The September 11, 2001 attacks prompted a major push for foreign language skills to track militants and trends in parts of the world that were not a top Cold War priority.

As recently as 2008 and 2009, intelligence officials were still issuing new directives and programs in the hopes of ramping up language capability. "Language will continue to be a challenge for us," the US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said at a congressional hearing last week.

"If you hark back to the Cold War days, it was much easier for us to raise highly qualified linguists in Russian and East European languages, which comes to our people much more naturally than to these Mid-East languages," he added.

Increase in Arabic skills

The spy agencies will not publicly disclose the number of employees with language skills. However, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says Arabic-speaking capability has increased throughout the intelligence community about three-fold over the past 10 years and capability in Baluchi, Dari, Kirghiz, Pashto, Punjabi, Tajik, Urdu, and Uzbek has increased by 30 times, compared to before the 9/11 attacks.

US spy agencies are reaching out to first- and second-generation Americans whose heritage would provide the language and cultural understanding quicker 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.

Intelligence officials say they are trying to change that: The ODNI issued a directive in 2008 to make it easier to hire first- and second-generation Americans whose heritage is from countries that can raise potential security issues.

Former CIA Director Leon Panetta made improving language proficiency a top priority in 2009 with a five-year plan to sharply increase linguistic skills, including by tying promotions to senior ranks to language ability.

US system not geared towards foreign languages

Language experts say the root of the problem lies in an education system that does not emphasize learning foreign languages early on 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 center was founded in 2003 and funded by the Defense 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
Editor: Manasi Gopalakrishnan