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Translating Risk

A nation at war needs to speak the enemy's language. But U.S. intelligence agencies have too few interpreters who speak the languages common to al-Qaida. Congress should adopt a stopgap measure proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein that would help relieve the shortage. And legislators should press the intelligence community to develop a comprehensive strategy to speed translation of enemy communications.

Feinstein, D-Calif., addresses the translator shortage in the 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act, which she introduced last week. In a summary of the legislation, Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, criticizes the intelligence community's "abysmal" record in recruiting adequate personnel to meet translation needs. And she would provide some help -- 100 temporary employees to fill in for intelligence agency employees who want to take language training.

Feinstein says that agency managers are reluctant to approve agents' requests for language training, because it takes them away from their assigned responsibilities. The availability of temporary replacements could help weaken that bureaucratic resistance.

But temporary employees are not a long-range solution. So legislators should support Feinstein's call for the director of national intelligence to shape a plan by the end of the year to shore up translation capabilities.

Intelligence Director Dennis Blair should treat that mandate as an urgent priority. Few aspects of national defense in an age of terrorism are as critical as having intelligence agents who can understand the languages al-Qaida operatives speak: Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Pashto and Urdu. The terror network has no massed troops to monitor. Its agents plot in secret and hide among civilians. Defeating planned attacks depends heavily on intercepting al-Qaida communications -- and translating them in time to forestall disaster.

Little information is publicly available about the translation challenges intelligence agencies face. However, CIA Director Leon Panetta announced in May that he wanted to double the agency's foreign-language staff over the next five years. And in 2007, Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, told Congress that the backlog of untranslated terrorism-related intelligence had grown since 2001.

The 2001 backlog proved disastrous enough. Alexander's predecessor at NSA, Gen. Michael Hayden, told Congress in 2002 that the agency intercepted two Arabic-language messages on Sept. 10, 2001. One said, "Tomorrow is zero hour." The other announced that "The match is about to begin." The NSA translated the messages on Sept. 12. Neither Congress nor the intelligence community can afford to let such a lapse happen again.