US intelligence agencies have severely few fluent Arabic speakers

Evidence

But the facts Bloomberg stated were true. The Washington Post reported that out of the entire FBI staff of 12,000 agents, only 33 have even a limited command of Arabic. (As a point of comparison, nearly 900 speak Spanish.) It’s not just the FBI either. The State Department, for example, lists 279 Arabic speakers on its staff. But when a bipartisan advisory panel investigated this figure in 2004, it discovered that only 54 of them could be considered fluent. And of the 54, only 6 were fluent enough to appear on Arabic television. The Iraq Study Group pointed out that the American embassy in Iraq, staffed with over 1,000 employees, also has only 6 fluent Arabic speakers. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 784

Categorization

• SHARE: Send to anyone interested in intelligence failure or language readiness — the FBI having only 33 limited-Arabic speakers out of 12,000 agents is a striking stat.
• QUESTION: How did this language gap shape actual counterterrorism operations and missed signals in the decade after 9/11?