Lost In Translation

The clash of civilizations rages in some surprising places, and one of them is the large room in the FBI's Washington, D.C., Field Office that houses a unit known as CI-19. In one set of cubicles sit the foreign-born Muslims; across a partition is everyone else. They have the same vital job: to translate supersecret wiretaps of suspected terrorists and spies. But the 150 or so members of CI-19 (for Counterintelligence) segregate themselves by ethnicity and religion. Some of the U.S.-born translators have accused their Middle Eastern-born counterparts of making disparaging or unpatriotic remarks, or of making "mistranslations"--failing to translate comments that might reflect poorly on their fellow Muslims, such as references to sexual deviancy. The tensions erupt in arguments and angry finger-pointing from time to time. "It's a good thing the translators are not allowed to carry guns," says Sibel Edmonds, a Farsi translator who formerly worked in the unit.

To fight the war on terror, the FBI desperately needs translators. Every day, wiretaps and bugs installed under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) record hundreds of hours of conversations conducted in Arabic or other Middle Eastern languages like Farsi. Those conversations must all be translated into English--and quickly--if investigators are to head off budding Qaeda plots against the United States. Today, more than two years after the 9/11 attacks, the FBI is still woefully short of translators. FBI Director Robert Mueller has declared that he wants a 12-hour rule: all significant electronic intercepts of suspected terrorist conversations must be translated within 12 hours. Asked if the bureau was living up to its own rule, a senior FBI official quietly chuckled. He was being mordant: he and every top gumshoe are well aware that the consequences could be tragic.

Since 9/11, goaded by the dire warnings of Attorney General John Ashcroft, Congress has poured billions of dollars into the war on terror to beef up manpower, including hiring foreign-language translators. (calling all linguists... to serve your country, reads the latest help-wanted ad posted on the FBI's Web site.) The bureau has made some headway: before 9/11, the FBI had only 40 Arabic and 25 Farsi speakers to listen to national-security intercepts. Today, officials claim, there are 200 Arabic and 75 Farsi speakers on the job (about two thirds are contract employees). Still, that's not nearly enough: every week, say informed sources, hundreds of hours of tapes from wiretaps and bugs pile up in secure lockers, waiting, sometimes for months on end, to be deciphered. The bureau's slow progress is not for lack of money. Rather, the FBI's understandable but obsessive concern with security, its sometimes cumbersome bureaucracy and, critics say, the remnants of its nativist culture make it a difficult place for Muslims and foreign-born linguists to get jobs and work.

A shortage of Arabic speakers has plagued the entire intelligence community. Though U.S. intelligence was using all the best technology--spy satellites, high-tech listening posts and other devices--to listen in on the conversations of possible terrorists, far too often it had no idea what they were saying. A congressional inquiry after 9/11 found enormous backlogs. Millions of hours of talk by suspected terrorists--including 35 percent of all Arabic-language national-security wiretaps by the FBI--had gone untranslated and untranscribed. Some of the overseas intercepts contained chillingly precise warnings. On Sept. 10, 2001, the National Security Agency picked up suggestive comments by Qaeda operatives, including "Tomorrow is zero hour." The tape of the conversation was not translated until after 9/11.

The FBI is still overwhelmed. Because of a threefold increase in FISA wiretaps to monitor the terror threat, the bureau has struggled to keep up. Mueller has been adamant about trying to monitor conversations--in real time--in the dozen or so truly urgent terrorism investigations. But he has been disappointed again and again. One FBI official described an oft-repeated awkward scene in the director's office: a top investigator comes to brief Mueller on a high-priority case, the kind that appears in the Threat Matrix shown to President George W. Bush every morning. During the course of the presentation, it becomes obvious that there are significant gaps in the case. The sheepish agent finally admits that hours of wiretaps have yet to be translated. Mueller, a no-nonsense ex-Marine, swallows his exasperation and tersely instructs his subordinates to "do better."

In theory, there are rules for prioritizing which conversations are to be translated first. Can the information be obtained elsewhere? Is the speaker a known Qaeda member? Is there other intelligence suggesting urgency? In practice, says one street agent, "it all depends on how loud you scream on the phone to headquarters."