In just a few years, a Columbus, Ohio-based firm has become the Army's dominant supplier of translators in places like Afghanistan, taking in hundreds of millions in military contracts. Now, Mission Essential Personnel is set to grow even larger, with a half-billion dollar contract to shift its translation business into the intelligence game.
Earlier this week, Mission Essential Personnel won a Central Command contract for "aiding in the coordination, planning and execution of intelligence collection operations, exploitation and analytic support" in Afghanistan. It's worth up to $475 million through 2013. And it comes just months after the company won a re-up from the government for its translator work totaling an eye-opening $679 million.
Ask Chris Taylor, Mission Essential Personnel's CEO, and he'll say the company's evolution into the intelligence world is natural. "We've been in Afghanistan for three years, with a lot of people, a lot of understanding, a lot of ground truth, a lot of experience in the theater," Taylor, a former Blackwater vice president who left that company three years ago, tells Danger Room. "It makes us a good partner for the services that were just awarded and makes us a good partner for anyone in Afghanistan." But Mission Essential Personnel has faced accusations of being anything but a good partner.
Critics have charged that the contractor doesn't pay its 6,000 translators in Afghanistan a decent wage; that it exposes them to too much danger; and that its linguists are insufficiently fluent in the local tongues and physically unfit to boot. The company categorically rejects all the claims: "Don't believe everything you read," Taylor says when asked about the loud criticisms of his company.
More serious was a lawsuit brought by a former employee, Paul Funk, alleging that the company sends poorly trained translators to Afghanistan. ABC News hyped the suit heavily earlier this month. But almost as soon as the piece came out, bloggers ripped it apart -- a prelude to a federal judge, Leonie Brinkema, dismissing the suit last week. (Funk may refile, though.)
Taylor doesn't exactly call his new intel contract a vindication, but he comes pretty close. "I can't speak to other people’s opinions or what they write," he says, "but it's indicative that we've been doing a good job and will continue to do a good job."
What exactly his company will be doing in the intel field isn't clear. Taylor shies away from specifying, saying the particulars of Mission Essential Personnel's new tasks haven't been provided to the company yet. But its future intelligence work will probably be intimately tied to its translation work. The same interpreters that the company provides to 250 bases throughout Afghanistan will probably get new intel responsibilities.
"Our strength, obviously, is language, in the written and the spoken word, and what nuances, if any, could be pulled from either of those forms," Taylor says. If there's a flow of information "there are nuances, and the best people to analyze those nuances are the people who have translated them."
So does that mean interpreting captured documents? Detainee statements? "The tasks you suggest could be in a future task order and would be within our capabilities," he says, adding, "We specialize in interpreters and translation operations. Other than that, it would be difficult to speculate what could be asked of us within that context."
Whatever it is exactly, Mission Essential Personnel is going to be well compensated to provide it. Just another example of how lucrative the U.S.' move into privatized intelligence is turning out to be.
Photo: U.S. Army
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