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Politics

New spy chief is told to recruit Arabic speakers

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published February 21, 2007

WASHINGTON - President Bush instructed the nation's new spy chief to focus on finding more recruits with the language skills and cultural background to collect information on al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.

During a swearing-in ceremony Tuesday at Bolling Air Force Base outside Washington for retired Vice Adm. Mike McConnell as the second director of national intelligence, Bush said the intelligence community still needs significant improvements more than five years after Sept. 11.

He charged McConnell, who took his new post several days ago, with better integrating the nation's 16 spy agencies, improving information sharing among those agencies and with other officials throughout government, and finding better intelligence technologies.

McConnell becomes the president's chief intelligence adviser and manager of the 16 agencies and roughly 100,000 people making up the U.S. intelligence community.

The president - and later McConnell - also focused on a persistent weakness in American intelligence-gathering: a dearth of operatives who speak critical languages, such as Arabic or Farsi.

"The old policies have hampered some common-sense reforms, such as hiring first- and second-generation Americans who possess native language skills, cultural insights and a keen understanding of the threats we face," McConnell said.

To go after the faced-paced threat of terrorism, McConnell said the government must start acquiring new technologies and capabilities with the agility that was seen during the Cold War.

McConnell's resume includes nearly four decades of work in the intelligence community. He heads an office created by Congress just over two years ago to coordinate national intelligence.

[Last modified February 21, 2007, 00:58:56]