REUTERS/Larry Downing
Barton Gellman and Greg Miller of the Post report that the U.S. has spent more than $500 billion on intelligence since September 11, 2001, and during that time it transformed "a spy service struggling to emerge from the Cold War into a paramilitary force."
To accomplish that, a surge in CIA resources "funded secret prisons, a controversial interrogation program, the deployment of lethal drones and a huge expansion of its counterterrorism center," according to the Post.
At the same time the agency built a "Global Response Staff," which hired former U.S. commandos and began collaborating with U.S. Special Operations teams on capture/kill missions in addition to training and deploying a 3,000-member Afghan paramilitary force.
Gellman and Miller note that the Agency's increasingly dominant slice of intelligence community's (IC) $52.6 billion budget over the last 12 years "will likely stun outside experts."
Here are some of the more striking numbers from the Post and the budget:
- The CIA workforce has grown from about 17,000 ten years ago to 21,575 this year.
- In 2013 U.S. spy agencies were projected to spend $4.9 billion on “overseas contingency operations” — such as operations in Iraq and Afghanistan — and the CIA accounted for roughly half of that sum.
- The CIA requested $14.7 billion in total funding for 2013, which is 28% of the total IC budget and $4.2 billion more than the NSA.
- In 1994, the only other time Black Budget information was leaked, the CIA accounted for just $4.8 billion of a budget that totaled $43.4 billion in 2012 dollars (i.e., 11% of the IC budget).
Here's a breakdown of where CIA funding currently goes:
U.S. IC Black Budget
Gregory Johnson, a journalist who covers America's secret drone war in Yemen, summed up the overarching implications of the Black Budget revelations: