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KATY CLARK: Here's another concern for the CIA. The agency charged with collecting intelligence from around the world doesn't have enough employees who speak a foreign language. For example only 18 percent of employees in the CIA's directorate of intelligence speak a language other than English. That's according to data published this week by USA Today. The low percentage troubles Congressman Pete Hoekstra. He's a ranking member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. And he says in eight years on the committee, he's only seen a little progress on this issue.

PETE HOEKSTRA: I think we've gone from thirteen, fourteen percent up to the eighteen percent number that you've identified, but you also need to start getting into exactly what languages do these folks have? So, this is an issue that congress continues to push on because if you don't understand the language and the culture how effectively can you work in a community to, kind of, penetrate it and try to find out exactly what's going on?

CLARK: Remind us what languages we're talking about here. Which are considered the critical languages to US intelligence gathering in 2009?

HOEKSTRA: Well, I mean, you've got all the languages, the varieties and the dialects that they're speaking in the Pak-Afghan region and throughout the Middle East.

CLARK: So, why hasn't there been more progress, in your opinion, to beefing up the language capabilities of the US intelligence services?

HOEKSTRA: Clearly they haven't put enough focus on it and they haven't really changed their promotional strategies and they haven't put in their compensation strategies. You know, we have, for a long time, encouraged incentive payments for people to acquire and maintain and to stay fluent in the necessary languages. And they've just been very, very slow in developing those types of practices.

CLARK: Are you suggesting that the CIA just hasn't taken the recommendation seriously? Doesn't find this an important thing to take on?

HOEKSTRA: I would agree that, you know, I came out of the business world and if I had told my management team that something was a priority and eight years later I had seen this small progress I would've said, I probably wasn't clear enough in communicating to you how important this is because you have not made it a priority for the organization, and I think that's exactly what's happened in the CIA. They have not taken the direction from congress or the 9-11 commission seriously enough to make it a priority and change the profile of the community.

CLARK: Do you think the fact that English is used all over the world puts the US at a disadvantage because we tend to think that we don't have to learn other languages and it leaves these gaps in our understanding as a result?

HOEKSTRA: It's a mixed blessing. They speak English all over the world which means that it also becomes a crutch. We can say, well, we can get away with just knowing English. In reality, to totally understand a community you need to know the language and in that way it does become a negative because Americans do become a little bit arrogant or whatever and just believe that, well, I'll be able to find somebody who can speak English and I'll just use a translator and I don't need to know the language. And so, yeah, that is one of the negatives of having English spoken so widely around the world.

CLARK: And I'm just curious if you know how other countries with major intelligence operations compare with the United States in this regard?

HOEKSTRA: Well, they will do a whole lot better because in their societies, you know, kids going through school are learning not only their own language but they're also learning two, three, four other languages and education experts will tell you that the most effective place to learn new languages is when people are kids. And it's an acquired skill. If you've picked up the ability to learn one or two different languages, picking up the third or the fourth gets to be a whole lot easier. In America we don't pick up the second language very often through our educational system and so we can get to be adults and then start to try to learn a new language for the first time. That's a real problem.

CLARK: Republican congressman Pete Hoekstra from Michigan; thank you very much.

HOEKSTRA: Thank you.

CLARK: By the way, congressman Hoekstra is bi-lingual. He moved to the US from the Netherlands as a small child and can speak Dutch.

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