Wanted: Malayali Spy For United States Intelligence Inc.

By Dr. Shelly Ahmed (Guest Writer)

Wanted: Malayalam linguist. Employer: the US Defence Intelligence Agency. Location: Kuwait. Job: decoding transcripts, spying on Maoists. Salary: more than INR 1.38 crore per annum. Interested? Rush your resume if you are equally good at Malayalam and American English.

The US intelligence agencies and their shadow intelligence communities are looking for a good hand who can handle Malayalam transcripts if the announcements posted on June 20, 2013 on www.intelligencecareers.com and are to be believed.
The job profile matches pretty much to the other vacancies published on the site for other languages including Hindi, Telugu, Somali, Pashtu, Persian, Farsi, Tajik etc.

There are only four Indian languages including Malayalam, Hindi, Telugu and Punjabi listed in the announcement. Meanwhile, in a June 20 article titled ‘Booz Allen, the world’s most profitable spy organisation’ appeared in Bloomsberg Business Week, Drake Bennet and Michael Riley provide more details on the requirement. Quoting William Golden, former US intelligence analyst and the founder of a large constellation of job sites including intelligencecareer.com, the article says they are trying to fill three slots at the Defence Intelligence Agency and one post is senior linguist fluent in Malayalam, “spoken mostly in the Indian State of Kerala, where there’s a growing Maoist insurgency.”

“That the Pentagon is looking for someone who speaks the language suggests American intelligence assets are there,” Golden was quoted as saying. Golden estimates, according to the article, that the Malayalam translator job will pay between $180,000 and $ 225,000 a year (roughly between `1.06 crore to `1.38 crore) depending on the candidate’s skills and experience.

The job description includes linguistic support to US Army operations worldwide, general linguistic support to military, transcribe and analyse verbal communications, perform document exploitation and scan, research and analyse documents for key information. The job also entrust one to translate and review foreign language documents, identify and extract information components meeting military information requirements list criteria. 

The candidates should be “willing to work shifts and extended hours in support of 24X7 ops”.  The QLS claims to exist “to provide language interpretation, translation and linguist management services to US combat commands, federal agencies and privately held firms supporting US forces”.