# How the CIA paid for its black sites: over $300 million that the public budget never showed The SSCI study found the CIA's secret-prison program cost well over $300 million in non-personnel costs, all routed through classified covert-action accounts. Author: J.A. Watte Published: July 16, 2026 Source: https://jwatte.com/blog/cia-black-sites-funding/ --- There is no line in any published federal budget for the CIA's secret overseas prisons. You cannot find it in the appropriations bills Congress debates on the floor, in the agency-by-agency tables the White House releases each February, or in a Government Accountability Office audit. And yet, according to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the program that ran those prisons spent "well over $300 million in non-personnel costs." That figure is the CIA's own, drawn from its own records, and it excludes salaries. This post is not about interrogation. It is about money: specifically, how real taxpayer dollars financed the construction of detention facilities, cash handoffs to foreign officials, and an $81 million contractor relationship, all without ever appearing as a public line item. The mechanism that made that possible is not an accounting trick. It is the covert-action funding system Congress deliberately built. Whether that system was well used here is one of the most contested questions in modern intelligence oversight, and this piece keeps the documented spending strictly separate from the disputes over whether it was worth it. One framing note before the numbers. The Senate committee's Democratic majority characterized the interrogation techniques at these sites as torture, and President Obama ended the program by executive order in January 2009. Those facts sit in the background. The body below stays on dollars and budget structure, because that is where the public-money story lives, and because the funding facts are largely uncontested while the effectiveness fight is not. ## What the program was, and how it was authorized The CIA's Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program, or RDI, operated secret overseas prisons commonly called "black sites" from roughly 2002 to 2009. Its legal foundation was a covert-action Memorandum of Notification signed by the President on September 17, 2001, six days after the al-Qaeda attacks. According to the SSCI study, that memorandum granted the CIA broad authority to detain and render individuals, but it made no reference to interrogation techniques of any kind. Two clarifications matter up front. First, these CIA black sites are not Guantanamo Bay. Guantanamo is a Department of Defense military detention facility; the black sites were covert CIA installations on foreign soil, run by a different agency under a different legal authority. They are separate programs and should not be conflated. Second, everything documented here comes from declassified and public sources: the December 2014 SSCI study executive summary, Congressional Research Service reports on how intelligence is funded, European Court of Human Rights rulings, and reputable press reporting on the study. Where the SSCI report redacted a specific number or a country name, this post treats it as redacted and does not fill it in. The SSCI study also established the program's scale. The committee found the CIA detained at least 119 individuals, of whom at least 39 were subjected to the enhanced interrogation techniques, and at least 26 were later found to have been wrongfully held, meaning they did not meet the detention standard set out in the September 2001 memorandum. The CIA had publicly claimed lower figures, which the majority called inaccurate. The CIA response does not broadly contest the detainee counts. ## Four cost buckets, all documented The declassified record breaks the spending into four concrete pieces. Each is citable to a primary source, and each carries its own qualifier. **1. Over $300 million in non-personnel costs.** The SSCI study states that "CIA records indicate that the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program cost well over $300 million in non-personnel costs." The qualifier is load-bearing. This figure explicitly excludes personnel salaries, so the true total program cost was higher; the $300 million is a floor, not a ceiling, and not the full bill. It covered, among other things, the construction and operation of the detention facilities themselves. **2. Two facilities built but never used.** Part of that construction money went to detention facilities that never held anyone. The SSCI study described "two facilities costing nearly $[redacted] million that were never used, in part due to host country political concerns." The dollar figure is redacted in the public report, so no specific number can be stated here. What is documented is the clean fact of the sunk cost: the CIA built two prisons, paid for them, and never opened them. More than two dozen individual dollar figures were blacked out across the report. **3. Cash payments to foreign officials.** To establish and keep the sites, the SSCI study found, "the CIA provided millions of dollars in cash payments" to foreign government officials. Station chiefs prepared what the report described as "wish lists," and one footnote referenced a station chief's remark about being able to "buy" a country whose name was redacted. Both the exact sums and every host-country name were redacted in the public report. The honest way to state this is the report's own generalized language: millions of dollars in cash, paid to secure covert access, with amounts and countries withheld. It is not confirmed bribery of any named country, and this post does not present it as such. **4. The contractor: roughly $81 million.** Two psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, operating as Mitchell Jessen and Associates, were paid approximately $81 million by the CIA to help design and run the interrogation program. According to the SSCI study, as reported by NBC News, the 2006 base contract value was "in excess of $180 million," and the contract was terminated in 2009. The two figures must stay distinct: the firm received roughly $81 million, not $180 million; the larger number is the maximum contract value, not the amount paid. The study noted the pair had run the military's SERE training program and had no specialized al-Qaeda or interrogation experience. In 2007 the CIA also gave the firm a multi-year indemnification agreement covering legal liability arising from the program, and, in the study's words, "has since paid out more than $1 million pursuant to the agreement." Some secondary sources cite a larger $5 million figure for that agreement, but that is a ceiling or obligation, not money disbursed; the SSCI-sourced, documented number for what was actually paid is more than $1 million. ## Where the host countries come from The SSCI report redacted every host-country name, referring to them only as "Country" followed by a color or letter. The country identities that have entered the public record came from elsewhere: European Court of Human Rights rulings and press investigations, not the Senate study. On July 24, 2014, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in *Al Nashiri v. Poland* and *Husayn (Abu Zubaydah) v. Poland* that Poland had hosted a secret CIA prison, identified in the litigation as Stare Kiejkuty, and had violated the European Convention on Human Rights. The court ordered compensation of EUR 100,000 to each of the two applicants, al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah, on the same day. Separate ECHR cases have addressed sites in Lithuania and Romania, and press reporting has described a site in Thailand and facilities in Afghanistan. The discipline here is simple: attribute host countries to the courts and the press that established them, never to the SSCI report, which named none of them. ## The mechanism: how covert money moves without a public line item This is the heart of the public-money story, and it is more mundane than a conspiracy and more consequential than an accounting footnote. Covert action in the United States is financed and disclosed through a specific, legally defined channel that keeps it out of the itemized public budget by design. According to the Congressional Research Service, the CIA is funded through the National Intelligence Program, or NIP. The NIP funds the CIA in its entirety, and covert action is included within it. Only the topline NIP figure is disclosed publicly, as required by statute; all subsidiary and program-level detail remains classified. The justification for how that money is spent goes to Congress in classified budget books provided only to the two intelligence committees, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The RDI program's specific budget line was, and remains, classified. The authorization and notification side runs on a parallel track. Again per CRS, covert action requires a Presidential Finding, or in this case a Memorandum of Notification, and the Intelligence Authorization Acts of 1980 and 1991 require timely notification of covert action and significant intelligence activities to the intelligence committees, or in extreme cases to a smaller group known as the Gang of Eight. None of this flows through the public appropriations debate. The structural point for a public-money explainer is this: money routed through classified covert-action accounts is real taxpayer money that never appears as a line item. The ordinary public checks, published budgets, GAO audits, and floor debate over appropriations, do not apply. Oversight rests entirely on two committees operating behind the classification barrier. That is not a loophole the CIA discovered; it is the system Congress built. The disagreement is over how well it worked in this instance. ## The critique and the defense, side by side The funding facts above are largely uncontested. The judgments about what those funds bought are not. Here are both, each tagged to the party asserting it. ### The oversight critique (SSCI majority) The Senate committee's Democratic majority concluded that the RDI program was poorly managed and that the enhanced interrogation techniques were "not an effective means of acquiring intelligence," producing no unique, life-saving information that could not have been obtained by other means. The majority further found that the CIA had provided inaccurate information about the program's cost, scope and effectiveness to Congress, the Department of Justice, and the public. Applied to the money, the majority's structural argument runs like this: financing the program through classified covert-action channels put well over $300 million in non-personnel spending outside the itemized budget and normal appropriations scrutiny. Under that low-visibility structure, the CIA built two detention facilities that were never used, made undisclosed millions in cash payments to foreign officials, and entered a sole-source arrangement paying roughly $81 million to two psychologists who both designed the techniques and helped assess their own program, backed by an indemnification agreement that had already paid out more than $1 million. In the majority's telling, low visibility and weak management compounded each other. These are the majority's conclusions, contested by the CIA and by the committee minority, and they are not stated here as settled fact. ### The mission defense (CIA and SSCI minority) The CIA and the committee's Republican minority present a different account. The program, on this view, was a lawful covert action, authorized by a Presidential Memorandum of Notification days after the September 11 attacks, at a moment when officials believed further mass-casualty strikes were imminent and hard intelligence on al-Qaeda was scarce. Funding it through the classified National Intelligence Program and notifying the intelligence committees, rather than publishing it in the open budget, was not evasion but the system working as intended: covert operations, foreign-liaison relationships, and the identities of host countries cannot function if they are itemized publicly. The CIA's roughly 136-page June 2013 response argued that the interrogation program produced intelligence it considered valuable in disrupting plots, capturing operatives, and understanding al-Qaeda, and that it is unknowable whether alternative methods would have yielded the same information. A precise distinction matters here: then-Director John Brennan said the program produced useful intelligence but that the causal link between the specific techniques and that intelligence is "unknowable." The stronger claim that the techniques themselves saved lives belongs to the committee minority, not to Brennan, and should not be attributed to him. The minority filed dissenting views challenging the majority's methodology and its conclusion that the program produced no unique value. On this account, the cash to host governments and the contractor spending were the real costs of standing up a covert capability quickly under wartime pressure. One honest qualifier applies to the defense. The CIA's own December 2014 "Note to Readers" walked back several of the agency's earlier effectiveness claims, so the both-sides framing should not overstate the CIA's final position as a full defense of every original assertion. And the program was ultimately repudiated: Obama ended it by executive order in 2009, and the SSCI majority characterized the techniques as torture. The defense goes to lawfulness, intent, and claimed value, all of which remain contested. ## Fact-check notes and sources - The RDI program was a covert-action program authorized by a Presidential Memorandum of Notification signed September 17, 2001, which granted rendition and detention authority but made no reference to interrogation techniques: [SSCI Committee Study of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program (Dec. 2014), via Federation of American Scientists](https://irp.fas.org/congress/2014_cr/ssci-rdi.html). - The program cost "well over $300 million in non-personnel costs," a figure that explicitly excludes personnel salaries: [SSCI study executive summary, reported by CNN Money](https://money.cnn.com/2014/12/09/news/economy/torture-report-cost/index.html). - Funds paid for two detention facilities built but never used, in part due to host-country political concerns; the exact cost was redacted in the public report: [SSCI study, quoted by VICE News](https://www.vice.com/en/article/torture-report-what-300-million-bought-the-cias-detention-and-interrogation-program/). - The CIA provided "millions of dollars in cash payments" to foreign officials to establish and maintain the sites; specific sums and country names are redacted: [SSCI study, reported by BuzzFeed News](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/cia-made-cash-payments-to-countries-that-hosted-black-sites). - Host-country identities come from court rulings and press, not the SSCI report. The European Court of Human Rights ruled on July 24, 2014 that Poland hosted a CIA site and ordered EUR 100,000 to each of al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah: [ECHR / Open Society Justice Initiative, Al Nashiri v. Poland](https://www.justiceinitiative.org/litigation/al-nashiri-v-poland). - Mitchell Jessen and Associates was paid roughly $81 million of a contract that could have exceeded $180 million, terminated in 2009; the principals had SERE backgrounds but no al-Qaeda or interrogation expertise: [SSCI study, reported by NBC News](https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/cia-torture-report/cia-paid-torture-teachers-more-80-million-n264756). - In 2007 the CIA gave the firm a multi-year indemnification agreement and had "paid out more than $1 million pursuant to the agreement." Some secondary sources cite a larger $5 million ceiling; the documented amount actually paid is more than $1 million: [SSCI study, quoted by VICE News](https://www.vice.com/en/article/torture-report-what-300-million-bought-the-cias-detention-and-interrogation-program/). - Covert action is financed through the CIA's classified budget within the National Intelligence Program, which funds the CIA entirely; only the NIP topline is disclosed publicly, with detail justified in classified budget books to the two intelligence committees: [Congressional Research Service, Intelligence Community Spending: Trends and Issues](https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R44381). - Covert action requires a Presidential Finding or Memorandum of Notification and notification to the congressional intelligence committees under the Intelligence Authorization Acts of 1980 and 1991, not the public appropriations process: [Congressional Research Service, Covert Action and Clandestine Activities of the Intelligence Community](https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45175). - Scale of the program: at least 119 detained, at least 39 subjected to the techniques, at least 26 found to have been wrongfully held: [SSCI study findings, via Federation of American Scientists](https://irp.fas.org/congress/2014_cr/ssci-rdi.html). - CONTESTED, SSCI majority view: the program was poorly managed, the techniques produced no unique life-saving intelligence, and the CIA misrepresented its effectiveness to Congress, DOJ and the public: [SSCI report overview citing the primary report, Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_report_on_CIA_torture). - CONTESTED, CIA and SSCI minority view: a lawful post-9/11 covert response that produced valuable intelligence; Director Brennan called the causal link between the specific techniques and that intelligence "unknowable": [CIA's June 2013 response and minority views, summarized by the Council on Foreign Relations](https://www.cfr.org/articles/cias-torture-report-response). ## Related reading - [NSA facilities and infrastructure overruns](/blog/nsa-facilities-infrastructure-overruns/): how construction costs surface (and hide) in the intelligence budget, a different funding mechanism from covert action. - [The NRO's secret headquarters and hidden funds](/blog/nro-secret-headquarters-hidden-funds/): another case of intelligence spending that outran its public paper trail. - [In-Q-Tel: the intelligence community's venture-capital arm](/blog/in-q-tel-intelligence-venture-capital/): a very different, more visible way public money moves through the intelligence world. - [The GAO High-Risk List and improper payments](/blog/gao-high-risk-list-improper-payments/): the oversight lens, and what auditing looks like when it is allowed to reach the money. - [The public-money programs index](/blog/public-money-programs-index/): the full series on where public dollars go and how visible they are. *This post is informational and journalistic, not legal or financial advice. It describes public programs and documented events; mentions of third parties are nominative fair use and no affiliation is implied.* --- Canonical HTML: https://jwatte.com/blog/cia-black-sites-funding/ RSS: https://jwatte.com/feed.xml JSON Feed: https://jwatte.com/feed.json Hero image: https://jwatte.com/images/cia-black-sites-funding.webp