Mr. Edward "Ted" A. Everett was born in 1925 in Jaffa, Palestine, and grew up as a native speaker of both Arabic and English. Mr. Everett was educated at the American University in Beirut and then Georgetown University. In 1956, he left employment at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and became an employee of the National Security Agency.

As a senior language analyst, he initiated an extensive NSA language effort and established an overseas language operation from scratch. He made important contributions in intelligence support during almost every crisis in the Middle East from the 1950s to the 1990s. Mr. Everett developed cryptologic language training for both the U.S. Army and NSA. He developed and taught four dialect courses for NSA, the first dialect courses offered by the National Cryptologic School. Nearly 30 years later, the materials he devised for these classes are still used as reference aids by operational analysts today.

Mr. Everett was the first chairman of the Arabic Professional Qualifications Examination (PQE) committee at NSA, and developed the first ever PQE used for any language at the Agency. The working aids he developed have formed the basis for many of the electronic language databases still in use today.

Mr. Everett's lexicographical expertise was so well known that he was asked for by name and became a major contributor to a definitive dictionary of Arabic. His colleagues referred to him as the "father of Arabic language analysis" in the cryptologic community.