June 6, 2010 9:10 PM

The Case Against Nada Prouty

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CBSNews
Under pressure, Prouty agreed to waive the 10-year statute of limitations on immigration fraud and plead guilty to two felonies related to the sham marriage. She also pled guilty to one misdemeanor count of unauthorized use of an FBI computer, a charge she now denies.

"I've made that mistake when I was a 19-year-old teenager. And I shouldn't have made it. And I own up to it. But I did not look into FBI ACS system without authorization. I did not mismanage or mishandle any classified information," she told Pelley.

Asked why she pled guilty to that charge when she now says it wasn't true, Prouty said, "I had to make a decision. I could not see our limited financial resources disappear in front of our own eyes."

"From attorney's fees that amounted in the hundreds of thousands of dollars," she added.

But pleading guilty wouldn't be the end of it: prosecutors didn't have the evidence to make a terrorism case in court so they made one in the media.

In a November 2007 press release the prosecutors said, "It's hard to imagine a greater threat" than someone like Nada Prouty. They said that she had "exploit[ed] her access to sensitive counter-terrorism intelligence."

And, later, the Detroit office boasted it had uncovered "the only known case of an illegal alien infiltrating U.S. intelligence agencies with potential espionage implications," as if Prouty had plotted from the age of 19 to infiltrate the CIA. All the worse, there it was, a word never uttered in court -- "espionage."

Prouty was branded a traitor in the national news media.

"My family was destroyed. Neighbors wouldn't talk to us," Prouty recalled. "When my daughter would go out in the neighborhood, her friends would scatter away. They told her, 'We don't wanna talk to you 'cause your mommy is bad.'"

"One of the New York papers called you 'Jihad Jane,'" Pelley remarked.

"That's the Jane that went to Iraq and put her life on the line," Prouty said.

Before she was sentenced, the CIA launched its own investigation to find out if Prouty was a Hezbollah spy. Bob Grenier, the CIA's former head of counterterrorism, told Pelley what the agency found.

"There was a full investigation which included multiple polygraph examinations," he said. "She was completely exonerated."



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