Anyone wondering, in this age of global terrorism, how much money the US intelligence community spends on spy services was given an answer on Tuesday: $43.5 billion in 2007, according to Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence.

So how exactly was that money spent? And who got the money?

The publication of the figure is a rare display of transparency. Government officials normally refuse to divulge intelligence budgets on the grounds of national security, as The New York Times reports this week.

The intelligence budget has twice before been made public: in 1997 and 1998, the C.I.A. disclosed that its budget was $26.6 billion and $26.7 billion, respectively. But since the Sept. 11 attacks the Bush administration has refused to make similar disclosures, fighting legal challenges from several advocacy groups.

The figure does not include billions of dollars spent by military services on intelligence, the Times points out. This is only a partial accounting of intelligence spending, The Washington Post says.

It includes salaries for about 100,000 people, multibillion dollar secret satellite programs, aircraft, weapons, electronic sensors, intelligence analysts, spies, computers and software.

The Post puts the $43.5 billion tab into perspective:

For comparison, last year's intelligence spending was about half the $91 billion President Bush is proposing to spend over the coming year on the Agriculture Department, and somewhat more than the $35 billion budget of the Homeland Security Department.

The figure nonetheless is still likely to add fuel to the controversy of how the government spends its money in the war on terrorism. That's because what counts is who got most of the $43.5 billion.

A Defense Intelligence Agency presentation in May of 2007 showed for the first time, according to a June 2007 investigative report by Salon.com, that 70 percent of the US intelligence community's work is done by contractors. That means that, just as civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan are increasingly hired to provide security and perform other quasimilitary functions, so too are civilians contracted to do intelligence work.

The figures revealed this week helps confirm that the US government is paying more money to contractors to do intelligence work than at any other time in history, reports Salon.com.

More than five years into the global "war on terror," spying has become one of the fastest-growing private industries in the United States. The federal government relies more than ever on outsourcing for some of its most sensitive work, though it has kept details about its use of private contractors a closely guarded secret. Intelligence experts, and even the government itself, have warned of a critical lack of oversight for the booming intelligence business.

What exactly did contractors do in return for 70 percent of $43.5 billion last year? It's anybody's guess, Salon.com's Tim Shorrock says:

Because of the cloak of secrecy thrown over the intelligence budgets, there is no way for the American public, or even much of Congress, to know how those contractors are getting the money, what they are doing with it, or how effectively they are using it. The explosion in outsourcing has taken place against a backdrop of intelligence failures for which the Bush administration has been hammered by critics, from Saddam Hussein's fictional weapons of mass destruction to abusive interrogations that have involved employees of private contractors operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Page: 1 | 2