FBI Slaps Helping Hand

Jimmy Breslin

June 4, 2002

Sometime last fall, the FBI ran ads asking for people who could speak Middle Eastern languages. This was at least a scandal. We had just been attacked by Arabs and were going to wage war on an Arab country and hardly anybody on our side could speak Arabic or any other Middle Eastern language. Around the United Nations in New York everybody says that this bin Laden has the best translators anywhere and the United States is comical. When Rumsfeld announces that we have captured bin Laden's hard drives, he can't give you the names of the people who can read them. He can't because most of the time there isn't anybody.

Forever, the FBI was afraid of anybody not milk-white Catholic. Fear of the least swarthiness was only normal. There was a day in 1960 when Robert F. Kennedy was named attorney general and asked immediately how many agents of color the FBI had, John Edgar Hoover came out of the building, looked at his black chauffeur and said, "Report upstairs and get a special agent's badge. You're not driving anymore."

He then could inform the attorney general's office that the FBI had at least one black agent in the home office.

This time, the lack of people who speak the languages of the Middle East was worse. It got people killed.

The day the ad asking for translators ran, I saw a woman I know at the corner newsstand and I told her about it. She was born in Iran, raised on the Farsi language and attended the University of Tehran.

"I'll look at it," she said. "I want to do something."

I saw her a couple of days later and she said that she was thinking of going to the FBI office and volunteering as a translator. I told her that I thought she'd be terrific. She had kids to worry about, but she thought that she and her husband could figure that out.

That she had been raised in Farsi was a tremendous asset. Besides Iranians, people in the north of Afghanistan speak Farsi. She arrived in the morning at the FBI offices, ready to volunteer for her country. First, an agent escorted her to an office, where they let her sit. She got up and right away an agent wanted to know what she wanted. She said she wanted to go to the ladies' room. The agent escorted her there, waited in the hallway and escorted her back to the room.

She was told that her background had to be checked. That was fine. She has been married forever to a guy who is in government law enforcement. The background check took a couple of months.

She was called down there one day over some form or other and while she was there she said to the watchful agent:

"Can I get coffee?"

"No."

"Then could you get me a cup of coffee?"

"That's not going to happen."

Good FBI language.

It was a couple of months later when I saw her on the street and asked her how it was going and she said that she hadn't heard from their background check yet. Her husband is known in the law business and she wouldn't even tell me the building she went to for appointments with the FBI. We were talking on St. Patrick's Day.

You go a couple of more months and then one day she told me that they had asked her to come down to the FBI office and take a language test.

"Couldn't they just talk to you and find out? Or don't they have anybody who can talk the language to give a test?"

The test turned out to be long and demanding, in that the language being used on the examination paper was a half notch removed from any Farsi she had used growing up and attending college. It was a test in Farsi put out by some professor in a college who never had been one foot off the North American continent.

They told her that she had not passed. This was like failing a test on Queens if you're born in Elmhurst. But then a note came that they still wanted her to come to work.

Her troubles with the FBI exam were similar to those of Geoff D. Porter, who teaches Middle Eastern studies at New York University. He writes, "The Arabic language test - copyrighted in 1994 by the Defense Language institute - was solely in Modern Standard Arabic ... this is the form used for official speeches and in the news media in Arab countries - but almost never in conversation. It differs substantially from the spoken varieties of Arabic in vocabulary, syntax and idiom - enough so that a non-native speaker who learned only Modern Standard Arabic would not be able to understand Arabic speakers talking to one another."

Now, it is at least seven months since she volunteered to help her country. It has taken so long because the FBI is lazy and inefficient and the more you see of them at work, the more you wonder how you can reorganize them.

Finally, she was asked to come down for another test, and when she walked into the office, she knew things were different. No agent escorted her as she walked to the room. The test consisted of sitting around and talking with Americans and people who spoke genuine Farsi and when she left, she felt that maybe, perhaps, she would get a chance to do volunteer work for a country that badly needs her abilities.