An Iraq war translator's inside take on America's failure to communicate

Last year, the Hamilton-Baker commission reported that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad had only six fluent Arabic speakers on its staff—a fact that went largely unnoticed next to ostensibly bigger and more pressing problems with the war in Iraq. But one wonders if a failure to communicate isn't the root problem of the fiasco. How can the U.S. reach hearts and minds if they can't even speak the language?

"The [linguists] are looked down on in the army as prima donnas who need a slap-down. They don't see it as a tool. Patriot missiles are seen as a tool"The lack of Arabic translators in Iraq appears to stem from a Bush Administration decision to outsource translation services to private contractors. Called "linguistic support," these companies, two of the largest of which are Titan Corporation and DynCorp International, have received billions of dollars to provide language interpreters to the Iraq reconstruction effort. But many of the supposed "translators" sent to Iraq were untrained, had poor language skills, or couldn't speak Arabic at all. In many cases the contractors appear to have conducted no screenings or interviews with prospective translators. And Titan Corporation interpreters are accused of involvement in two cases of prisoner abuse in Iraq and one case of espionage at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

For an inside look at the U.S.'s failure to communicate, Radar spoke with Dustin Langan, who worked as a translator in Iraq for defense contractor MZM Incorporated for 11 months between 2003 and 2004. Later, MZM's CEO at the time, Mitchell Wade, pleaded guilty to bribing then-Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA) in exchange for access to no-bid contracts with the Pentagon. Langan, for his part, worked as an interpreter for U.S. and coalition officials in Iraq at mass gravesites, in interview rooms of the doomed "de-Baathification" process, and throughout the city of Baghdad. He left Iraq in 2004, is currently writing a satirical novel based on his experience, and now works as a linguistics consultant in Barcelona, Spain.

We asked Langan for an inside take on why, after four years of engagement, we still can't talk to the Iraqis.

RADAR: Had you ever worked for a defense contractor before working for MZM?
DUSTIN LANGAN: In September 2002 I went and worked for REEP Inc., which is another small contractor with the Defense Department. They had acquired this contract to take six intermediate-level Arabic linguists to spend two weeks in an "Iso-immersion" environment [where soldiers speak Arabic in an isolated environment]. REEP had this house in New Hampshire and they contacted me by e-mail, out of the blue. They asked me if I was interested in going and teaching the course.

What were you doing at the time?
I was waiting tables at a Chinese restaurant.

How long had you studied Arabic for?
I had attended the Defense Language Institute [DLI] in 1994 and then I did a year of intensive self-study, before I studied at the University of Washington.

So you had been out of Arabic from the mid-'90s to 2002 when they hired you to teach soldiers Arabic prior to their Iraq deployment.
That's right, with zero experience. I'd never been to a Middle Eastern country.

Do you feel you were qualified for the job?
Was I the right guy to teach the course? No.

Did they give you any instructions?
I asked them, "What do you want me to do?" And they said, "You're the expert." Look, it was that REEP got the contract and then they sent an e-mail to me, because it looked like I spoke Arabic, asking me if I would come teach the course. That was it. There was no interview. There was no anything. No accountability. Nothing.

How did they know you really spoke Arabic?
Because it said so on my resumé. Because I said so when they asked me.

So you teach the course and you go back to the Chinese restaurant. A year later, MZM Inc. contacts you.
Six months. They just said, "We have a contract to send linguists to support the Department of Defense in Iraq, would you be interested in going?" I called to ask about it, and we talked about five minutes. I said at first I was not really interested.

Why not?
Because I didn't support the war. My knee-jerk reaction was not to touch it with a ten-foot pole. And the guy said, "I really think you should reconsider." Which basically means he really needs me and doesn't really care who I am. That's what I found out later.

And MZM hired you without an interview?
Zero. Basically MZM had 22 slots to fill for the contract with the Department of Defense. Each linguist filled a slot, and those slots had to be useful in advancing the military's goals.

So no one seemed concerned about the lack of screening?

I never met her, but Barbara Bodine [the former U.S. Ambassador to Yemen], she was there [in Iraq], and my understanding is she was outraged when she heard that we had not been screened. But she was fired and sent home almost immediately.

So what was your assessment of your fellow translators?
Two of the 22 were Farsi speakers.

Intentionally?
If it was intentional, that intention was never communicated to anybody that would be working with these linguists.

Is Farsi useful in Iraq?
Everyone was pretty confused about why they were there. One of them decided he was not being useful, was earning money for doing nothing and it was nonsense, so he went home. The other had a master's degree in political science but he never used it for anything. But nobody could find anything to do with him as a Farsi linguist and he couldn't find a job and was just trying to justify being there, but no one could find anything for him to do.

These guys didn't have any useful skills?
These are the crucial first four months. Everything's super crucial at the beginning. And he did get placed in the end, eavesdropping on Iranian websites. Of course he could have done that from Virginia. One of the guys who was hired didn't speak Arabic at all.

What happened to him?
They did not send him home. MZM had given orders to keep him in place because the contract worked as such that there were 22 slots, so we had to provide a piece of paper with 22 names on it, and we had to prove that these were 22 people around somewhere doing something. And there were no questions asked. There was no review. They didn't want to pull him out of there because he was a body.