[The document describes a
constellation of spy agencies that track millions of individual 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.]
By Barton Gellman and Greg Miller
U.S. spy agencies have built an
intelligence-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’s top secret budget.
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. Although
the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending
since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses those funds or how it performs
against the goals set by the president and Congress.
The 178-page budget summary
for the National Intelligence Program details the successes, failures and
objectives of the 16 spy agencies that make up the U.S.
intelligence community, which has 107,035 employees.
The summary describes
cutting-edge technologies, agent recruiting and ongoing operations. The
Washington 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.
“The 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,” Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said in response to
inquiries from The Post.
“Our 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,” he said.
Among the notable
revelations in the budget summary:
•Spending by the CIA has
surged past that of every other spy agency, with $14.7 billion in requested
funding for 2013. The figure vastly exceeds outside estimates and is nearly 50
percent above that of the National Security Agency, which conducts
eavesdropping operations and has long been considered the behemoth of the
community.
•The CIA and NSA have
launched aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal
information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as
“offensive cyber operations.”
•The NSA planned to
investigate at least 4,000 possible insider threats in 2013, cases in which the
agency suspected sensitive information may have been compromised by one of its
own. The budget documents show that the U.S. intelligence community has sought
to strengthen its ability to detect what it calls “anomalous behavior” by
personnel with access to highly classified material.
•U.S. intelligence
officials take an active interest in foes as well as friends. Pakistan is
described in detail as an “intractable target,” and counterintelligence
operations “are strategically focused against [the] priority targets of China,
Russia, Iran, Cuba and Israel.”
•In words, deeds and
dollars, intelligence agencies remain fixed on terrorism as the gravest threat
to national security, which is listed first among five “mission objectives.”
Counterterrorism programs employ one in four members of the intelligence
workforce and account for one-third of all spending.
•The governments of Iran,
China and Russia are difficult to penetrate, but North Korea’s may be the most
opaque. There are five “critical” gaps in U.S. intelligence about Pyongyang’s
nuclear and missile programs, and analysts know virtually nothing about the
intentions of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Formally known as the
Congressional Budget Justification for the National Intelligence Program, the
“Top Secret” 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.
The document describes a
constellation of spy agencies that track millions of individual 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.
In an introduction to the
summary, Clapper said the threats now facing the United States “virtually defy
rank-ordering.” He warned of “hard choices” as the intelligence community —
sometimes referred to as the “IC” — seeks to rein in spending after a decade of
often double-digit budget increases.
This year’s budget proposal
envisions that spending will remain roughly level through 2017 and amounts to a
case against substantial cuts.
“Never before has the IC
been called upon to master such complexity and so many issues in such a
resource-constrained environment,” Clapper wrote.
An espionage empire
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 Sept. 11 attacks. The
United States has spent more than $500 billion 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.
The result is an espionage
empire with resources and reach beyond those of any adversary, sustained even
now by spending that rivals or exceeds the levels reached at the height of the
Cold War.
This year’s total budget
request was 2.4 percent below that of fiscal 2012. In
constant dollars, it was roughly twice the estimated size of the 2001 budget
and 25 percent above that of 2006, five years into what was then known as the
“global war on terror.”
Historical data on U.S.
intelligence spending is largely nonexistent. Through extrapolation, experts
have estimated that Cold War spending likely peaked in the late 1980s at an
amount that would be the equivalent of $71 billion today.
Spending in the most recent
cycle surpassed that amount based on the $52.6 billion detailed in documents
obtained by The Post, plus a separate $23 billion devoted to intelligence
programs that more directly support the U.S. military.
Lee Hamilton, an Indiana
Democrat who was a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and
co-chairman of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, said that
access to budget figures has the potential to enable an informed public debate
on intelligence spending for the first time, much as Snowden’s disclosures of
NSA surveillance programs brought attention to operations that had assembled
data on nearly every U.S. citizen.
“Much 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,” he said.
“Nobody is arguing that we
should be so transparent as to create dangers for the country,” he said. But,
he said, “there is a mindset in the national security community — leave it to
us, we can handle it, the American people have to trust us. They carry it to
quite an extraordinary length so that they have resisted over a period of
decades transparency. . . . The burden of persuasion
as to keeping something secret should be on the intelligence community, the
burden should not be on the American public.”
Experts said that access to
such details on U.S. spy programs is without precedent.
“It was a titanic struggle
just to get the top-line budget number disclosed, and that has only been done
consistently since 2007,” said Steven
Aftergood, an expert at the Federation of American Scientists, a
Washington, D.C., organization that provides analyses of national security
issues. “But 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.”
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 billion of a budget that totaled $43.4
billion 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 end of the Cold War.
During the past decade,
they have taken a back seat to the CIA.
NSA was in line to receive
$10.5 billion in 2013, and the NRO was to get $10.3 billion — both far below
the CIA, whose share had surged to 28 percent of the total budget.
Overall, the U.S.
government spends 10 times as much on Department of Defense as it does on spy
agencies.
“Today’s world is as fluid
and unstable as it has been in the past half century,” Clapper said in his
statement to The Post. “Even 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.”
Dominant position
The CIA’s dominant position
will likely 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 Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the 2003
U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
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 counterterrorism
center. The agency was transformed from a spy service struggling to emerge from
the Cold War into a paramilitary force.
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.
The agency’s budget
allocates $2.3 billion for human intelligence operations, and another $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 programs” that would
include drone operations in Pakistan and Yemen, payments to militias in
Afghanistan and Africa, and attempts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.
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
billion on what are labeled “overseas contingency operations.” The CIA
accounted for roughly half of that figure, a sum factored into its overall
$14.7 billion budget.
Those war expenditures are
projected to shrink as the U.S. 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 roughly 30 percent.
Critical blind spots
Despite the vast outlays,
the budget blueprint catalogs persistent and in some cases critical blind
spots.
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 — even on the community’s foremost priority,
counter-terrorism.
In 2011, the budget
assessment says intelligence agencies made at least “moderate progress” on 38
of their 50 top counterterrorism gaps, the term used to describe blind spots.
Several concern Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, an enemy of Israel that has not
attacked U.S. interests directly since the 1990s.
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 destabilizing events in Moscow, such as large protests and
terrorist attacks.”
A chart outlining efforts
to address key questions on biological and chemical weapons is particularly
bleak. U.S. agencies set themselves annual goals of making progress in 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.
The documents describe expanded
efforts to “collect on Russian chemical warfare countermeasures” and assess the
security of biological and chemical laboratories in Pakistan.
A table of “critical” gaps
listed five for North Korea, more than for any other country that has or is
pursuing a nuclear bomb.
The intelligence community
seems particularly daunted by the emergence of “home grown” 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.
The National
Counterterrorism Center has convened dozens of analysts from other agencies in
attempts to identify “indicators” that could help law enforcement understand
the path from religious extremism to violence. The FBI was in line for funding
to increase the number of agents surreptitiously tracking activity on jihadist
Web sites.
But a year before the
bombings in Boston the search for meaningful insight into the stages of
radicalization was described as one of “the more challenging intelligence
gaps.”
High-tech
surveillance
The documents make clear
that U.S. spy agencies’ long-standing reliance on technology remains intact. If
anything, their dependence on high-tech surveillance systems to fill gaps in
human intelligence has only intensified.
A section on North Korea
indicates that the United States has all but surrounded the nuclear-armed
country with surveillance platforms. There are distant ground sensors to
monitor seismic activity and platforms to scan the country for signs that might
point to construction of new nuclear sites. U.S. agencies seek to capture
photos, air samples and infrared imagery “around the clock.”
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.
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’s forces apparently later recognized. One of the NRO’s functions
is to extract data from sensors placed on the ground near suspected illicit
weapons sites in Syria and other countries.
Across this catalog of
technical prowess, one category is depicted as particularly indispensable:
signals intelligence, or SIGINT.
The NSA’s ability to
monitor e-mails, phone calls and Internet traffic has come under new scrutiny
in recent months as a result of disclosures by Snowden, who worked as a contract computer specialist for the agency before
stockpiling secret document and then fleeing, first to Hong Kong and then
Moscow.
The NSA was projected to
spend $48.6 million on research projects to assist “coping with information
overload,” an occupational hazard as the volumes of intake have increased
sharply from fiber optic cables and Silicon Valley Internet providers.
The agency’s ability to
monitor the communications of al-Qaeda operatives is described in the documents
as “often the best and only means to compromise seemingly intractable targets.”
Signals intercepts have
also been used to direct the flight paths of drones, gather clues to the
composition of North Korea’s leadership and evaluate the response plans of
Russia’s government in the event of a terrorist attack in Moscow.
The resources devoted to
signals stealing are staggering.
Nearly 35,000 employees are
listed under a sweeping category called the Consolidated Cryptologic Program,
which includes the NSA as well as the surveillance and code-breaking components
of the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marines.
Even the CIA devotes $1.7
billion, or nearly 12 percent of its budget, to technical collection efforts
including a program called “CLANSIG” that former officials said is the agency’s
more targeted version of the massive data collection operations of the NSA.
The CIA is pursuing
tracking systems “that minimize or eliminate the need for physical access and
enable deep concealment operations against hard targets.”
The agency has deployed new
biometric sensors to confirm the identities and locations of al-Qaeda
operatives. The system has been used in the CIA’s drone campaign.
The NSA is also planning
high-risk covert missions, a lesser-known part of its work, to plant what it
calls “tailored radio frequency solutions” in hostile territory — close-in
sensors to intercept communications that do not pass through global networks.
Spending on satellite
systems and almost every other category of collection are projected to remain
stagnant or shrink in coming years, as Washington grapples with budget cuts
across the government. But the 2013 intelligence budget called for increased
investment in SIGINT.
Counter-intelligence
programs
The budget includes a
lengthy section on funding for counter-intelligence programs designed to
protect against the danger posed by foreign intelligence services as well as
betrayals from within the U.S. spy ranks.
The document describes
programs to “mitigate insider threats by trusted insiders who seek to exploit
their authorized access to sensitive information to harm U.S. interests.”
The agencies had budgeted
for a major counterintelligence initiative in fiscal 2012, but most of those
resources were diverted to an all-hands, emergency response to successive
floods of classified data released by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
For this year, the budget
promised a renewed “focus . . . on safeguarding
classified networks” and a strict “review of high-risk, high-gain applicants
and contractors” — the young, nontraditional computer coders with the skills
the NSA needed.
Among them was Snowden,
then a 29-year-old contract computer specialist who had been trained by the NSA
to circumvent computer network security. He was copying thousands of highly
classified documents at an NSA facility in Hawaii, and preparing to leak them,
as the agency embarked on a security sweep.
“NSA will initiate a
minimum of 4,000 periodic reinvestigations of potential insider compromise of
sensitive information,” according to the budget, scanning its systems for
“anomalies and alerts.”
Julie Tate contributed to
this report.
