Concealment of the CIA budget
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There is no written-down CIA budget available to the public; the budget is highly classified, and John Kiriakou says that "really nobody knows what the budget is."

The mechanism he describes is dispersal. "What the CIA does is it takes each line item and it hides it all over the federal budget. It might be in the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Defense, State Department, you know, the EPA, they're all over the place."

Because the concealment requires an innocuous-sounding cover programme for each hidden item, the disguises can read as waste. Kiriakou's example is a line item of "$12 million to study gay monkeys in Guatemala", a programme that did not exist, standing in for $12 million of agency money embedded in another department's accounts. The side effect was that Senator William Proxmire would target such items with his Golden Fleece Award, and the agency "was just apoplectic every month."

Kiriakou states the practice is unchanged: "they're still lying about the budget, they're still embedding covert action programs all over government, they're still using USAID as the CIA beachhead at the State Department, and they're still using the American taxpayers' money to try to overthrow governments that they deem are not friendly enough to the United States." See USAID as a CIA cover vehicle.

Even the cost of declassification is secret

Shown a document in which the spending on declassification systems had itself been blacked out, Kiriakou's response was that this is the norm rather than an aberration: "you're not allowed to know what they're spending. That is outrageous, and it's typical and very common." The redaction covered the CIA, the NSA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence alike.

He adds the standing reason the overall figure is known even approximately: "we only have a general idea of what the CIA spends because the former deputy director of national intelligence Mary Margaret Graham accidentally let it slip while giving a speech. Otherwise we wouldn't have any idea what the budget is. The budget has always been classified."

See also

- William Proxmire
- USAID as a CIA cover vehicle
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Tuesday morning kill list
