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.[1][2] 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.[2][3]
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.[4]
The saying and the duffel bags
The operational premise Kiriakou states is that intelligence is a cash business and cash is not a problem.[5] 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.[6][7] The mechanics of what happens to that money once it reaches an agent are set out at agent payment mechanics.