I've thought a lot about the recruitment issue re languages. It is extremely tricky from a counterintelligence perspective as that has always been one of the best ways of inserting a double. You would have thought that we would at least be overloaded with Farsi speakers but in 1979 it had been a long time since we even had many Farsi speakers in Tehran station and afterward - the legacy of Stansfield Turner was far-reaching (see "Charlie Wilson's War")

I would hope we had bartered for some Arab speakers from Mossad after 2001 but the decision about how to apply them is very contentious - NSA needs them badly but DD wan't them in the war zone.

There is another problem - Cuban-dialect spanish speakers are more than happy to announce themselves as anti-castro and refugees from Russia and the eastern block would make no secret of their anti-communist leanings. Few Arab speakers in the Western world are vocally anti-jihadi. Just isn't healthy. I suspect recruiting and enrollment is done very very quietly when it is done most effectively.

( and of course in the military you have to be sure that those with right language skills also have politically approved habits for the deployment of their genitals ... <s> )


>>Fascinating piece by Donald Gregg in the Washington Post titled "George Smiley's War"
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>>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/30/AR2007123002236.html
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>>The bio at the bottom doesn't give you the real flavor of it. Gregg worked for Shackley - the Ghost - in covert ops in Burma in the 60s and ran a good deal of Phoenix in Vietnam. He was the prime mover in the support of the Contras. He ran Felix Rodriguez - "Max", the guy who got Che ... He is one of George Bush senior's closest confidants in the intelligence world. If Scocroft speaks for Poppy on foreign policy, Gregg speaks for the Bush who ran CIA.
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>>If you know how to read between the lines on this one, it is a very big deal and I guarantee you there are folks from Langley to Baghdad to Islamabad to Seoul reading it like tea leaves.
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>>Tracy, you're probably the only one who'll realy get this, but I didn't want you to miss it <s>
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>>Sed Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
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>>Happy New Year.
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>Interesting reading indeed. Thanks for the link. I would have asked the same question your latin quote asks.
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>When the Cold War ended the CIA had plenty of Russian speaking officers. How many Arabic speakers did they recruit since? Did they realize the need then? They have a ready-made set of skills in the Arab-American community. Did they recruit there? Or didn't they because of distrust?
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>We sent Japanese-Americans to internment camps in WWII. Does history really repeat itself? Have we learned anything?