CIA Releases Long-Secret Yearly Espionage Budget: $26.6 Billion

The CIA ended 50 years of secrecy Wednesday surrounding how much the government spends to spy, announcing in response to a lawsuit that the annual budget for national intelligence is $26.6 billion.

Disclosure came in a one-sentence legal filing by Lee Strickland, a CIA information officer: “In response to the referenced Freedom of Information Act request, the total budget appropriation for intelligence for fiscal year 1997 is $26.6 billion.”

The budget, covering the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, includes the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other branches of the vast U.S. intelligence-gathering apparatus, as well as tactical military intelligence.

No breakdown of how the money was spent was provided, and CIA Director George J. Tenet said none would be.

“The administration intends to draw a firm line at the top line,” Tenet said. “Beyond this figure, there will be no other disclosures of currently classified budget information because such disclosures could harm national security.”

Tenet also said the administration will decide on a year-by-year basis whether to reveal overall intelligence spending. Neither Congress nor the administration has provided the intelligence budget for fiscal 1998, but a congressional staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said it is only slightly larger.

To put the intelligence budget in perspective, the total was somewhat lower than what the federal government spent last year on transportation, $35.9 billion, and health and human services, $34 billion, not including Social Security.

Despite the lack of details, the Federation of American Scientists, which filed the suit, has been able to construct approximate breakdowns of intelligence spending based on an inadvertent disclosure by the House Appropriations Committee three years ago.

About $10 billion of the total goes for tactical military intelligence, serving battlefield commanders; the CIA itself gets about $3 billion; the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping and decoding operations, gets about $4 billion; the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and operates spy satellites, gets about $6 billion.

The rest is divided among a variety of intelligence analysis agencies such as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, and intelligence offices at the FBI, State Department, Energy Department and elsewhere.