"There is no party in the world as big and sophisticated as Hezbollah that was able to stand with the same steadfastness despite some major infiltrations," Hezbollah's second in command Naim Qassem said, speaking to Hezbollah-affiliated An-Nour radio station over the weekend.
"Hezbollah has worked intensely on battling espionage among its ranks and in its entourage. Some cases [of espionage] have surfaced, [but] they are few in number," the cleric added. He noted that while Hezbollah seeks "purity" among its ranks, it is still an organization made up of human beings and that human beings make mistakes.
Qassem noted that Hezbollah is "fully capable" of dealing with the organizational fallout of the affair. Talal al-Atrissi, a Lebanese analyst close to the organization, told the New York Times that the security breach is "a loss but not a substantial loss", given that "the party works in tiny circles, not big circles."
The New York Times has explained that the spy's outing comes at a time when Hezbollah has been expanding from a tightly-focused anti-Israeli Lebanese militia organization into an group with a much larger mission, including the deployment of thousands of Shiite fighters to assist in the defense of the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
