Washington Cites Shortage of Linguists for Key Security Jobs

Tue Apr 17 11:03:58 UTC 2001

April 16, 2001

Washington Cites Shortage of Linguists for Key Security Jobs

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
New York Times

As a band of trained terrorists plotted to blow up the World
Trade Center, clues to the devastation ahead lay under the
nose of law enforcement officials.

The F.B.I. held videotapes, manuals and notebooks on bomb
making that had been seized from Ahmad Ajaj, a Palestinian
serving time in federal prison for passport fraud. There
were phone calls the prison had taped, in which Mr. Ajaj
guardedly told another terrorist how to build the bomb.

There was one problem: they were in Arabic. Nobody who
understood Arabic listened to them until after the explosion
at the Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, which killed six
people and injured more than a thousand.

The tale is but one illustration of what intelligence and
law enforcement officials describe as an increasingly dire
lack of foreign language expertise that is undermining
national security.

In the post-Soviet world, where threats are more diffuse and
scattered over the map, military, diplomatic and
intelligence officials are warning of critical shortages in
their ability to understand the languages of other nations,
and so unravel their secrets.

The reasons are many. With English increasingly becoming the
world's lingua franca, the study of foreign languages has
suffered. Taxpayer pressure on school districts to cut
budgets and focus on the basics of reading and math has
shortchanged language courses, and districts that are
interested in teaching foreign languages report a shortage
of qualified teachers.

At the same time, the need for language proficiency has
grown as security threats have fragmented and the ability to
eavesdrop has expanded.

But government layoffs and employee buyouts have trimmed
foreign language expertise drastically, said Theodore Crump,
who is updating a book cataloging the federal government's
foreign language needs. These days, most agencies can only
hope to catch up with, rather than anticipate, their needs.

"Back in 1985 the terrorist thing didn't really come up," he
said of the year he first prepared the book. "Now, when you
have the possibility of someone coming in with a weapon of
mass destruction in a suitcase, it changes the whole
picture."

While the cold war's end has brought waves of immigrants
with knowledge of obscure languages to the United States,
law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been
reluctant to hire great numbers of them, citing a weakness
in English and, frequently, difficulties in gaining security
clearances for them.

According to testimony last September before a Senate
subcommittee, roughly half of the State Department's
diplomatic postings are filled by people lacking necessary
foreign language skills.

The F.B.I. must translate a million pages and untold hours
of intercepted conversations a year and faces a mounting
backlog that undermines its ability to prevent some crimes
and investigate others.

Intelligence agencies say they are frequently caught short
in times of crisis, lacking a sufficient pool of agents and
analysts with needed languages, from Arabic to Korean and ≈
most recently ≈ Macedonian.

Thousands of scientific and technical papers also go
untranslated, depriving analysts and policy makers of vital
information about the state of foreign research in a range
of areas, the Senate heard.

Robert O. Slater is director of the National Security
Education Program run by the Defense Department, which
offers grants to promote the study of foreign languages and
cultures. Mr. Slater said that in the last decade, the
linguistic shortfalls had gone from an episodic to a chronic
problem. "It's now affecting the ability of federal agencies
to address their missions," he said.

A sobering illustration came in 1998, with the nuclear tests
in Pakistan and India, said Richard D. Brecht, who runs the
University of Maryland's National Foreign Language Center.
Official documents on the failure of United States
intelligence to translate information that could have warned
policy makers of the explosions "remain classified, but you
can rest assured that those surprised people," Mr. Brecht
said. The explosions, he added, "should not have been
surprises."

According to government figures, American colleges and
universities graduated only nine students who majored in
Arabic last year. Only about 140 students graduated with
degrees in Chinese, and only a handful in Korean.

These days, only 8.2 percent of American college and
university students enroll in foreign language courses ≈
nearly all in Spanish, French and German, said Phyllis
Franklin, executive director of the Modern Language
Association.

That figure, she said, has remained essentially unchanged
since 1976. But the demand for language speakers has
ballooned.

Many of the lapses in essential translation skills remain
invisible to the average citizen, who seldom learns of the
linguistic flubs and risks that could have been avoided. But
sometimes they spill into the public realm.

In November the publicly accessible version of the C.I.A.'s
Foreign Broadcast Information Service, its roundup of
foreign news reports, translated an article in a Palestinian
newspaper accusing Israel of using weapons containing
"phlebotomized uranium" ≈ which does not exist ≈ instead of
depleted uranium.

"If such a wild mistranslation by F.B.I.S. is not a private
joke, then it is an embarrassing sign of incompetence," said
a report on the slip-up in the Secrecy News, an electronic
newsletter put out by the American Federation of Scientists.

Mr. Brecht, co-author with William P. Rivers of "Language
and National Security in the 21st Century," likened the
current period, with its recognition of foreign language
deficiencies, to the late 1950's, when the Soviet launching
of Sputnik triggered a nationwide mission to raise the level
of science and mathematics training.

This time it is the end of the cold war that is spurring the
sense of crisis. The Soviet Union required knowledge of one
language, Russian, for analysts and diplomats. Its map has
broken up into a linguistic jigsaw puzzle of 15 official
languages, from Armenian to Ukrainian to Kazakh to
Belarussian, and more than 100 ethnic enclaves.

The State Department has had to provide staff for 22 new
posts in republics of the former Soviet Union, a region once
covered with Russian speakers in Moscow. The linguistic
fragmentation is reflected on the political and military
fronts as well.

"It's not that the Department of Defense or anyone else has
been neglectful," Mr. Brecht said. "It's just that
requirements have exploded and budgeting for language is not
the easiest thing to do."

There is no single solution.

A number of government agencies, including the Defense
Department, are using computers to take a first pass at
reducing the load of material for translation.

The Justice Department is exploring the use of a pool of
translators with security clearance who could work for a
number of agencies. The State Department increased language
training for junior officers ninefold between 1997 and 1999.

The Defense and State Departments run the largest factories
for training foreign language speakers in the country. Ray
Clifford, provost of the Defense Language Training
Institute, notes that the languages the military considers
critical are not those generally taught in universities, so
the military for the most part does its own training.

"The largest number of enrollments in the school system is
Spanish," Dr. Clifford said. "Our No. 1 enrollment is in
Arabic." The military has more students learning Arabic,
Chinese, Korean and Russian than it does Spanish, he said.

Compared with the nine students majoring in Arabic last year
in colleges, his institute graduated 409. It graduated 120
students in Farsi. Dr. Clifford said he could not even find
figures on Farsi among colleges and universities.

For the first time, the military is planning to set quotas
for the recruitment of so-called heritage speakers ≈ the
children of immigrants.

Advances in technology have multiplied the ability to
eavesdrop and, consequently, the material requiring
translation, Mr. Crump said.

Margaret R. Gulotta, the F.B.I.'s section chief for language
services, said court-sanctioned wiretaps have to be
translated as conversations take place. The expertise needed
is high, with suspects frequently using coded language.

And in investigating the bombing of the American Embassies
in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the bureau came across a tape
recording in an esoteric language. Eventually, the bureau
was able to identify the language, but found nobody with the
required security clearance who could translate it.

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David E. Crawford
Titusville, Florida
United States of America
28.5144N 80.8417W
dec1 at cfl.rr.com
FAX/voicemail:   530-504-9257
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