An M.A. in Spanish has led Don Gentile to the secretive world of foreign intelligence
By William Cocke
Don Gentile, M.A. Spanish '82, won't talk much about his job, which is somewhat ironic considering he loves language. However, when you factor in his chosen profession as a language analyst with the ultrasecret National Security Agency (NSA), Gentile's demureness is more understandable.
For the past 20 years, Gentile has worked for the organization known as the eyes and ears of the nation's intelligence community (where day-to-day chatter consists of intercepted conversations and broadcasts from around the globe) doing, well, he can't say exactly what. It's not that he's rude; quite the opposite, in fact. As fluent in the colloquial New Englandese that he grew up speaking in Massachusetts as he is in the Spanish he studied as a Middlebury graduate student, Gentile is exceedingly polite and modest. He apologizes when he explains he can talk about his job in only general terms ("I love my job, and I'd like to keep it," he jokes), and even when presented the opportunity to brag about a recent promotion, he declines. "I really can't talk about that. I'm sorry."
The son of an Italian immigrant (his father emigrated from Italy at the age of three), Gentile was drawn to the romance languages at an early age. He devoured languages in high school and opted for a double major in Spanish and French at Colby College, spending a semester in Paris immersed in the French language and culture. After graduating from Colby in 1976, he settled in to a teaching job at Proctor Academy in Andover, New Hampshire, instructing high school students in French, Spanish, and English, while also coaching football, basketball, and baseball. Gentile loved teaching and coaching and might have stayed in secondary education for the rest of his career, where he was perfectly happy, were it not for a casual remark from an academy colleague about the foreign language program at Middlebury. Gentile applied to the Spanish School and was accepted in 1979. It was, he says, "a life-changing" moment.
"My language skills improved exponentially," he says. "[Each summer], in those eight weeks, the progress that you make is certainly the equivalent to six months to a year in a foreign country." As a teacher, Gentile had stressed the relevance of learning other tongues. "Language is underestimated as a skill," he explains. It's not just a rote exercise in foreign semantics, dry conjugation on a blackboard; learning the language means absorbing the culture in all its rich complexity.
And for Gentile, his experience at Middlebury would lead him to find an alternate career, one that showed him just how complex the world of languages could be.
For years, Middlebury's Language Schools have served as a hot destination for government employees looking to enhance—or establish—language skills, but government entities have also looked toward Vermont's Champlain Valley when recruiting employees. During Gentile's time at Middlebury, he says that recruiters from the National Security Agency visited each summer, and by the time he had earned his degree in 1982, he knew he wouldn't be returning to Proctor Academy.
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As the nation's cryptologic organization, the National Security Agency is charged with listening to, processing, and analyzing the vast bulk of raw foreign intelligence information used by the government and other agencies within the intelligence community. It is the place where enemy codes are cracked and U.S. intelligence systems are protected, and since most of the globe speaks a primary language other than English, the NSA is also one of the most important centers of foreign language analysis and research in the U.S. government. By necessity, the utmost secrecy surrounds everything it does. In Body of Secrets, a 2001 book about the NSA, author James Bamford calls it "the largest, most secret, and most advanced spy organization on the planet."
In the early 1980s, Spanish was a hot language for intelligence agencies. This was a time of insurgency in Central America, and there was a tangible fear that rebel groups such as Nicaragua's Sandanistas could shoot their way as far north as the Rio Grande.
Gentile was hired by the NSA as a language analyst, working in Spanish. As he progressed through the agency's internal foreign language professionalization program—featuring levels of expertise similar to Middlebury's, but using standards unique to the NSA—Gentile picked up "most of the other romance languages." When asked to expand on "most," Gentile demurs. He also chooses his words carefully when he tries to relate what exactly a language analyst does. "You're given foreign language materials to work on," he explains cryptically, "but you're not like a foreign language translation machine or transcription machine. You have foreign intelligence priorities, and you use your language and analytical skills to determine whether the material that you're working on meets those priorities." If so, Gentile adds, the material is then compiled into an intelligence report and passed on to foreign policy experts.
Gentile falls silent. That's all he's allowed to say about what he does on a daily basis.
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Gentile was in the White House Situation Room on September 11, 2001. (Nearly two years prior he had been assigned to the executive branch's crisis nerve center as a senior intelligence analyst.) When the first hijacked plane hit the World Trade Center, he was one of only four analysts at their posts. "My only comment will be that we were certainly under an extraordinary amount of stress and under command to provide communication support and information to the president, vice president, and National Security Council," Gentile says. "There was a period of between two and three hours that day that were the most intense I've ever experienced in my life. I probably think about it every day."
Not surprisingly, Gentile acknowledges that the NSA's priorities shifted that day. "The number one priority [now] is the global war on terrorism, and we are putting all resources—personnel, manpower, and money—toward this war," he says.
While intelligence agencies have taken public steps in emphasizing the need to train and recruit analysts fluent in Arabic and southern Asian languages, Gentile warns that the intelligence community, and the government as a whole, is still facing a language crisis of unprecedented proportions. "The demand surged for people who were skilled in those languages," he points out. "There is not a large enough supply of qualified linguists in these southern Asian, Arabic languages." Native speakers often have a limited grasp of English, Gentile adds, making them less versatile in language work. And security clearances can't be rushed. Neither can learning programs for esoteric languages and obscure dialects.
As he sees it, the need for foreign languages has never been greater within a national security framework. "We really need a major turnaround in foreign language study in this country," he says. "Everything that's happened in the last couple of years has sensitized us to the larger issue of understanding other people and their view and vision of life and the world. We have to understand people, we can't just fight them."
The federal government is making a large commitment to fund and support internal programs in Arabic and other languages, but the need is so great that private language schools, such as Middlebury, will have to help us fill this need for a long time," Gentile believes. "[This crisis] is ongoing, it's generational, and it's going to continue for the foreseeable future."
Still, Gentile remains optimistic. "There have been many positive stories, situations that we've prevented because of great intelligencework and great language work that I can't talk about," he says. "I like to point out when I'm on the recruiting trail that working in the intelligence community is like the movie The Matrix, and that there's this other world that you can't see. What's being done has to be done to make the country a safer place. For anyone who's passionate about foreign languages, well, the NSA is the place to work."
And the otherwise tight-lipped intelligence professional does have one secret to share: "If you have certain foreign language skills, it's a great time to go into government."
William Cocke wrote "Queen Bee" in the spring 2003Magazine.