DEARBORN, MI – Nada Nadim Prouty still loves her adopted country, the United States of America, though it might be hard for some to understand why. “It’s still the greatest country in the world,” she said in a recent phone interview from Ireland, where her oldest daughter goes to boarding school.
She feels that way, even though a few years ago, U.S. agents tried to destroy her life after she had repeatedly risked her life for America, joining first the FBI and then transferring to the CIA.
Prouty worked in Baghdad after the American invasion in 2003, interviewing suspected terrorists, occasionally modifying her bulletproof vest to expand it, because she was pregnant.
Her husband, Gordon Prouty, a U.S. foreign service officer, didn’t like that she was putting her life and that of their unborn daughter at risk, but he supported her decision. Her fellow CIA officers testified that her work undoubtedly saved American lives.
U.S. intelligence had far too few other agents who spoke fluent Arabic and virtually no women who did. “It was inconceivable to me, knowing how important my contributions were, to desert the mission,” she said later in her book, Uncompromised: the Rise and Fall and Redemption of an Arab-American Patriot in the CIA.
She left Iraq only when her pregnancy was so advanced it posed a hazard to her and her mission. She gave birth to a healthy daughter, and went back to work. And then her life changed.
Prouty had come to the United States from her native Lebanon in 1989, to escape that country’s civil war, an abusive father and attempts to trap her in an arranged marriage.
She enrolled in the Detroit College of Business, made good grades and eventually earned bachelor and master degrees in accounting. But as a student she couldn’t make ends meet.
So Prouty, then Nada Al-Aouar, followed a friend’s advice and entered into a phony marriage with an American citizen, so she could stay in the country and become a citizen. The marriage was never consummated, and ended years later in a simple divorce.
But in 2007, the Department of Justice began investigating her sister Lola, who had married a man who fled Michigan for Lebanon after being wanted for crimes ranging from tax evasion to bribery and extortion. In addition, he was close to a major leader of the terrorist group Hezbollah. When they expanded the investigation to include Lola’s family, they discovered Nada’s early sham marriage.
Suddenly, the Department of Justice had learned that a CIA agent working in the Middle East had gotten American citizenship under false pretenses – and had relatives with ties to Hezbollah.
The ambitious U.S. District Attorney in Detroit jumped on the case for all it was worth. Was there a terrorist spy in the U.S. intelligence community’s midst? One newspaper labeled her “Jihad Jane,” though there was no proof she had terrorist ties.
Nada Prouty had never been a Muslim. She had been raised in the Druze faith and then became a Roman Catholic. But she was frightened, though she knew there was no truth whatsoever to the charges in the headlines, namely that she had given aid and comfort to the enemy. She was indicted and charged.
Prosecutors, she later claimed, told her they would go after her family, ruin her financially and ruin her husband’s career, unless she took a plea bargain that would involve her giving up her citizenship.
They also threatened to deport her to Lebanon, which she felt would be a certain death sentence. So she pled guilty to one count of immigration fraud, one count of perjury, and another regarding the unauthorized use of a government computer.
The Department of Justice never alleged in court that she had shared any information improperly, or that she was a “mole.”
They did, however, bask in the publicity and the media hype that made it seem as if they had nabbed a potential terrorist spy.
But Avern Cohn, the federal judge in the case was not impressed. Technically, he could have sentenced her to prison and levied hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. He did none of that.
Instead, he sharply criticized the prosecution and the press. “The media accounts of your case, perhaps prompted by the excessiveness of the press releases issued by the United States Attorney’s office, have grossly distorted the circumstances.”
All she really had done wrong, he said, was engage in a sham marriage as a teenager to avoid returning to a civil war, something the judge found understandable. He fined her a mere $750.
He had no choice but to revoke her citizenship, and for a time, government agents threatened to deport her to a unspecified country. Then, in early 2010, the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes did a story on her case. They, too, found she was essentially a victim.
Not long after that, the U.S. Attorney General, the CIA director and the head of Homeland Security ended her deportation fears by granting her permanent resident alien status.
A few years later, her citizenship was restored. “I think I am the only person who has become a U.S. citizen twice,” she told me.
Today, Prouty, now 51, and her husband and daughters live in the United Arab Emirates, where she does various kinds of consulting. She isn’t bitter, though she wasn’t thrilled that the prosecutor who persecuted her was soon rewarded by being made a federal judge by President George W. Bush.
“Yes, I still love our country,” she said.
Some might wonder why.
