September 01, 2009

The Hotline

A fixture of film, popular culture and news reports, the Hotline between Moscow and Washington is both more and less than it is cracked

up to be. Russian Life Editor Paul E. Richardson interviewed Craig Bell, who, from 2004-2008, was Chief and Senior Presidential Translator at the Hotline.

So what is the Hotline and what is a typical day like?

Officially the link is called the Washington-Moscow Direct Communications Link, but most people just refer to it as the Hotline. At some point the office received the designation within the Joint Staff as MOLINK (for Moscow Link) so I will use those terms interchangeably. The Hotline is manned 24/7 to ensure immediate availability to the Presidents. The Hotline is a crisis link used only by authorization of the President and is not used for routine intergovernmental communications. The teams, which consist of a Presidential Translator and a Presidential Communicator, work eight-hour, rotating shifts.

In the course of an eight-hour shift, the teams test the link hourly. They also have various other duties to account for communications security equipment, and report the status of the links to supporting agencies. They also may participate in various national level crisis response exercises that are run periodically to exercise the procedures that the military and other government agencies will use to support presidential decision making in a crisis. If a new test message is received, the Presidential Translator will produce a translation of it for the test message file (the translator on the following shift reviews the translation and the Chief/Senior Presidential Translator certifies it before it is filed).

In addition to test messages, the team may receive service messages sent for the purpose of arranging maintenance or providing other information relevant to the operation of the link (the same translation and review procedures apply as for as for test messages).

On a typical shift, all of those activities will take less than a quarter of the available time. Most of a translator’s shift is spent on language maintenance training, mostly using internet resources. Training activities include reading, training translations, listening to Russian audio (mostly news) and watching television news. Night and weekend shifts frequently watch Russian movies, which still provides language training, but also makes the late night and weekend shifts a bit more palatable. Several days a week, Defense Language Institute professors come to the office to do about two hours of one-on-one translation training with the shift translators.

A typical day will not see a Presidential message sent, rather the day-to-day focus is on ensuring that the link is available, the communications procedures are thoroughly practiced, and the translator is fully prepared to quickly provide an accurate translation for the President in the event that the link is needed.

…The mission of the MOLINK translators is to translate from Russian to English. We do not have the official mission to perform interpretation or to translate from English to Russian. There have been exceptions to this, but only the Chief of the Hotline is authorized to make that decision. For instance, during the recent conflict in Georgia, one of my translators and I ended up interpreting phone conversations for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of the Russian General Staff. I determined that the two of us were capable of handling the interpretation. We ended up working 12 hours on/12 hours off for about two weeks to be available for the Chairman.

So, just to clarify, what you were doing was in fact “the Hotline,” as in the famous red phone... and it comprises both written communications and verbal/phone calls? It sounds like most communication takes place in written form, however.

Yes, I was the Chief and Senior Presidential Translator at the Hotline for four years (2004-2008) and before that served as a Presidential Translator. The Red Phone, however, was a Hollywood invention (though we do give departing MOLINK personnel a red telephone with a plaque and MOLINK medallion as a farewell gift).

The Hotline was established in 1963 as a teletype link over an undersea cable with a radio relay back-up. A voice link at that time would have suffered from unreliability and poor voice quality (in fact the voice links continue to be less reliable than data links. The link has gone through multiple modernizations, with the fifth generation being completed January 1, 2008. The link is now a redundant set of circuits (satellite and fiber cable) linking computers that create in effect a dedicated, secure internet link between the Washington and Moscow terminals. Commercial software is used for both chat and email. Chat is used by the operators for coordination of link operations, while email is used for sending actual messages. Transmission time is literally near instantaneous. There is no voice capability on the Hotline.

Documentary communications are preferable in crisis communications for a number of reasons besides just the voice quality.

Think about a time when someone made you really mad and you called them to give them a piece of your mind. Your emotions may well have overridden your judgment, resulting in you saying things that you wish you had not. You may have later thought that you could have stated your points better or more clearly. You may have even let an expletive or two slip in that only made things worse. Add to that the need to have a voice call interpreted. An interpreter only gets one shot at hearing, understanding, and interpreting what was said, and then he is on to the next sentence. Also, interpreters only transfer about 80-85% of what was said, and the original speaker does not get to choose what 15-20% gets left out. He assumes that his interlocutor got all of what he said. I have seen too many bilateral discussions get seriously off-track because of a minor error by an interpreter, and it takes a lot of work to get back to the point at which the misunderstanding occurred and fix the damage.

With a written document, the translator can approach 100 percent accuracy… and one can refer back to the original as often as is necessary to ensure that it accurately conveys the full meaning. You can also then have other translators assist in reviewing the translation to ensure accuracy (the review procedures for test and service messages apply here as well, though a first draft by the duty translator goes to the President as soon as it is done).

Written documents also require more thought on the part of the creator and allow him to select the words he needs and not just the word that comes to mind in the heat of the moment... The time required to create the document also, in effect, makes you take a deep breath, count to ten, and then think calmly and rationally. If the intent of a Hotline is to defuse a tense situation, then clearly documentary communications is better than voice.

What is that like, being the interpreter in the middle, when you are on a call like that about the war in Georgia? Did you ever find yourself in that situation agonizing over, say, whether to use a perfective or imperfective verb and wondering at the effect it could have on tensions? Or did you just find yourself on interpreter-autopilot? Do you recall any interesting anecdotes about when you struggled to find just the right word or meaning, while wondering about the consequences of your choice?

The voice interpretation that I did for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mullen, was done over the Secretary of Defense’s direct voice link with the Russian Minister of Defense (MOD), not the Hotline. This link is located in, and under the control of, SecDef Cables, in a different part of the Pentagon. It is not designed or operated as a crisis link, so it does not have interpreters on duty 24/7. (Imagine the cost of having $200 a day interpreters sitting around waiting to be used—while their language skills deteriorate—and then multiply that by the number of different languages spoken by Ministers of Defense around the world!)

Because the calls made are usually scheduled in advance for routine matters of coordination and consultation between the SecDef and the MOD, interpreters are brought in from State Department or wherever they usually work when needed. In the case with the Georgia conflict, the call was not scheduled, and the Chairman wanted to speak with his counterpart, General Makarov, immediately. The Chairman’s office asked if we could interpret the call. Though interpretation is not part of our mission or training, there were at that time two of us with sufficient skill to perform the mission, so I made the decision that the two of us would support the Chairman as interpreters.

I was extremely nervous as I waited for the first call to go through, as I had done very little interpretation work in the past. I am very comfortable working in Russian to conduct discussions, but in such cases I get to choose my own words. When you are interpreting, you are tied very closely to your principle’s choices. You also have to be able to remember what he said. Fortunately, Admiral Mullen used clear, concise constructions that did not strain my memory too badly. I have witnessed principles who forget that they are working through an interpreter and go on for paragraphs. It was actually wonderful to realize afterward just how much the pressure had focused my mind and allowed me to remember what was said long enough to interpret it.

Equally interesting was immediately after I interpreted each bit, my mind flushed it to allow me to concentrate totally on what was coming next. An interpreter cannot afford to dwell on a mistake, trying to think of what a better way might have been, or they will miss something important (this may be why most people either prefer to translate or interpret, but not both – interpreters live in the moment, do the best they can in one shot and move on, loving the pressure; translators love the subtle interplay of words and love to play with a sentence or phrase to give it the truest possible rendering in the target language, considering it time well spent). There was one word that I knew I had not quite gotten right (though what I said was acceptable) and it bothered me and I could feel it trying to pull me back to that point in the conversation, I had to force myself to forget it, so as not to miss what came next.

When the conversation was over, I realized that I had no coherent memory of the conversation as a whole. I had to listen to the tape to assure myself that I had done well...

Mostly I was on autopilot… One of the really difficult things was that, as an interpreter, you speak for your principle, so I was going into Russian while the Russian interpreter was going into English. I would have been much happier going from Russian into English (in effect interpreting for General Makarov), as we do on the Hotline when translating. I think that you get far better accuracy that way. The Russian interpreter did well for the most part, but was also clearly pushed into the breach because he was available (just as I was). There were a couple of points where I did correct or clarify his interpretation. I was very reluctant to do this, but I saw clearly that misunderstanding would ensue if I did not. I hope that I did not hurt the Russian interpreter’s feelings too badly or make him look bad to his boss, but with a war going on, I felt it necessary to do it.

One interesting thing occurred while I was assisting the SecDef Cables operator in setting up a call for the Chairman. The person who picked up in Moscow answered the phone by announcing his rank and last name. I responded with his first name and patronymic and asked how he was doing—it was a Russian officer that I had met many times both in Washington and Moscow at technical discussions concerning not just the Hotline, but also other links between Washington and Moscow. It took him by surprise, as he knows that I do not normally deal with the SecDef line that we were speaking on.

Without revealing any State Secrets, can you recall concepts, ideas or words that you found difficult to translate from Russian to English or visa-versa?

MOLINK personnel do not comment on the fact of, frequency or content of Presidential use of the Hotline. Presidential Hotline communications are treated as private communications and thus are governed by rules of executive privilege, which generally means only the President engaged in the exchange can authorize distribution of the message beyond himself and those involved in message handling… What that means in practice is that anyone who asked me about Hotline archives would get referred to the White House Counsel for the current President and to the legal representatives of past Presidents to let them figure it out.

More directly to your question, the language used in crisis communications is generally straightforward and clear. After all, you want to make sure that your meaning is not lost in ambiguity or culturally specific idiom if at all possible. This is one more reason to use documentary communications rather than voice in a crisis; you can take the time to remove ambiguity and select your words with great care.

This in practice means that governmental messages will not exceed the capability of a translator who can routinely handle Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) level three materials. In fact, I read an article recently that examined typical Russian usage and found that most Russians rarely use language exceeding ILR level three and that higher levels are primarily found in the arts, creative literature and philosophy.

As Field Marshall Aleksandr Suvorov said, “Тяжело в учении—легко в бою!” (Study hard and the battle is easy!) With that in mind, I established a training program that worked my translators at and just beyond their level of ability. If a translator can handle 3+ and 4 level materials for training, I have no worries that he can handle a level 3 official message. Once you get into the 3+ level and above, you frequently encounter idioms, usage and grammatical constructions that create challenges for translation. Sometimes they are allusions to classics of Russian literature that require you to dive into a dictionary of “Крылатых слов” (“winged phrases”) or sometimes they are from more current slang, and you have to do Yandex searches to track down the origin and meaning (e.g. some of Putin’s jewels from his speeches: “Мочить в сортире,” “to wet [murder] in the outhouse”).

I remember one training translation that some of us were working on, in which I came across the words “Кони, люди,” describing a political situation. I don’t recall the details, but I was uncertain how to translate it. “Horses, people” made no sense in the situation. First you have to make sure that you understand the Russian. One of my best translators tracked the phrase back to Lermontov’s poem Borodino. The phrase is used to describe a situation of noise, chaos and confusion. I don’t recall how I ended up translating the phrase, but I always think now of Bill Murray’s line from Ghostbusters, “human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!”

One thing that I have found is that people who do not speak another language have a hard time understanding that translation is more than just a matter of one word in this language equaling one word in another language. A translator has to understand in the original in order to translate. A translator who translates in order to understand will never produce really good translations.

There are terms that exist in any language that express an entire concept that is understood by someone from that culture, but requires a graduate level seminar to explain to a non-native. The one that springs to mind is “силовики” [siloviki, literally “the powerful ones”]. It would take an entire paragraph to explain this term to someone who is unaware of this particular Russian phenomenon. “Power Ministries” or “power agencies” can be acceptable, but they really do not explain things very well. If I am translating for an audience that is knowledgeable about this phenomenon, I can just transliterate it and drive on; but for the uninitiated, you need to provide a good footnote explaining who the siloviki are and what is the source of their power.

The internet has certainly revolutionized the translating profession. During my first tour as a translator on the Hotline, we had very limited internet access and relied mostly on bound dictionaries that were frequently out of date (this was the late 1990s). When I returned in 2004, we had better access but it was through a network proxy server that was heavily filtered to protect the government network from intrusion. Network security is of course a major concern and extremely important, but the tension between security and access to information created some humorous situations.

Shortly after I took over as the chief, I got a call from the network security office. They wanted me to be aware that someone in my office was spending a lot of time on Russian websites, including very late at night. Once I was able to stop laughing, I explained to them what our office did and thanked them for the confirmation that my people were doing what they were supposed to do.

We experienced increasing difficulty in accessing Russian websites as time went on and network security was constantly increased to fight external attacks—Yandex and Multitran were occasionally blocked! I asked for and finally got an independent internet drop installed that was in no way connected to the government network, so that we could go to the sites we needed without creating a security threat to the network. This allows the translators to access the full resources of the internet in support of training and translations. RL

Craig Bell is now chief of the Defense Threat Reduction Office in the US Embassy in Astana, Kazakhstan.

The Hotline was established in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Khrushchev and Kennedy had to resort to communications via the media and backchannels to get their messages to each other. It was signed into existene on Jun 20, 1963.

September 01, 2009

The Hotline

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