BEIRUT: Two Hezbollah members have confessed to working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and a third had links to an as-yet-undetermined foreign intelligence service, the group’s leader Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah said Friday, admitting for the first time the penetration of one of the most secretive organizations in the region.

“When Israel failed to infiltrate Hezbollah’s structure, it requested the assistance of the most powerful intelligence agency,” Nasrallah said in a televised speech broadcast by Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television Friday night.

“We have two cases of spies affiliated with the CIA and one more might be affiliated with the CIA, European intelligence or Mossad,” he added.

It was the first time Hezbollah has acknowledged that spies had penetrated its ranks, a rare acknowledgment of a group which takes pride in its ability to prevent infiltration.

“The U.S. Embassy in Awkar is a nest of spies recruiting [spies] to serve Israel. We have become a direct target of the U.S. intelligence. This put us in a new stage of security struggle,” Nasrallah said.

However, the U.S. Embassy swiftly dismissed Nasrallah’s claims as “empty accusations.”

“These are the same kind of empty accusations that we’ve repeatedly heard from Hezbollah,” the embassy spokesman told The Daily Star Friday night. “There is no substance to them. It appears as if Nasrallah was addressing internal problems within Hezbollah with which we have nothing to do.”

“Our position toward Hezbollah is well known and has not changed,” the spokesman added.

The U.S. labels Hezbollah as a terror group. The party last fought a devastating war with Israel in the summer of 2006 during which it fired missiles deep into Israel. At least 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers, were killed during the war.

Nasrallah said the two party members, whom he described as not senior, had been in contact with diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.

“Our investigation has found that … intelligence officers [with the CIA] have recruited two of our members, but we will not identify [them] out of respect for the privacy of their families,” he said.

Nasrallah said the spies, one of whom was recruited five months ago, did not pose a serious threat to Hezbollah or its military capabilities.

“None of these three cases is within the first line of senior leadership. They were not in positions of sensitive responsibility,” he said. “It is impossible to touch the military and security infrastructure of the resistance and its ability to confront.” “None of them has sensitive information that could harm the structure of the resistance,” he added. Nasrallah said the three individuals were not close to him and they did not include any cleric.

Nasrallah said the CIA agents who hired the spies had diplomatic protection from the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.

Nasrallah recalled a speech last year in which he said that Hezbollah was immune to penetration. “The resistance in Lebanon is targeted by American, foreign, Arab and Israeli intelligence agencies,” he said. He called the discovery of the three cases “a true security achievement” that would help the party confront “security penetrations” in the future.

Earlier this week a Kuwaiti newspaper reported that Hezbollah had discovered a group of spies, but the group had denied the allegations.

In his one-hour speech, Nasrallah also said Israel’s latest weeklong defense exercise proved that the Jewish state was no longer capable of protecting itself.

“Israel has now acknowledged that all of its territory is now threatened with missiles … This means that Israel has lost the ability to protect its domestic front militarily,” he said.

Israel’s defense exercise, “Turning Point 5,” was aimed at testing the country’s various responses to rocket attacks from Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and Iran.

“Israel’s latest military maneuvers were the result of its defeat especially in the [2006] July war … Israel did not conduct similar military drills in the past,” Nasrallah said, adding that the drills reflected Israel’s plans to launch wars in the region.

“The Turning Point 5 maneuvers have clearly determined the real enemy of Israel, which considers Iran, Syria, the resistance in Lebanon and the resistance in Gaza as its four enemies,” Nasrallah said.

Nasrallah scoffed at the March 14 parties’ charges that the new Cabinet formed by Prime Minister Najib Mikati last week was a government dominated by Hezbollah or Syria. He denied that Syria had intervened to impose the formation of Mikati’s 30-member Cabinet, which is dominated by Hezbollah and its March 8 allies.

Nasrallah also said he expected the government’s policy statement to be approved soon. The policy statement has been stalled by differences between Mikati and Hezbollah over the divisive issue of the U.N.-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which is probing the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. “Given the mutual trust and honest dialogue, there will be no problems in the process of drafting the policy statement. It will be drafted and will receive the vote of confidence in Parliament,” Nasrallah said.

Nasrallah had only a few words about the STL. “We are not concerned with the issue of the tribunal,” he said.

A 12-member ministerial committee tasked with drafting the government’s policy statement has so far failed to reach agreement on the STL. Mikati and Hezbollah are at odds over the issue, with the party and its March 8 allies demanding that the STL not be mentioned in the policy statement at all.

Nasrallah said Hezbollah did not have “economic interests,” funds, banks in Lebanon or abroad.

He said March 14 parties’ betting on the downfall the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad as a result of a three-month-long popular uprising would fail as their previous bets had failed.