Key spy agency expands to Utah
NSA: The feds hope to get good translators as the state hopes for good jobs
By Robert Gehrke
©2006, The Salt Lake Tribune
Salt Lake Tribune
WASHINGTON - The secretive National Security Agency is expanding its operations, adding a cadre of translators in Utah, the agency confirmed Wednesday, as part of an effort to decentralize its operations and improve its capability to track terrorist communications.
The stealthy agency, which gathers intelligence around the world by monitoring communications, would not say how many linguists it would be hiring or where they would be located. A source familiar with the plan says it probably will be a significant number of jobs, possibly a few hundred.
"Since the catastrophic terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the National Security Agency/Central Security Service has embarked on a national strategy to expand our foreign language capabilities. We've intensified our recruitment and increased the number of locations where our work can be most efficiently performed," NSA spokesman Don Weber said in a statement.
"The current threat environment naturally limits the detail we are willing to share on numbers, tasks or precise locations. Our Utah presence, however, reflects additive capability to our worldwide foreign-language ac- tivities."
The National Security Agency's mission is to gather intelligence from abroad and to encrypt sensitive U.S. information to protect it from being exploited.
It has been at the center of a recent debate over whether President Bush broke the law in authorizing the NSA, without first obtaining a warrant, to monitor communications among individuals with suspected terrorist ties in which one party was in the United States.
The move to Utah is part of a trend within the NSA to move many functions out of its headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., just outside of Washington.
Author James Bamford, who has written two books on the NSA, said part of the motivation may be cost savings, but after Sept. 11, 2001, the agency feared another terrorist attack or catastrophic event could wipe out its headquarters and paralyze the vast majority of its intelligence operations.
As a result, some NSA counterterrorism operations have moved to Georgia; several thousand NSA jobs are being relocated to a multimillion-dollar facility in San Antonio, according to the San Antonio Express-News; The Denver Post reported some unspecified functions would be moving to the Denver area; and the NSA representative indicated some duties in Hawaii have been expanded.
"To the extent they're dispersed, they're going to be more versatile and responsive," said Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy with the Federation of American Scientists.
When he visited Washington in November, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. had a classified meeting with NSA officials at Fort Meade.
The addition of translators in Utah could help the NSA ease a major bottleneck that has hindered its intelligence gathering ability.
Bamford said millions of messages around the world can be collected, but only so many can be translated, and without that translation capability, the information is worthless.
A key finding of a House and Senate intelligence committee investigation into intelligence gathering prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was that the NSA lacked experienced linguists to monitor terrorist traffic.
The congressional report said that the intelligence community generally had significant backlogs of material awaiting translation and that before the attacks the NSA had a limited number of Arab linguists and few were focused on al-Qaida.
Specifically, it cited NSA intercepts obtained Sept. 10, 2001, where speakers with suspected terrorist ties indicated a significant event may be imminent, but those communications were not translated until Sept. 12. It's not clear if they were referring to the Sept. 11 attacks.
A senior NSA official told the committee that finding qualified counterterrorism translators - familiar with Arab dialects, culture, the Muslim faith, and military operations - is difficult.
To bolster its language corps, the NSA hosts dozens of job fairs at colleges across the country. It held a fair at Brigham Young University last Thursday and will be at Utah State University on March 1.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, would not discuss the NSA activities in Utah specifically, but said in a statement that he is proud to represent a state whose people "contribute mightily with their talent, experience and dedication" to the war effort.
"Utah has the highest per capita foreign language literacy in the nation. These skills have often been tapped for the greater good of the country, and will no doubt be tapped many times more," Hatch said.
The high percentage of Utahns speaking foreign languages is due in large part to the number of Mormon missionaries who learn languages so they can serve two years proselytizing overseas for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
>>Intelligence Community Links
http://www.nsa.gov/notices/notic00005.cfm More clips today from the Senate grilling of John “Death Squad” Negroponte. Among them the chilling prospect of War Criminal John Poindexter’s “Total Information Awareness” program still being in operation!
Poindexter’s Information Awareness Office website
(this site was quickly purged, but not before others archived it)
http://www.randirhodesarchives.com
