CIA Mole, or Destroyed Videotape: Tough Call on News Interest

This isn't what I'd call rigorously scientific, but I did a little Google search this morning after getting this update for America’s Truth Forum: “More details on ex-agent's security breach.”

On Wednesday, prosecutors said Prouty illegally accessed the FBI's Hezbollah investigative files in 2002 and 2003, at a time when she was a Washington, D.C.-based FBI field agent who was not working Hezbollah cases. Prouty accessed them electronically, "without authorization and in excess of her authorized access," the prosecutors said in a court filing.

At the time, her sister's husband, Talal Khalil Chahine, 51, was under investigation by the FBI in Detroit for his suspected ties to Hezbollah. The Lebanon-based group was designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization in 1997….

One senior federal law enforcement official said an ongoing damage assessment focused on what information Prouty -- who started working for the FBI in 1999 and the CIA in 2003 -- passed onto Chahine and perhaps others with connections to Hezbollah here. Officials also are trying to determine whether the information undermined any of the FBI's long-running investigations into the organization.

So why isn’t this a bigger story?

I put in these search terms for the CIA videotape story: “CIA videotape investigation,” and got 318 hits.

I Googled “Prouty FBI spy Hezbollah” and got 41 hits.

(As a reality check, I Googled “Michael Vick sentencing”, 3,392 hits, but we’re just coming off a weekend.)

So Hezbollah has apparently managed to get a mole into not one, but two of our highest-echelon intelligence agencies, and used their mole to steal secrets of direct benefit to Hezbollah, and it’s a smaller story than the CIA destroying a videotape after going to the Congress and saying, “Hey, we’re going to get rid of this videotape, all right?”

I wonder how many Congressional investigations Carl Levin is going to demand about this one. After all, it happened in Michigan, the State he represents, I'm told.