CIA language training
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CIA language training is, in John Kiriakou's account, both an immersion course and a career mechanism, the thing that moved him out of analysis and into operations.

The course

Having asked in 1993 to be detailed to the State Department, Kiriakou was first sent to Arabic language training, which took a full year and left him with what he calls some conversational fluency. The regime was nine hours a day of Arabic. Some students went on to a second year at the State Department's own language school; Kiriakou did not, going straight out to Bahrain, where he served from 1994 to 1996 as the embassy's second secretary for economic affairs.

The linguist's advantage

Kiriakou spent the first seven years of his CIA career as an analyst working on Iraq, became bored, and looked for a way into counterterrorism operations. A counterterrorism slot in Athens covering Arab terrorism required either Greek or Arabic; as he tells it, he turned out to be the only person in the entire agency who spoke both.

The institutional reasoning he was given has become one of his standing lines about how the agency actually allocates people: "it's a lot easier and a lot cheaper for us to take a linguist and teach him operations than it is to take an operations person and teach him how to speak Greek and Arabic." He got the job, went through operational training at the Farm, and found he had a knack for it.

The shortage that never closes

Against that, Kiriakou describes a permanent scarcity of qualified speakers, and a screening system that reproduces it. The agency goes through "fits and starts" of resolving to hire as many Arabic speakers as it can; but many Arabic speakers in the United States are first-generation Americans or refugees who became citizens, and they run into trouble with the polygraph or the background investigation and are not hired. Those who were hired, he says, were cleared several levels below their American-born colleagues despite identical vetting, a practice he says changed after 9/11.

The deficit has operational consequences in his telling. He notes the oddity, in the cover story given by a group of Arab travellers to Pakistan, that they had gone there to learn Arabic, a country where the language is Urdu, not Arabic.

See also

- The Farm
- The polygraph
- Bahrain Posting (1994,1996)
- John Kiriakou
