Spy Chief Accidentally Leaked CIA's Intelligence Budget

[Rose Siding]

Leaker Is
The biggest oops! of the week goes to career CIA officer Mary Margaret Graham, now the deputy director for national intelligence collection. You see, Uncle Sam is very good at keeping secret how much the CIA and 14 other agencies spend on intelligence, even going to court to prevent the figure from spilling out. But at a conference in San Antonio, Graham let slip that the budget is a whopping $44 billion.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/politics/whispers/articles/051114/14whisplead.htm

More on Mary Margaret:

...Negroponte's deputy in charge of collection, Mary Margaret Graham, a former CIA operations officer, will oversee all human intelligence collection overseas and will set broad requirements for what information needs to be collected, sources said. The CIA, the FBI and Pentagon agencies will work out who carries out the clandestine collections, with the clandestine services chief coordinating their activities.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/12/AR2005101202174_pf.html

[NV Whino]

1. A little accident on purpose, maybe?

I think there are a lot of people in the spy business who are really fed up with the entire BushCo situation and are doing little things here and there to sabotage the Neocons. I can't believe someone brought up in the super secret CIA would let something like that slip, especially when there is so much bruh ha ha over budgets and military spending these days.

[WiseButAngrySara]

2. Hmmm...Who knows! .....n/t

[Canuckistanian]

3. Could be misinformation, too

Maybe the real figure is very much different.

[papau]

4. Individual spy agency budgets are classified - the total is not- this is a

10% increase over prior years $40 billion that was mentioned in Congress more than once. I believe Clinton kept it at about $30 billion and the fight was that NSA eavesdropping via Sat and otherwise was getting too big of a piece of the pie.

In classic Bush fashion, NSA is increased - and all other spy costs got major increases.

The only savings in spy costs under Bush was the rolling up of our WMD group run by a Mrs. Wilson. One wonders why Cheney wanted that group gone? What friends did Bush and Co have that were threaten by the Wilson group tracking WMD sales to bad countries?

I recall World War 1 and folks talking about how at the end of the day the big winners of the war were the companies that made weapons - for either side - and I wonder if that is happening again?