FBI Issues Call for Translators to Assist Probe

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller made an unusual plea Monday, seeking to recruit people who speak Arabic, Persian or Pashtun--the language of western Afghanistan--to help with the nation’s probe into last week’s hijackings.

But even though the jobs pay as much as $38 per hour, filling them won’t be easy.

Not many native English speakers are fluent in these Middle Eastern tongues, and many native speakers of these languages are wary of working with the American government.

Leaders of Arab and Iranian American groups said they want to be helpful and some even welcomed the outreach effort. But many also are worried that anyone who signs up might somehow come under suspicion, given the wide-ranging nature of the investigation.

“Our community should definitely cooperate . . . [but] there’s a lot of mixed feelings about the authorities,” said Hussein Ibish, spokesman for the American Arab Anti-Discrimination League.

Other Iranian Americans privately questioned whether the recruitment campaign wasn’t just an FBI attempt to infiltrate Middle Eastern communities. A few disagreed, but said the timing of the request was suspect.

“It’s not like they didn’t know terrorism was out there in Middle Eastern countries,” said Nikoo Nikoomanesh, 20, of Beverly Hills, a UCLA student majoring in history. “I doubt they really have any deficiencies [in language expertise].”

In Los Angeles, the director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council described the FBI request as “kind of scary,” although he too was “encouraging people to cooperate with law enforcement short of espionage.”

“We are somewhat surprised they didn’t have that level of expertise before this tragedy took place,” said Salam Al-Maryati.

In Los Angeles, the desire to help apparently overshadowed concerns about untoward consequences. The FBI office here on Monday received inquiries from about 50 people who called or showed up at the agency’s office in Westwood, spokesman Matt McLaughlin said.

A Persian-language talk show on KIRN 670-AM radio interrupted a discussion of drug abuse to talk about Mueller’s effort, and callers interested in helping the FBI complained they couldn’t get through on the toll-free number set up by the FBI, said host Shahrzad Ardalan.

One likely site of recruitment is Southern California. About 900,000 Arab Americans live in the U.S. and roughly a third of those live in Los Angeles and Orange counties. It is estimated that there are about 1 million people of Iranian descent in the United States, about half of whom live in Southern California.

The agency will likely have to count on assistance from immigrant communities because the pool of American-born people fluent in those languages is shallow. American universities are not training significant numbers of students in Arabic, Persian or Pashtun.

Jerry Lampe, a senior fellow with the National Foreign Language Center in Washington, D.C., said the “federal government has been short-handed for years because the American education system does not train people to high levels of competence, especially in the less commonly taught languages.”

“Many government agencies can’t find people, and either the jobs go unfilled or filled with people who don’t have the requisite skills,” he said.

McLaughlin, spokesman for the FBI’s Los Angeles operations, said the agency did not have a shortage of linguists until the launch of the investigation following the terrorist attacks.

Fewer than one in 10 American college students major in foreign languages and only one in 10 of those who do so study non-European languages. Among that smaller group, languages such as Russian, Chinese and Korean are far more popular than Arabic or other languages spoken in the Near and Middle East, according to the Council for Organizations of Less Commonly Taught Languages.

Part of the reason has to do with the predominance of English, the accepted worldwide language of commerce and, to a large extent, culture. The popularity of American movies and music makes it a status symbol as well as a lucrative skill.

But languages are not taught in the United States until high school in most communities, and although many universities have language requirements, fluency is rarely required.

Universities say that interest in language surges and flags. Many universities saw increased demand for Persian after the Iranian hostage crisis during the Carter administration and interest in Arabic rose after the Persian Gulf War.

The toll-free hotline to reach the FBI is 1-866-483-5137. Applicants must be U.S. citizens who have lived in this country for at least three of the last five years. They also must pass a proficiency test, take a polygraph and undergo a background check.