US spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of September 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government’s top-secret budget, despite spending $2.6 billion in Pakistan alone.
The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny.
The 178-page budget summary for the National Intelligence Programme details the successes, failures and objectives of the 16 spy agencies that make up the US intelligence community, which has 107,035 employees.
The CIA’s budget allocates $2.3 billion for human intelligence operations and $2.5 billion to cover the cost of supporting the security, logistics and other needs of those missions around the world. A relatively small amount of that total, $68.6 million, was earmarked for creating and maintaining “cover”, the false identities employed by operatives overseas.
There is no specific entry for the CIA’s fleet of armed drones in the budget summary, but a broad line item hints at the dimensions of the agency’s expanded paramilitary role, providing more than $2.6 billion for “covert action programmes” that would include drone operations in Pakistan and Yemen, payments to militias in Afghanistan and Africa, and attempts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear programme.
The documents describe expanded efforts to “collect on Russian chemical warfare countermeasures” and assess the security of biological and chemical laboratories in Pakistan.
Other blank spots include questions about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear components when they are being transported, the capabilities of China’s next-generation fighter aircraft, and how Russia’s government leaders are likely to respond to “potentially destabilising events in Moscow, such as large protests and terrorist attacks”, the report in the newspaper disclosed.
