Security Crisis: More Linguists Needed

W A S H I N G T O N, Oct. 22, 2001 -- 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.

In 1998, the last year for which there are statistics, only 4,347 college students were studying Arabic at American universities, according to the Modern Language Association.

Growing Interest

But something was changing — even before Sept. 11.

"There's a great deal of interest," said Shukri Abed, a University of Maryland adjunct professor, who also teaches at the Middle East Institute in Washington. "[There is] much more interest than I have ever seen."

Abed, who taught at Yale in 1991 before coming to Maryland, persuaded the University to begin offering Arabic studies two years ago. When the first class was offered, he said, 50 students showed up to take the 15 places available. Now, more than 70 students are studying Arabic.

One student is a professor himself. Hayim Lapin is a professor of Jewish History. He helped organize support for establishing Arabic studies at Maryland.

"We … as Americans and citizens of the world ought to appreciate and know this language," Lapin says.

Clearance Takes Time

But nationwide, no university trains students at the high professional level needed in business, government, or even the universities. This path can take 10 years or more to complete, say experts, and includes living abroad within the culture of a civilization.

Ironically, such overseas studies complicate the clearance process for prospective linguistic recruits at the intelligence agencies, says Robert Slater, the director of the National Security Education Program, a federal project housed in Rosslyn, Va.

"The problem is it takes an inordinate amount of time for them to get a clearance," said Slater, "and the clearance process is complicated by their overseas study, and their experiences overseas makes it harder to even get a clearance."

The reason, said Slater: "They're seen as higher security risks."

Slater's National Security Education Program spends $8 million a year on language scholars, helping them gain places in academic institutions abroad and in the United States.

One graduate, Jonah Blank, was a journalist (a senior editor at U.S. News & World Report) when he obtained an NSEP scholarship. After a year of study in Egypt and a follow-up year at Harvard, he owed the federal government two years of service.

Today, Blank is the only member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff who speaks Urdu, the language of 60 million people in 21 countries, including Pakistan and India.

Need for Training

The problem of finding more linguists, says NSEP Director Slater, won't be solved until government and business find a way to recruit and pay at a professional level.

"Not only do we have to invest in the individuals to go to this, we have to create the programs that deliver on that [need for training] in these kinds of languages. And those don't exist right now," he said.

That's why a number of language experts and administrators believe it is time for the federal government to mobilize a drive to make language proficiency a national goal.

"I think the intelligence community is behind it, the military is behind it," said Richard Brecht, director of the National Foreign Language Center. "But federal government has to take the lead."

There are signs Congress is awakening to the crisis.

A House Intelligence Committee document reports: "This is the single greatest limitation … the CIA, NSA, FBI, DIA, and the military services … do not have the language talents … to … accomplish their missions."

That's why a rapid mobilization is essential, said Brecht, "If we don't do this now, if we don't take the next nine months, and do something legislatively, as well as in educational policy, I think we're gonna be back here again in two or three years."

The United States has suffered from a lack of linguists before.

There were calls for greater proficiency 18 years ago in the wake of the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks at Beirut Airport, in which 241 Americans lost their lives. A decade ago, during the Gulf War, there were more calls for Arabic speakers.

But those emergencies passed quickly and language programs never gained priority.

This time, say experts, a failure to recruit and train linguists will keep America crippled for years to come.