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No Hablo Arabic: Clinton's Failure on CIA Translators
By Richard Miniter
Washington Times | September 4, 2003

This is the second installment of a four-part excerpt from Richard Miniter's new book Losing Bin Laden, which is available for $20 from the FrontPage Magazine Bookstore. Read part one.

CIA Director James Woolsey was fighting other bureaucratic battles — instead of [Osama] bin Laden. The CIA was critically short of translators who spoke or read Arabic, Farsi, Pashto and the other languages of the great "terrorist belt." That belt begins on the dirty beaches of Somalia, arcs up the river valleys of Sudan and Egypt, across the desert flats of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, over the dry plateaus of Syria and Iraq, past the wastes of Iran, through the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and ends in the cold steppes of Central Asia. In the world's most terror-prone region, the CIA was essentially blind, deaf, and dumb.

Partly as a result, the intelligence community was able to decipher and translate less than ten percent of the volume of telephone and other intercepts gained from its extensive networks of spy satellites and listening stations. Indeed, throughout the Islamic world, even many radio and television news reports went untranslated. While state-run broadcasts from the Communist bloc were a prime source of intelligence during the Cold War, in the Clinton years the CIA did not have the same capability against militant Islamists. And that deficiency was largely Clinton's fault.

Mr. Woolsey hoped to fix these dangerous deficiencies, but he ran into congressional roadblocks. Sen. Dennis DeConcini, Arizona Democrat, repeatedly blocked any attempts to boost the CIA's budget for Arabic translators.

Mr. Woolsey and Mr. DeConcini came to viscerally dislike each other. The senator told the author that he lost faith in Woolsey when he defended the secret construction of a $300 million National Reconnaissance Office headquarters in Northern Virginia. When Woolsey privately warned the senator against speaking publicly about sensitive intelligence information, Mr. DeConcini was outraged. He said he phoned both Clinton and [National Security Advisor Tony] Lake, threatening to demand Woolsey's resignation on the floor of the U.S. Senate unless Woolsey apologized. Mr. Woolsey never apologized, and Mr. DeConcini never forgave him. As a result, Mr. Woolsey estimates that two-thirds of all his meetings on Capitol Hill were about undoing spending cuts proposed by DeConcini, then a key Senate Appropriations Subcommittee chairman. Woolsey had made a powerful enemy and America's security would pay the price.

When Mr. Woolsey suggested spending a few million dollars to hire Arabic-language translators in 1994, the feud with Mr. DeConcini intensified. Mr. DeConcini said he would only approve the request if it was a presidential priority. "I wanted to be sure," Mr. DeConcini told the author, "that Woolsey was not out on his own, like a cowboy." If Mr. Woolsey did have Clinton's ear, it is unlikely DeConcini would have blocked the CIA's efforts to hire more translators.

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