Hezbollah complains of CIA recruitment in Lebanon

The Lebanon-base Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah this weekend complained that the United States' Central Intelligence Agency is using the U.S. Embassy in Beirut as a de facto recruiting station for Lebanese informants to Hezbollah operations. During a speech on the Hezbollah-controlled Al- Manar TV station, an official accused the CIA of activating a team of 10 intelligence officers, including women, specifically to recruit Lebanese spies to gather information on Hezbollah's officials and fighters along with the locations of the terror group's arms caches.

Speaking on TV during a rally in Beirut on Saturday evening, Deputy Secretary General of Hezbollah Sheikh Naeem Qassem claimed that intelligence revealed the activities of the CIA in Lebanon. Al-Manar TV reported that the intelligence officers are registered as diplomats at the U.S. Embassy, and they've served as CIA agents for three years in Lebanon. "The CIA officers were active in recruiting agents from various segments of the Lebanese society: government employees, security and military personnel, religious, banking and academic figures," the report said, adding that while recruitment of agents took place inside the embassy premises, meetings with them were held in local eateries and cafes. Last month, U.S. officials had admitted that a group of CIA informants in Lebanon had been captured earlier this year by Hezbollah, damaging agency operations against the organization that is labeled a terrorist group by U.S. Departments of State and Treasury.

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Meanwhile, the Al-Manar TV report also accused the CIA officers of corruption while recruiting Lebanese agents. "The CIA officers seized part of the money allocated for agents and requested [recruits] to sign receipts for amounts bigger than what these agents received," the report said. Following last week's Law Enforcement Examiner report that the top leader of the terrorist group Hezbollah warned the United States government that any attack by the U.S. military on Iran would result in violence throughout the Middle East, the Syrian and Iranian-backed Hezbollah boasted Wednesday it had "vanquished" the U.S Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Israel's intelligence group Mossad. "Our security... has exposed several American and Israeli plots on Lebanon," Hezbollah Member of the Lebanese Parliament, Hassan Fadlallah, said to reporters outside parliament. "We call on the Lebanese government to take immediate action... and raise the issue with the United Nations and embassies, so that the whole world is aware of what the U.S. embassy in Lebanon is doing," he added. Fadlallah claimed that Hezbollah had succeeded in uncovering Central Intelligence Agency operatives that had infiltrated that terrorist group's ranks. "Lebanese intelligence vanquished US and Israeli intelligence in what is now known as the intelligence war," Fadlallah said. The MP's comments comes only a few days after reports emerged that Hezbollah had uncovered several operatives within its ranks who were allegedly "assets" or informants for the CIA. In the first acknowledgement of infiltration since the Shiite group's founding in the 1980s, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in June said members of his group had confessed to being CIA agents. Nasrallah accused Hezbollah's archenemy Israel of turning to the US spy agency after failing to infiltrate his party – slamming the American embassy in Beirut as a "den of spies." The US embassy in Beirut dismissed the accusations as "empty".