CIA Denies Claims it Halted Activity in Lebanon
An American official stressed that espionage will always be fraught with dangers, reported As Safir newspaper on Tuesday.
He told the newspaper that collecting information about enemies who are always trying to uncover spies within their ranks will always be a risky matter.
This is why combating terrorism is and will always be a determining factor to success, he said.
He denied allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency had halted its activity in Lebanon, labeling them as “empty statements”.
He instead listed the CIA’s achievements in the past few months, starting with the discovery of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden’s location and the unearthing of a nuclear site in Qom in Iran.
The official made his statements in light of reports on Monday the CIA was forced to curtail its spying in Lebanon after the arrests of several CIA informants in Beirut this year, U.S. officials and other sources told the Los Angeles Times.
"Beirut station is out of business," a source said, adding that up to a dozen CIA informants have been compromised.
The source told the newspaper that CIA case officers met a series of Lebanese informants at a local Pizza Hut, allowing Hizbullah and Lebanese authorities to identify them.
But U.S. officials strongly disputed that agents were compromised at a Pizza Hut.
“U.S. officials also denied the source's allegation that the former CIA station chief dismissed an email warning that some of his Lebanese agents could be identified because they used cellphones to call only their CIA handlers and no one else,” said the LA Times.
The newspaper did not name the station chief but said he now has a supervisory role at CIA headquarters in operations targeting Hizbullah.
Hizbullah is "an extremely complicated enemy" and “no one underestimates its capabilities," the official added.
In June, Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said members of his group had confessed to being CIA agents, and accused arch-foe Israel of turning to the U.S. spy agency after failing to infiltrate his party.
Nasrallah refused to give the identities of two party members he said were working for the CIA. But he said a third case was also under investigation, and slammed the U.S. embassy in Beirut as a "den of spies."
The embassy in Beirut immediately dismissed the accusations as "empty.”
The LA Times source said that Lebanese security agencies were able to isolate the CIA informants by analyzing cellphone company records that showed the numbers called, duration of each call and location of the phone at the time of the call.
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