Intelligence operatives are finding it hard to learn the necessary lingo these days, writes
TABASSUM ZAKARIA
DESPITE INTENSE focus on Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East in the last decade, US spy agencies are still lacking in the language skills needed to talk to locals, translate intercepted intelligence and analyse data, according to top intelligence officials.
The September 11th, 2001, attacks prompted a major push for foreign language skills to track militants and trends in parts of the world that were not a Cold War priority.
But intelligence agencies have had to face the reality that the languages they need cannot be taught quickly and that the street slang US operatives require is not easy, while security concerns make the clearance process slow.
As recently as 2008 and 2009, intelligence officials were still issuing new directives and programmes in the hopes of ramping up language capability.
“Language will continue to be a challenge for us,” director of national intelligence James Clapper said at a congressional hearing last week.
“It’s something we’re working at, and will continue to do so, but we’re probably not where we want to be,” he said.
The US government needs speakers of Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Dari, Urdu, and other “exotic” languages which are more difficult for English-speakers to learn.
“If you hark back to the Cold War days, it was much easier for us to raise and have a cadre of highly qualified linguists say in Russian and East European languages which comes to our people much more naturally than these Mid-East languages,” Clapper said.
The spy agencies will not publicly disclose the number of employees with language skills. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence says Arabic-speaking capability increased throughout the intelligence community about threefold over 10 years and Afghanistan-Pakistan language capability – including Baluchi, Dari, Kirghiz, Pashto, Punjabi, Tajik, Urdu, and Uzbek – increased by 30 times from before the September 11th attacks.
Intelligence agencies require more than just a perfunctory grasp to understand cultural meanings and different dialects.
“In these very difficult terrorism targets, there’s obviously this yearning for native speakers,” said Ellen Laipson, president of the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank.
“Some of the people you’re trying to track are not themselves highly educated so they use a lot of slang, and it’s a higher standard than if you were trying to monitor or interact with very elite foreign ministry people of a developed country.”
US spy agencies are reaching out to first- and second-generation Americans whose heritage would provide the language and cultural understanding more quickly than trying to teach someone from scratch. But they can face difficulties getting through the strict security clearance process because of family ties back in their country of heritage.
Former CIA director Leon Panetta made improving language proficiency a priority in 2009 with a five-year plan to sharply increase those skills, including by tying promotions to senior ranks to language ability.
Language experts say the root of the problem lies in an American education system that does not emphasise learning foreign languages early on in the way European schools do.
The federal government uses a language scale of zero to five to judge proficiency, where zero is none and five is an educated native speaker.
“Up until now basically everybody has been pretty content to get twos, which is basic communication skills. The intelligence community really needs three, three-plus and fours,” said Richard Brecht, executive director of the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language.
The centre was founded in 2003 and funded by the defence department to conduct research to improve language capability in the intelligence community.
About 50 million people in the United States speak a language other than English at home, which is an “immense national language resource”, Brecht said. – (Reuters)