But Prouty got her post fraudulently. She illegally obtained her U.S. citizenship, a fact the intelligence agencies somehow missed when they hired her. Far more worrisome, she was caught tapping into the FBI’s criminal investigative files dealing with Hizbullah, the terrorist organization allied with Iran. Last week, when Prouty pleaded guilty to defrauding the United States in a federal courtroom in Detroit, intel experts began speculating about nightmare scenarios. Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief in the Clinton administration (who also served under President Bush), asked if the FBI and CIA had been penetrated by a “Hizbullah mole.”
Prouty was not, however, charged with espionage. High-ranking intel sources, who declined to be identified discussing the sensitive matter, tell NEWSWEEK there is no evidence—at least so far—that Prouty was spying for terrorists. (Her lawyer had no comment.) Though she had a top-level clearance and access to sensitive information, she was a fairly low-level operative (a “GS-12,” in government-speak) and was not in a position to run any operations herself. She has told investigators she just wanted to see what information the FBI had on her sister and brother-in-law, a well-known Detroit restaurateur who was the focus of an FBI probe into Hizbullah fund-raising. Her motives may turn out to have been relatively innocent, but her somewhat dodgy past makes investigators want to learn more.
According to court documents, Prouty came to America from Lebanon in 1989 and overstayed her student visa. To get her green card, she arranged a sham marriage and got a job as a hostess at La Shish, a popular chain of shish kebab restaurants in Detroit. Her sister was the business manager; her brother-in-law, Talil Khailil Chahine, was the chain’s owner. The Detroit shish kebab man later became a target of FBI investigators when he was suspected of skimming millions of dollars from his restaurants and funneling the money to a Hizbullah-linked charity in Lebanon. In 2002, Chahine flew to Lebanon to a fund-raiser and sat beside Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, once the spiritual leader of Hizbullah, who was officially designated a terrorist by the United States in the wake of the 1983 Marine-barracks bombing in Beirut. Both men were keynote speakers at the event and were seen conferring privately. When FBI agents raided Chahine’s home, they found a picture of Chahine and his wife, Elfat Al Aouar—Prouty’s sister—posing at a military outpost (the site of a Hizbullah battle against the Israelis) under the yellow and green Hizbullah emblem. Al Aouar was indicted with her husband last year on tax charges and has pleaded guilty. Chahine is a fugitive, presumably in the Middle East. (Chahine’s lawyer has denied Chahine had any involvement in terrorism.)
As part of her plea agreement, Prouty will have to answer questions about her sister and brother-in-law while wired to a lie detector. She will no doubt be thoroughly interrogated. The FBI and CIA are sensitive about the risk of being penetrated by moles. After the cold war, it was revealed that a pair of top spooks—the FBI’s Robert Hanssen and the CIA’s Aldrich Ames—had been feeding secrets to the Soviets for years. Applicants are now subjected to lengthy background checks, including a polygraph test. A former intel official, who asked for anonymity when talking about the investigation, said he heard in 2005 that Prouty had shown some sign of deception on the lie detector, but her career did not suffer. The official noted that about a quarter of CIA case officers (particularly those with families abroad) have trouble passing the polygraph test, and most of the issues are harmlessly resolved. When Prouty was polygraphed, the CIA badly needed Arabic speakers to meet the intelligence demands of the Iraq War. Indeed, she had recently been taking language training in Farsi—spoken by Iranians.
Counterintelligence—finding moles—always places conflicting demands on spy services. If spooks become too suspicious about double agents, they have a hard time recruiting spies or trusting each other. Ironically, notes a senior law-enforcement official who didn’t want to be identified talking about intel matters, the bureau in recent years has been criticized for keeping its standards too high, thereby preventing it from meeting its recruitment goals for foreign-speaking agents. “When you see a case like this,” the official says, “you start to think we’ve been setting the bar too low.”
title: “Dangerous Liaisons” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-16” author: “Lori Williams”
Among other reasons, young Japanese sleep around because they assume sex is safe. Their logic: Japan is largely HIV-free, so by having sex within a closed circle of cohorts they can enjoy lifestyles reminiscent of the West after the advent of the birth-control pill but before the emergence of AIDS. That flawed reasoning reflects the unwillingness of older Japanese, particularly parents and schools, to educate kids about the risks of promiscuous behavior. The result, new research shows, is a significant rise in the rate of sexually transmitted diseases among young Japanese. According to the Ministry of Health, between 1998 and 2000 (the latest figures available), the STD infection rate rose 21 percent for Japanese men under 24 and 14 percent for women in the same age group. And while Japan’s HIV rate remains one of the world’s lowest, the International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific has forecast that the number of full-blown AIDS cases in Japan, now at 14,000, could top 50,000 by 2010.
Japan’s new sex culture dates to the collapse of the “bubble economy” in the early 1990s. Until then, Japan Inc. absorbed most university and high-school graduates, welcoming them to a social structure that determined whom they would date and eventually marry. These days, many corporations have stopped hiring, so ever-greater numbers of young Japanese matriculate each year to find temporary jobs on the economic margins. They form social groups that–like their jobs–are part time, low stress and temporary.
A 24-year-old named Yuji is typical. On a recent weekday, he waited to meet friends from one of his part-time jobs at Dogenzaka, Tokyo’s famous “love hotel hill.” He counts himself as a member of several social circles, and within each group occasionally sleeps with two or three girls. “It’s understood that we are all healthy, and that we’re not paying prostitutes for sex or sleeping with foreigners,” he says.
Yuji hasn’t been tested for STDs or AIDS because, he says, none of his friends have become sick. But like many Japanese in his age group, he seldom wears condoms during intercourse. Indeed, condom sales have dropped 25 percent over the past decade in Japan, bucking the trend in the United States and Europe. “Condoms are hard to sell in Japan right now because young adults refuse to use them,” says Toshiyaki Ishi, spokesperson for Okamoto, Japan’s largest maker of prophylactics. As a result, Japan’s abortion rate has nearly doubled since 1999 to 13 per 1,000 (still a far cry from the U.S. rate, which is 51 per 1,000).
Japan’s Ministry of Education has outlined a broad sex-ed curriculum for high schools, but it’s optional. Many principals reject the idea of sex-education classes for fear of offending parents. Private organizations struggle to fill the knowledge gap. The Yokohama AIDS Action and Information Center offers peer counseling and classes. But activists say young Japanese tend to stay away, terrified of having their sexual behavior scrutinized.
Masami, the Tokyo University student, says her biggest fear is not getting a disease but getting pregnant. She joins her male friend at a nearby hotel, and afterward admits the two had unprotected sex, ignoring condoms provided by the hotel. Unless that attitude changes, Japanese kids could find themselves with as many problems as partners.
