Use of English as Global Tongue Is Booming, and So Is Concern
In U.S., a Lack of Linguists Weakens Security
NEW YORK 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 FBI held videotapes, manuals and notebooks on
bomb-making that had been seized from Mohammed
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. And nobody
who understood Arabic listened to them until after the
explosion at the Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, which
killed six people and wounded more than 1,000.
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 U.S.
national security.
In the post-Soviet world, where threats are more diffuse
and scattered over the map, U.S. military, diplomatic and
intelligence officials are warning of critical shortages in
ability to understand 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 often difficulties in gaining
security clearances for them.
According to testimony in September before a Senate
subcommittee, roughly half of the State Department's
diplomatic postings are filled by people lacking necessary
foreign language skills.
The FBI 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 often caught short in
times of crisis, lacking a sufficient pool of agents and
analysts with needed languages, from Arabic to Korean to
- most recently - Macedonian.
Thousands of scientific and technical papers also go
untranslated, depriving analysts and policymakers of vital
information about the state of foreign research in a
significant range of areas.
Robert 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 Brecht, who runs the
University of Maryland's National Foreign Language
Center.
Official documents on the failure of U.S. 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 CIA'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 FBIS is not a private joke,
then it is an embarrassing sign of incompetence," said the
Secrecy News, an electronic newsletter put out by the
American Federation of Scientists.
Mr. Brecht, co-author with William Rivers of "Language
and National Security in the 21st Century," likened the
current period, with its recognition of foreign language
deficiencies, to the late 1950s, when the Soviet launch of
Sputnik triggered a U.S. 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.
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.
"It's not that the Department of Defense or anyone else
has been neglectful," Mr. Brecht said. "It's just that re-
quirements have exploded and budgeting for language is
not the easiest thing to do."
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