NCIS agent accused of aiding terror suspect lover testifies
The federal agent accused of derailing a joint FBI and Homeland Security counterterrorism investigation into her exlove interest took the stand in her trial in Houston on Friday, detailing how she and her former lover met, how she ended up in court and her past trauma.
Leatrice De Bruhl-daniels, the 48-year-old NCIS agent on trial in federal court amid allegations she hindered the investigation, first met Nadal Diya at his house in Dubai, where she was stationed, after a mutual friend invited her over. Their relationship went on to include walks along the beach, hourslong dinners and sexual relations.
De Bruhl-daniels said, however, she never considered their relationship to be “intimate” because of past trauma with men.
When the two first met, De Bruhl-daniels said, Diya’s wife greeted her as she entered the house, and they all had dinner. During a moment outside, Diya, a 49-year-old Syrian businessman, learned she was a U.S. federal agent and asked her if she could help him with obtaining a visa.
Then, as they remained in contact, Diya’s affection for De Bruhl-daniels began to show.
He was “always flirting,” she said. “He always found a way to slip in something.”
Eventually, he told her he loved her and mused that she could be “wife No. 2 ,” De Bruhl-daniels said.
“I had no interest at first, of course,” she said of Diya. “When he started expressing his affection to me, I got confused with my emotions.”
It was equally confusing for Diya, according to his Wednesday morning testimony in the case, but the two kept in contact despite her former boss R. Todd Foley, then the NCIS resident agent in charge in Dubai, telling her “on at least two occasions to stay away” after an FBI agent informed him of the agency’s investigation.
But they continued to contact each other, with Diya eventually throwing De Bruhl-daniels a lavish birthday party, helping her pay for a Greek vacation, buying her expensive jewelry and giving her then-23-year-old son a job, according to federal prosecutors.
He even organized her reconversion to Islam, the faith she grew up in and left when she was around 30 years old because her ex-husband was Christian,
she said.
On one occasion, they had an argument at her home in Dubai, but he kissed her afterward.
“One thing led to another,” De Bruhl-daniels said, and she and Diya had sex for the first and only time. Their relationship, however, wasn’t “intimate,” she said in court, because of her strict definitions of intimacy. When asked why, De Bruhl-daniels said she was raped at 14 and that the men with whom she had been romantically involved later in her life, including the father of her son, were sexually and physically abusive.
When the relationship with her son’s father became abusive, “I ran away with my son,” she said.
Since being put on indefinite suspension with NCIS in 2018, De Bruhldaniels said she has tried to find work with Diya, the Dubai Police Department, as a hotel security manager and even at her dentist office in Dubai, but she has mostly worked in retail.
De Bruhl-daniels is facing 13 charges, including allegations she lied, tampered with evidence, meddled with witnesses, bribed public officials and outright impeded justice to protect Diya.
U.S. District Judge Gray Miller is hearing the case.