Even more curious was the flap in Lebanon. In June, Hezbollah’s Secretary General Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah announced that the movement had arrested two of its own members as CIA spies. But it wasn't until last week that the story got traction in Washington. The CIA confirmed that operations in Beirut had been compromised but declined to offer details. As in the case of the alleged Iranian debacle, it's no doubt still doing a "damage assessment" -- a process that can take years. Even then, it will be difficult to determine exactly what happened. 

From what I've been able to piece together, Hezbollah aggressively went after the CIA in Lebanon using telephone "link analysis." That's a form of electronic intelligence gathering that uses software capable of combing through trillions of gigabytes of phone-call data in search of anomalies -- prepaid cell phones calling each other, series of brief calls, analysis of a cell-phone company's GPS tracking. Geeks who do this for a living understand how it works, and I'll take their word for it. 

But it's not the technology that's remarkable, as much as the idea that it is being employed by Hezbollah, an Islamic organization better known for resistance than for electronic counterespionage. That's another reminder that Hezbollah has effectively supplanted the Lebanese state, taking over police and security functions that in other countries are the exclusively the domain of sovereign authority. 

Since I served in Beirut during the '80s, I've been struck by the slow but inexorable shift of sovereign power to Hezbollah. Not only does the movement have the largest military, with nearly 50,000 rockets pointed at Israel; it has de facto control over Lebanon's spies, both military and civilian. It green-lights senior appointments. Hezbollah also is wired into all the databases, keeping track of who enters the country, who leaves, where they stay, whom they see and call. It's capable of monitoring every server in the country. It can even tap into broadband communications like Skype. And, of course, it doesn't bother with such legal niceties as warrants. 

I have a feeling last week's events bodes ill for U.S. intelligence because it suggests that anyone capable organized groups can greatly enhance their counterintelligence capability by simply buying off-the-shelf equipment and the know-how to use it. Like a lot of people, I thought it would be easy coasting at the end of the Cold War after the KGB was defanged. Instead, globalization and the rapid spread of sophisticated technologies have opened an espionage Pandora's box. 

Robert Baer, a former CIA spy in the Middle East, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and author.