CIA cash room
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A CIA cash room is, per John Kiriakou, a small room at the larger CIA stations stacked to the ceiling with cash, "50 million, 100 million, whatever you happen to need." An officer signs out what an operation requires and goes. For the Abu Zubaydah capture he took $2 million, carefully counted into duffel bags, to buy two safe houses in Lahore and Faisalabad, mindful of the warning he got in his first week that finance, security and medical are the three offices that can "send you to prison" if a dollar goes unaccounted.

Kiriakou says that when he was in the CIA, intelligence work was fundamentally a cash business, officers carrying pockets or duffel bags of cash to pay sources, occasionally resorting to diamonds. He says that has changed: since almost nobody uses cash anymore, cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin is now the preferred way to pay agents discreetly, sent directly from a secure phone with no one the wiser.

The saying and the duffel bags

The operational premise Kiriakou states is that intelligence is a cash business and cash is not a problem. The practical shape of that is a van on the road to Faisalabad about two weeks before the Abu Zubaydah capture, carrying $2 million in two duffel bags, and a conversation between the two officers in it about why anyone would falsify twenty dollars of accounting paperwork when they were sitting on millions. The mechanics of what happens to that money once it reaches an agent are set out at agent payment mechanics.

See also

- Abu Zubaydah Capture
- Cofer Black
