Hezbollah claims to release CIA names

The Washington Post/ Greg Miller

Escalating its confrontation with the CIA, the militant organization Hezbollah released what it said were the names of agency officers working in Lebanon in a television broadcast that aired there last week.
The exposure creates new security risks for CIA officers in a country where American espionage operations had already been damaged by Hezbollah’s capture of a group of agency-paid informants.

The names of the purported CIA members were broadcast Friday on the Lebanese television station al-Manar as part of a report that claimed to expose the agency’s spying efforts as well as its collaboration with Israel.

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said the agency “does not, as a rule, address spurious claims from terrorist groups. I think it’s worth remembering that Hezbollah is a dangerous organization, with al-Manar as its propaganda arm. That fact alone should cast some doubt on the credibility of the group’s claims.”

Youngblood declined to comment on whether the report was accurate or whether the agency had or would remove officers from a country that has long been an espionage crossroads in the Middle East.

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