Proving that someone really is who they say they are isn’t easy. Or more to the point, it isn’t easy to establish that they are who you want them to be, namely the job candidate with the impeccable references and dazzling resume.

In your recruitment process, you try to weed out the venal and the corrupt, and you work hard to avoid inadvertently hiring an arch-criminal or aspiring serial killer.  If you put your mind to it, you would presumably also prefer to know that close family members of prospective, or existing employees, have ties to Al Qaeda, or criminal records the length of Yonge Street.

Of course, many of us have skeletons in the closet, and just because Uncle Johnny would steal bread from the mouths of orphans doesn’t mean that his brother or cousin is cut from the same cloth. But if your employees work with highly sensitive data, or have jobs that require tact and discretion, and, preferably, limited contact with organized crime figures, conducting background checks is a necessity. You need to speak with your lawyer to see what degree of scrutiny is permissible by law in your jurisdiction. But check you should.

A good example of how individuals can work a system from the ground up, to inveigle their way into positions of trust with potentially devastating consequences, is the case of Nada Nadim Prouty.

Prouty, 37, emigrated to the United States from Lebanon in 1989. She paid an unemployed U.S. citizen to marry her to enable her to remain in the country legally, but continued to live with her sister. She used the cover of the fake marriage, supported by a series of fraudulent and forged documents that attested to its validity, to obtain US citizenship in 1994. She divorced her ‘spouse’ shortly afterwards. It appears that she used a series of different names throughout the period of her metamorphosis from illegal alien to American success story.

Before she hit the big time, Prouty worked as a waitress at La Shish Inc., a chain of shish kabob restaurants in Detroit, owned by Talal Khalil Chahine.  Chahine is reported to have written a letter to US immigration authorities supporting the validity of Prouty’s false marriage. Prouty’s ingenuity in obtaining US citizenship was rewarded in April 1999, when she gained employment as a special agent of the FBI, presumably passing the rigorous background checking procedures in place at the intelligence agency, as well as a polygraph test. She was granted a security clearance and assigned to the FBI’s Washington Field Office.

Her sister married Chahine in 2000, and shortly afterwards, Prouty accessed the FBI’s computerized Automated Case System (ACS), without authorization, to run a background check on her own name, her sister’s name, and that of her brother-in-law, Chahine. Prouty had good reason to be worried.

In August 2002, Prouty’s sister and Chahine attended a fundraising event in Lebanon where the keynote speakers were Chahine and Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist, due to his status with Hizballah.

A few months later, Prouty again accessed the FBI’s computer systems and looked up information from a national security investigation into Hizballah that was being conducted by the FBI’s Detroit Field Office. She had no ‘need to know’ anything about Hizballah, so her snooping raised a red flag.  However, her actions did not impede her career, and she left the FBI voluntarily in 2003, to work for the CIA.

Her Arabic linguistic skills stood her in good stead, and reports indicate that she was sent to Baghdad to help interrogate captured insurgents, and that she was involved in the investigation of the USS Cole bombing in Yemen.

In 2006, Chahine and Prouty’s sister were both charged with tax evasion and money laundering funds for Hizballah.  Prouty’s sister was sentenced to 18 months in jail.  Chahine is a fugitive, and believed to be in Lebanon.

Prouty recently pleaded guilty in Detroit to three charges related to ‘marriage fraud’- although the limitation period had actually run out on that charge- and unlawfully accessing a federal computer system. She is unlikely to spend much time, if any, in jail, as she is undoubtedly vigourously ‘co-operating’ with US federal authorities, extremely anxious to ascertain whether she was in fact a Hizbollah mole, or just a talented grifter with unsavoury relatives, and singularly poor judgment.

Some folk have asked how an illegal alien from Lebanon, working as a waitress at a shish kabob restaurant in Detroit, could outwit US immigration, and conceal high- risk familial connections, and a demonstrated eagerness to protect them, to obtain front-line employment with both the FBI and the CIA?

This is a good question. And one we might all learn from.