Security Crisis: More Linguists Needed

W A S H I N G T O N, Oct. 22 -- The United States is desperately seeking linguists to fight the war.

From the halls of Congress to the corridors of the Defense Department to the campus of the Central Intelligence Agency and beyond, everyone is suddenly looking for translators and analysts who speak the tongues of the Middle East.

There are very few people available. Part of the problem is that native speakers must be citizens of the United States for at least three years before federal agencies will hire them.

Ghada Ackall is a Palestinian immigrant who works for the embassy of an Arab country in the Persian Gulf. Her English is perfect, and she has an MBA and an undergraduate degree from the University of Texas at El Paso.

"I heard [the] FBI wanted really Arab speakers and Persian speakers, and I checked with my friends and I said: 'You know, I'm really interested,'" she said, sitting on a bench in Lafayette Park, across from the White House.

"They said, 'you really have to be an American citizen and at least a citizen for three years,'" she said. "So it was out of the question. But I was interested, yes."

Ackall came to America in 1985 to attend college and last April obtained her permanent residency card. None of her friends speak Arabic, she said.

Longstanding Shortage

The shortage of linguists in America is longstanding.

Michele Flournoy is a policy adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. For six years during the Clinton administration, she was Principal Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Threat Reduction, which involved strategic planning and civilian oversight of operational planning.

"You gather this information, it's overwhelming," Flournoy said. "And you need someone who can translate the data into English so an analyst can start sorting through it."

But linguists are not available in any great numbers. Until recently, few colleges taught Urdu or Pashtu or Arabic because few students wanted to study them.