangelical school, and this is when I embraced Christianity, as a child.

CURIEL: You’re sort of a minority in Lebanon, so you’re used to being the outsider. As a woman, especially, when you’re treated –

PROUTY: Yes. The culture views women as second class citizens. One of the stories that I describe was [how] the boys are allowed to bully the girls. This is how they earn their, I don’t know, dominance. In our home, it went a little bit further. My brother is the youngest, and in order to allow him to learn how to become a good, strong male, my parents would hold down the girls and allow him to beat us. I think it’s what made me a survivor, and I think that’s the one thing the Detroit prosecutors did not count on: my ability to survive.

I take the positive from growing up in such a culture, demeaning to women, and growing up with an abusive family. I just use it for my daily survival. [I’ve learned] how not to be a parent, from my parents