An institutional climate of "Islamophobia" and wariness among many U.S. Arabs and Muslims of the federal government are proving to be substantial barriers to recruiting Arabic speakers into the United States’ counterterrorism agencies, observers say.
Applications are being received in record numbers, but submissions from those who might be choice picks in the fight against al-Qaeda – such as U.S.-born Arabs and other Muslims – are not being received in anything like the quantity needed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), State Department, Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies involved in counterterrorism.
The commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon strongly criticized U.S. intelligence agencies for failing to hire linguists who are fluent in Arabic and other target languages, and for their inability to infiltrate reliable agents into al-Qaeda.
Meanwhile, officials say that about 40 U.S. citizens who sought positions at the nation’s intelligence agencies have been turned away for possible ties to terrorist groups.
"We think terrorist organizations have tried to insinuate people into our hiring pools," Barry Royden, a 39-year CIA veteran who is a counterintelligence instructor at the agency, said at a national conference on counterintelligence last weekend at Texas A&M University.
But in the opinion of many Arab-American and Muslim-American groups, most of whom spoke with IPS on condition of anonymity, another major reason for the absence of Arabic speakers is the treatment of people in these communities in the months following the 2001 attacks.
This period was marked by the wholesale roundup, arrest, and detention of hundreds – and eventually thousands – of Arabs and Muslims across the country. Many were detained for months and treated like criminals, without access to legal counsel or even to their families.
Some allege they were abused. Most were eventually released without charge. Others were deported, often to home countries where they would face political persecution. Most were immigrants or visitors, but U.S. citizens were also caught up in the fear and hysteria of the time.
An executive with one of the major Arab-American organizations told IPS: "The government wants it both ways. They want us to apply for counterterrorism jobs, and at the same time they’re keeping us under surveillance or sending agents to arrest us."
"It’s difficult to recruit people to join organizations when they feel besieged by them," Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington-based advocacy group, told the Christian Science Monitor.
"The detentions.the foreign policies in the Muslim world, you name it. Muslims are feeling besieged by it these days."
Despite the ill-feeling, counterterrorism agencies are reaching out to the Arab-American and Muslim-American communities – and with some success. In the past few years, the CIA has been graduating young spies and analysts in record numbers.
But there is a wide consensus that counterterrorism agencies still have a very long way to go. Before he stepped down as CIA chief, George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission it would take at least five years to get the agency’s clandestine service back to full speed. Others in the field have said that 10 to 15 years might be more realistic.
The same is true of the FBI. A recent report by the Government Accountability Office found that while the FBI has made progress in staffing to carry out its new counterterrorism mission, the number of counterterrorism agents is "still not sufficient to handle the workload."
The strategic plan that CIA Director Porter J. Goss recently delivered to President George W. Bush would increase clandestine officers and analysts by 50 percent.
There are a number of obstacles. First, the nation’s counter-terrorism agencies are now competing with one another, and with the private sector, for scarce new talent. Headhunting efforts have probably been exacerbated by the recent announcement by the Department of Defense (DOD) that it would begin to carry out clandestine operations, formerly the exclusive province of the CIA.
And until recently, in domestic agencies like the FBI, counterterrorism has not presented a clear career path.
But most experts agree that bureaucracy also plays a large role in impeding recruitment efforts. For example, each applicant the agencies are interested in has to receive a security clearance – one of the most time-consuming bottlenecks in the hiring process. Clearance can take up to a year, experts say.
Some applicants are turned down for straightforward reasons such as a criminal conviction or drug use. But others are rejected for bizarre reasons. For example, U.S.-born Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans have been turned down for having family in the Middle East, or having spent too much time there.
Robert Baer, who was a CIA case officer from 1976 to 1997, and is the author of See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism, says the security clearance system needs to change.
"If you are, say, an American born in Islamabad who happens to have a second cousin working in the Pakistani intelligence service, the chances of getting security clearance to join the agency are close to nil," he said.
"Third-generation Americans with no known foreign relatives but who have spent much of their lives overseas have a better chance, but the odds are still slim, especially if those overseas years were spent studying in a place like Cairo."
Melissa Boyle Mahle, a fluent Arabic speaker, is one of several former CIA agents to write of their experiences in Denial and Deception: An Insider’s View of the CIA From Iran-Contra to 9/11.
Mahle says one of the results of the cumbersome security clearance process "was best illustrated by a panoramic view of the swearing-in of the first class to enter on duty" after Sept. 11. "It was a sea of white faces.a graduating class that looked exactly like me."
Mahle has blond hair and blue eyes. "Security has no incentive to take risks," Mahle added.
The State Department, which has a smaller counterterrorism unit, faces similar problems. It, too, is receiving more applications than it can handle. But of the record 32,239 people who took the State Department’s Foreign Service exam or applied there last fiscal year, for example, only 470 ended up with jobs.
All the counterterrorism agencies are finding it difficult to recruit fluent U.S.-born translators. One reason is that Arabic is rarely studied in U.S universities. As a consequence, the FBI is hiring translators born in the Middle East, who require longer background checks.
According to the General Accounting Office, the lack of native qualified linguists has resulted in thousands of hours of tape recordings and pages of documents that have not been translated or studied.
So, despite the record number of applications, most agencies haven’t been hiring in record numbers – creating a bottleneck of candidates and many disappointed applicants.
Meanwhile, the intelligence community is reaching out for talent at college job fairs and among U.S-born Arabs and other Muslims, offering students large scholarships, and poaching staff from one another.
