U.S. intelligence agencies are woefully short of foreign language speakers more than five years after 9/11, and they have no one to blame but themselves, officials say.
The government’s strict standards on security clearances result in agencies turning away scores of prospective linguists because something in their backgrounds raised suspicion.
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The result is that the intelligence community is still in need of speakers of Arabic, Pashtu, Farsi and other languages common in the Islamic world.
An intelligence officer told The Examiner it is particularly difficult to gain clearance for foreign-born U.S. citizens. Background checks, for example, can turn up that the applicant had contacts with a suspect individual or has relatives living in al Qaeda-infested countries. The person is denied a job for fear he or she may become a spy for al Qaeda, even though there is no evidence of terrorist activity.
The National Security Agency, which intercepts telephone and Internet communications, needs more language experts to listen to phone calls, identify the speakers and do translations.
“NSA cannot get anyone through the background check and vetting process,” said the officer, who asked not to be named because reports on the issue are classified. “They have created an unachievable standard for hiring. It is heightened by the fact that our schools do not teach the languages that are needed to support the intelligence community.”
Foreign language skills are important in combating Islamic terrorist groups. Linguists not only listen to intercepted calls, they also perform interrogations and translate documents.
Mike McConnell, the U.S. director of national intelligence, referred to the linguist shortage in an article last month in Foreign Affairs magazine.
“Policy barriers have stood in the way of attracting intelligence professionals with the right skills and backgrounds,” McConnell wrote. “If the intelligence community is going to reach out to native speakers, it must change its recruitment practices, which currently make it difficult to hire such candidates.”
McConnell did not describe the “barriers.” Stephen Shaw, his spokesman, referred a reporter to a talk McConnell delivered Friday at the Council on Foreign Relations.
McConnell said then that he was trying to move agencies away from a Cold War practice of disqualifying applicants because they have relatives living overseas who could be held hostage to blackmail the intelligence employee.
“My approach to this is to declare that null and void, and we’re not going to think about it that way,” he said.
