Hezbollah admits spies have infiltrated top ranks

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Jan. 7 (UPI) -- An admission by a high-ranking Hezbollah official of intelligence infiltrations in its ranks demonstrates the porous nature of the terrorist organization.

The weekend confirmation by the radical Shia group, based in Lebanon, of an Israeli spy, identified in Lebanese media as Mohammed Shawraba, employed as commander in charge of attacking Israel follows years of attempts by Hezbollah to achieve revenge for Israel's 2010 assassination of its top military strategist. Each attempt failed, and Shawraba's current location is unknown.

Founded in 1982 to attack Israel, and funded largely by Iran, Hezbollah has grown from a small and tightly knit political party with an ascetic sense of honor (the name means "Party of God") to a bloated bureaucracy with its own army and courts, considerable power in Lebanese politics and a middle-class constituency that depends on it for sewers, police and other day-to-day services.

A government without a country, it has sent troops to Syria to defend President Bashar al-Assad's regime. Its authority now includes people eager to profit from Hezbollah.

The party's second-in-command, Naim Qassem, said on a Hezbollah radio station last weekend that "Hezbollah has worked intensely on battling espionage among its ranks and in its entourage. Some cases surfaced, and they are very limited cases. There is no party in the world as big and sophisticated as Hezbollah that was able to stand with the same steadfastness."

Randa Slim of Washington's Middle East Institute told The Telegraph, "Hezbollah has become more vulnerable to infiltration for a number of reasons: its growth, the many agendas that require the attention of the leadership, and especially the Syria war, which has caused them to divert their resources."