U.S. spy agencies have built an\u00a0intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government\u2019s top-secret budget.<\/i><\/p>\n
CLICK TO SEE THE BLACK BUDGET<\/a><\/p>\n The $52.6\u00a0billion \u201cblack budget\u201d for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former \u00adintelligence contractor Edward Snowden<\/a>, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses the money or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.<\/p>\n The 178-page budget summary for the National Intelligence Program details the successes, failures and objectives of the 16 spy agencies<\/a> that make up the U.S. intelligence community, which has 107,035 employees.<\/p>\n The summary describes cutting-edge technologies, agent recruiting and ongoing operations. The Post is withholding some information after consultation with U.S. officials who expressed concerns about the risk to intelligence sources and methods. Sensitive details are so pervasive in the documents that The Post is publishing only summary tables and charts online.<\/p>\n \u201cThe United States has made a considerable investment in the Intelligence Community since the terror attacks of 9\/11, a time which includes wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction technology, and asymmetric threats in such areas as cyber-warfare,\u201d Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. wrote in response to inquiries from The Post. <\/a><\/p>\n \u201cOur budgets are classified as they could provide insight for foreign intelligence services to discern our top national priorities, capabilities and sources and methods that allow us to obtain information to counter threats,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Among the notable revelations in the budget summary:<\/p>\n \u25cfSpending by the CIA has surged past that of every other spy agency, with $14.7\u00a0billion in requested funding for 2013. The figure vastly exceeds outside estimates and is nearly 50\u00a0percent above that of the National Security Agency, which conducts eavesdropping operations and has long been considered the behemoth of the community.<\/p>\n \u25cfThe CIA and the NSA have begun aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as \u201coffensive cyber operations.\u201d<\/p>\n \u25cfLong before Snowden\u2019s leaks, the U.S. intelligence community worried about \u201canomalous behavior\u201d by employees and contractors with access to classified material. The NSA planned to ward off a \u201cpotential insider compromise of sensitive information\u201d by re-investigating at least 4,000 people this year who hold high-level security clearances.<\/p>\n \u25cfU.S. intelligence officials take an active interest in friends as well as foes. Pakistan is described in detail as an \u201cintractable target,\u201d and counterintelligence operations \u201care strategically focused against [the] priority targets of China, Russia, Iran, Cuba and Israel.\u201d The latter is a U.S. ally but has a history of espionage attempts against the United States.<\/p>\n \u25cfIn words, deeds and dollars, intelligence agencies remain fixed on terrorism as the gravest threat to national security, which is listed first among five \u201cmission ob\u00adjectives.\u201d Counterterrorism programs employ one in four members of the intelligence workforce and account for one-third of the intelligence program\u2019s spending.<\/p>\n \u25cfThe governments of Iran, China and Russia are difficult to penetrate, but North Korea\u2019s may be the most opaque. There are five \u201ccritical\u201d gaps in U.S. intelligence about Pyongyang\u2019s nuclear and missile programs, and analysts know virtually nothing about the intentions of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.<\/p>\n Formally known as the Congressional Budget Justification for the National Intelligence Program, the \u201ctop-secret\u201d blueprint represents spending levels proposed to the House and Senate intelligence committees in February 2012. Congress may have made changes before the fiscal year began on Oct 1. Clapper is expected to release the actual total spending figure after the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.<\/p>\n The document describes a constellation of spy agencies that track millions of surveillance targets and carry out operations that include hundreds of lethal strikes. They are organized around five priorities: combating terrorism, stopping the spread of nuclear and other unconventional weapons, warning U.S. leaders about critical events overseas, defending against foreign espionage, and conducting cyber-operations.<\/p>\n In an introduction<\/a>, Clapper said the threats facing the United States \u201cvirtually defy rank-ordering.\u201d He warned of \u201chard choices\u201d as the intelligence community \u2014 sometimes referred to as the \u201cIC\u201d \u2014 seeks to rein in spending after a decade of often double-digit budget increases.<\/p>\n The current budget proposal envisions that spending will remain roughly level through 2017 and amounts to a case against substantial cuts.<\/p>\n \u201cNever before has the IC been called upon to master such complexity and so many issues in such a resource-constrained environment,\u201d Clapper wrote.<\/p>\n An espionage empire<\/b><\/p>\n The summary provides a detailed look at how the U.S. intelligence community has been reconfigured by the massive infusion of resources that followed the 2001 attacks. The United States has spent more than $500\u00a0billion on intelligence during that period, an outlay that U.S. officials say has succeeded in its main objective: preventing another catastrophic terrorist attack in the United States.<\/p>\n The result is an espionage empire with resources and a reach beyond those of any adversary, sustained even now by spending that rivals or exceeds the levels at the height of the Cold War.<\/p>\n The current total budget request was 2.4\u00a0percent below that of fiscal 2012<\/a>. In constant dollars, it was about twice the estimated size of the 2001 budget and 25\u00a0percent above that of 2006, five years into what was then known as the \u201cglobal war on terror.\u201d<\/p>\n Historical data on U.S. intelligence spending is largely nonexistent. Through extrapolation, experts have estimated that Cold War spending probably peaked in the late 1980s at an amount that would be the equivalent of $71\u00a0billion today.<\/p>\n Spending in the most recent cycle surpassed that amount, based on the $52.6\u00a0billion detailed in documents obtained by The Post plus a separate $23\u00a0billion devoted to intelligence programs that more directly support the U.S. military.<\/p>\n Lee H. Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat who chaired the House Intelligence Committee and co-chaired the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, said that access to budget details will enable an informed public debate on intelligence spending for the first time, much as Snowden\u2019s disclosures of NSA surveillance programs brought attention to operations that had assembled data on nearly every U.S. citizen.<\/p>\n \u201cMuch of the work that the intelligence community does has a profound impact on the life of ordinary Americans, and they ought not to be excluded from the process,\u201d Hamilton said.<\/p>\n \u201cNobody is arguing that we should be so transparent as to create dangers for the country,\u201d he said. But, he added, \u201cthere is a mind-set in the national security community: \u2018Leave it to us, we can handle it, the American people have to trust us.\u2019 They carry it to quite an extraordinary length so that they have resisted over a period of decades transparency. .\u2009.\u2009. The burden of persuasion as to keeping something secret should be on the intelligence community, the burden should not be on the American public.\u201d<\/p>\n Experts said that access to such details about U.S. spy programs is without precedent.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a titanic struggle just to get the top-line budget number disclosed, and that has only been done consistently since 2007,\u201d said Steven Aftergood<\/a>, an expert at the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington-based organization that provides analyses of national security issues. \u201cBut a real grasp of the structure and operations of the intelligence bureaucracy has been totally beyond public reach. This kind of material, even on a historical basis, has simply not been available.\u201d<\/p>\n The only meaningful frame of reference came in 1994, when a congressional subcommittee inadvertently published a partial breakdown of the National Intelligence Program. At the time, the CIA accounted for just $4.8\u00a0billion of a budget that totaled $43.4\u00a0billion in 2012 dollars. The NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates satellites and other sensors, commanded far larger shares of U.S. intelligence budgets until years after the Cold War ended.<\/p>\n During the past decade, they have taken a back seat to the CIA.<\/p>\n The NSA was in line to receive $10.5\u00a0billion in 2013, and the NRO was to get $10.3\u00a0billion \u2014 both far below the CIA, whose share had surged to 28\u00a0percent of the total budget.<\/p>\n Overall, the U.S. government spends 10 times as much on the Defense Department as it does on spy agencies.<\/p>\n \u201cToday\u2019s world is as fluid and unstable as it has been in the past half century,\u201d Clapper said in his statement to The Post. \u201cEven with stepped up spending on the IC over the past decade, the United States currently spends less than one percent of GDP on the Intelligence Community.\u201d<\/p>\n Dominant position<\/b><\/p>\n The CIA\u2019s dominant position is likely to stun outside experts. It represents a remarkable recovery for an agency that seemed poised to lose power and prestige after acknowledging intelligence failures leading up to the 2001 attacks and the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.<\/p>\n The surge in resources for the agency funded secret prisons, a controversial interrogation program, the deployment of lethal drones and a huge expansion of its\u00a0counterterrorism center. The agency was transformed from a spy service struggling to emerge from the Cold War into a paramilitary force.<\/p>\n The CIA has devoted billions of dollars to recruiting and training a new generation of case officers, with the workforce growing from about 17,000 a decade ago to 21,575 this year.<\/p>\n The agency\u2019s budget allocates $2.3\u00a0billion for human intelligence operations and $2.5\u00a0billion 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\u00a0million, was earmarked for creating and maintaining \u201ccover,\u201d the false identities employed by operatives overseas.<\/p>\n There is no specific entry for the CIA\u2019s fleet of armed drones in the budget summary, but a broad line item hints at the dimensions of the agency\u2019s expanded paramilitary role, providing more than $2.6\u00a0billion for \u201ccovert action programs\u201d that would include drone operations in Pakistan and Yemen, payments to militias in Afghanistan and Africa, and attempts to sabotage Iran\u2019s nuclear program.<\/p>\n The black budget illuminates for the first time the intelligence burden of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For 2013, U.S. spy agencies were projected to spend $4.9\u00a0billion on \u201coverseas contingency operations.\u201d The CIA accounted for about half of that figure, a sum factored into its overall $14.7\u00a0billion budget.<\/p>\n Those war expenditures are projected to shrink as the United States withdraws forces from Afghanistan. The budget also indicates that the intelligence community has cut the number of contractors it hires over the past five years by about 30\u00a0percent.<\/p>\n Critical gaps<\/b><\/p>\n Despite the vast outlays, the budget blueprint catalogues persistent and in some cases critical blind spots.<\/p>\n Throughout the document, U.S. spy agencies attempt to rate their efforts in tables akin to report cards, generally citing progress but often acknowledging that only a fraction of their questions could be answered \u2014 even on the community\u2019s foremost priority, counterterrorism.<\/p>\n In 2011, the budget assessment says intelligence agencies made at least \u201cmoderate progress\u201d on 38 of\u00a0their 50 top counterterrorism gaps, the term used to describe blind spots. Several concern Lebanon\u2019s Hezbollah movement, an enemy of Israel that has not attacked U.S. interests directly since the 1990s.<\/p>\n Other blank spots include questions about the security of Pakistan\u2019s nuclear components when they are being transported, the capabilities of China\u2019s next-generation fighter aircraft, and how Russia\u2019s government leaders are likely to respond to \u201cpotentially destabilizing events in Moscow, such as large protests and terrorist attacks.\u201d<\/p>\n A chart outlining efforts to address key questions on biological and chemical weapons is particularly bleak. U.S. agencies set annual goals for at least five categories of intelligence collection related to these weapons. In 2011, the agencies made headway on just two gaps; a year earlier, the mark was zero.<\/p>\n The documents describe expanded efforts to \u201ccollect on Russian chemical warfare countermeasures\u201d and assess the security of biological and chemical laboratories in Pakistan.<\/p>\n A table of \u201ccritical\u201d gaps listed five for North Korea, more than for any other country that has pursued or is pursuing a nuclear bomb.<\/p>\n The intelligence community seems particularly daunted by the emergence of \u201chomegrown\u201d terrorists who plan attacks in the United States without direct support or instruction from abroad, a threat realized this year, after the budget was submitted, in twin bombings at the Boston Marathon<\/a>.<\/p>\n The National Counterterrorism Center has convened dozens of analysts from other agencies in attempts to identify \u201cindicators\u201d that could help law enforcement officials understand the path from religious extremism to violence. The FBI was in line for funding to\u00a0increase the number of agents who surreptitiously track activity on jihadist Web sites.<\/p>\n But a year before the bombings in Boston, the search for meaningful insight into the stages of radicalization was described as one of\u00a0the \u201cmore challenging intelligence gaps.\u201d<\/p>\n High-tech surveillance<\/b><\/p>\n The documents make clear that U.S. spy agencies\u2019 long-standing reliance on technology remains intact. If anything, their dependence on high-tech surveillance systems to fill gaps in human intelligence has intensified.<\/p>\n A section on North Korea indicates that the United States has all\u00a0but surrounded the nuclear-armed country with surveillance platforms. Distant ground sensors monitor seismic activity and scan the country for signs that might point to construction of new nuclear sites. U.S. agencies seek to capture photos, air \u00adsamples and infrared imagery \u201caround the clock.\u201d<\/p>\n In Iran, new surveillance techniques and technologies have enabled analysts to identify suspected nuclear sites that had not been detected in satellite images, according to the document.<\/p>\n In Syria, NSA listening posts were able to monitor unencrypted communications among senior military officials at the outset of the civil war there, a vulnerability that President Bashar al-Assad\u2019s forces apparently later recognized. One of the NRO\u2019s functions is to extract data from sensors placed on the ground near suspected illicit weapons sites in Syria and other countries.<\/p>\n Across this catalogue of technical prowess, one category is \u00addepicted as particularly indis\u00adpensable: signals intelligence, or SIGINT.<\/p>\n