US Spy service 'bloated, out of control'

• US Secret Service agents at work protecting the American president. Picture: Getty

The US government's response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001 was to create a secretive world so large and unwieldy that nobody knows how much it costs, how many people work in it or how effective it really is, according to the Washington Post.

It follows almost a decade of "unprecedented spending and growth" in intelligence operations, which took place away from public view and lacked proper oversight, the newspaper claimed. "The money spigot was just opened after 9/11 and nobody dared say we shouldn't be spending that much," said Dana Priest, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who spent two years working on the Post's "Top Secret America" series.

Among the findings were that more than 850,000 people, one and a half times the population of Washington DC, have top-level clearance to work in intelligence and that 1,271 government organisations and 1,931 government-appointed contractors work in counterintelligence and homeland security at more than 10,000 locations across the United States.

The network amounts to what Priest calls "an alternative geography of the US", a top- secret world of spies working for newly created agencies in anonymous buildings, sapping more and more taxpayer dollars each year and delivering questionable results.

"Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support: phone operators, secretaries, librarians, architects, carpenters, construction workers, air-conditioning mechanics and, because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances," the report says.

Perhaps more worrying is the claim that no one person, not even the head of the Central Intelligence Agency nor the president himself, has full knowledge of the extent of the growth, the size of the intelligence community or even what each component part contributes to keeping the nation safe.

"There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that, not just for the director of the CIA, for the secretary of defence, is a challenge," admitted defence secretary Robert Gates. "It makes sense to take a look at this and say, 'OK, we've built tremendous capability, but do we have more than we need?'"

The report quotes one of the defence department's "Super Users", the handful of senior operatives with clearance to know all of the department's activities.

"I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything," he said, suggesting that so many intelligence reports are produced that not all get read. According to experts, the department handles more than two thirds of the country's intelligence programmes.

The cost to the US taxpayer of the massive expansion in intelligence is impossible to calculate because much of the information is classified, the Post said.

"This is a closed community, and since 9/11 it's become even more so," said William Arkin, Priest's fellow author.

But he pointed out that the $75 billion (49bn) announced in last year's US budget for intelligence is 2.5 times the amount it was on 10 September, 2001, and that it does not include money spent on many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programmes.

As an example, the newspaper said that the number of employees at the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency leapt from 7,500 in 2002 to 16,500 this year.

The Obama administration, braced for more revelations today as the Post series continued, was quick to defend itself.

"The reporting does not reflect the intelligence community we know," said David Gompert, acting director of national intelligence. "The men and women of the intelligence community have improved our operations, thwarted attacks, and are achieving untold successes every day."