CIA Training, Recruiting Initiatives Highlight Intelligence Workforce Woes (S. Lee)

Published on examiner.com on June 26th 2009. 

Written by Stephen Lee , CIA examiner. 

Putting out fires left over from Bush-era intelligence adventures isn’t the only problem on CIA Director Leon Panneta’s plate. New language training and hiring initiatives aim to build a 21st century workforce and shore up neglected capabilities. But will these initiatives be enough to undo intelligence workforce problems decades in the making?
  Last month, Panetta announced a new in-house language-training program intended to double the number of foreign language speakers in CIA’s workforce. A mere 30 percent of CIA’s overseas clandestine service officers are fluent in foreign languages.  
Put another way, about one out of three CIA officers working undercover overseas can actually speak the local foreign language. That’s on a good day—with officers on constant rotation to Washington and the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones, it’s a safe bet that many overseas CIA posts are inadequately staffed with officers proficient in local languages.  
Meanwhile, CIA is attempting to beef up its cadre of business and economics experts with a recruiting pitch aimed at down-on-their-luck Wall Street types.  
A fresh new cohort of economists and ex-bankers, however, won’t help CIA fill that critical shortage of foreign language speakers.  
And the new foreign language program, aimed at increasing language skills among existing employees, is only part of the answer.  
What CIA and other Intelligence Community agencies need is a pipeline of new employees already fluent in key languages. Another new intelligence community proposal, reported by Walter Pincus of the Washington Post last week, seeks to entice a new generation of native foreign language speakers into intelligence service with money for college.  
CIA and NSA have been employing college students for decades, with some student employees actually receiving financial aid.  
(Full disclosure: my CIA career began as a student employee. CIA hired and employed me while I was in graduate school, and paid a small portion of my academic expenses in addition to wages I earned while I worked full-time at CIA between semesters.)  
The proposed new student recruitment program would be aimed at first- and second-generation immigrant Americans who have the language and cultural skills so badly needed by CIA and other intelligence agencies.  
The program is a sorely needed step in the right direction—intelligence officials, blue ribbon commissions, and scholars have repeatedly pointed out that foreign language expertise is a critical weak spot in US intelligence and defense capabilities.  
However, recruiting and incentivizing first- and second-generation immigrants to join CIA, NSA, FBI, and other security agencies simply won’t be enough to satisfy the pressing need for more foreign language speakers in the intelligence community. Major shifts in national security culture are needed to make these new training and recruiting initiatives stick.  
Amy Zegart, a scholar and authority on intelligence reform, told Pincus, "You can't hire the right people until you change the security-clearance rules."
  The security clearance process is a significant obstacle to assimilating first- and second- immigrant Americans into the intelligence workforce. Foreign travel, foreign friends, and foreign relatives—which these immigrant applicants will certainly have, and in abundance—tends to trip up the security clearance process as we currently know it. The foreign-ness of these immigrants will make it difficult or impossible for them to get security clearances, unless the process is overhauled.
  Other prejudices built into the security clearance process also tend to exclude foreign language speakers from careers in national security. For example, a disproportionately high number of military foreign language experts have been discharged from the military under “don’t-ask-don’t tell” rules that prohibit openly gay individuals from serving in the military.
  The hostility toward homosexuality evident within military culture carries over directly into security organizations that administer the security clearance process for intelligence agencies. Despite Clinton-era reforms intended to remove homosexuality as a security disqualifier, intelligence community security personnel have told me that homosexuality is nonetheless treated as a “flag” or indicator of deviant or criminal behavior that invites closer and often disqualifying scrutiny.
  If security clearance investigators and polygraph examiners won’t let an executive order change their McCarthy-era fixations on homosexuality and deviancy, what makes anyone think that they’ll change their minds about immigrants’ foreign contacts and travel?  
Xeno- and homophobia in the security clearance process is but one factor contributing to the critical shortage of foreign linguists in the intelligence community. Trends in American society also contribute to the problem.  
One significant reason why the pool of foreign language-speaking intelligence recruits is so small: native-born Americans tend not to speak foreign languages, and when they do, they tend not to speak languages that are needed for defense and intelligence, such as Arabic, Farsi, or Chinese.  
Only a third or so of high schoolers take a foreign language. And when they do, foreign language instruction in American schools focuses almost exclusively on Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Latin, which were useful languages for US intelligence--during the first half of the 20th century.  
Meanwhile, here in the 21st century, less than one percent of American students are currently studying languages such as Arabic or Korean that might be useful for US intelligence . Some 24,000 US students study Chinese, as compared to 200 million Chinese students who are learning English.
  The strategic value of foreign language learning has not been completely lost on American politicians. The Bush administration launched the National Security Language Initiative in a post 9/11 effort to remediate shortfalls in foreign language instruction, but it will likely take decades to attain meaningful results. Interest in similar programs before and during the Cold War came and went every decade or so, and even now, education observers note that the slipping local tax revenues are already exacting a toll on foreign language programs in cash-strapped school districts.  
Marc Ambinder of Atlantic Monthly pointed out six months ago, while Obama was still assembling his national security team, that human resources would be the “CIA Director’s greatest challenge.” Even as Panetta battles Congress, other intelligence chiefs, courts, and critics, Ambinder’s assessment still holds true.   
Unfortunately, night classes in foreign languages and scholarships for sharp foreign kids will be only be a start at tackling CIA’s tough workforce challenges.