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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- The National Security Agency has confirmed it will establish a cadre of translators in Utah, a Salt Lake City newspaper said.
The agency would not say how many linguists it would be hiring or where they would be located, but a source familiar with the plan said it probably will be a significant number of jobs, possibly a few hundred, The Salt Lake Tribune said in a copyright story Thursday.
"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 activities," it said.
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.
To recruit linguists, 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.
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
