Black Budget and Manhattan II Project (Conclusion)

Conclusion

The method used in guiding the analysis in this report is to simply follow the money trail created by the CIA’s black budget that enables a number of important insights to be drawn by the institutions playing key roles in generating, protecting and distributing black budget funds. Critical in this analysis has been the experience of individuals and companies such as Catherine Fitts and Hamilton Securities that experienced what evidence indicates was a CIA orchestrated covert campaign to discredit the financial tracking reforms that threatened to make more transparent the financial flows of HUD and other government agencies. The systematic accounting problems experienced by HUD and other agencies points to the existence of an unofficial black budget of up one trillion dollars annually. The size of the black budget and the CIA activities used to generate funds for it, point to a vast secret network of projects that is funded outside of the normal Congressional appropriation process.  Consequently, what follows is a discussion of some of the primary conclusions that can be drawn and arguments made concerning the CIA’s ‘unofficial’ black budget and the Manhattan II project it has been argued to fund.

 

It is worth repeating that the CIA is legally authorized by Congress to transfer, “without regard to any provisions of law”, funds from other government agencies for the generation of a black budget. There is strong evidence that the CIA uses this power to disregard law to complement whatever funds it can generate through Congressional appropriations, with funds gained through the drugs trade and organized crime that is laundered through different government agencies. The total annual sum of the black budget is best estimated in the form of accounting anomalies in the main departmental recipient of all black budget funds, the DoD, and is in the vicinity of 1.1 trillion dollars that funds a network of classified intelligence activities and covert operations that collectively form a second Manhattan Project.

 

The oversight of Manhattan project occurs outside of the conventional oversight system that can be easily compromised by partisan politics. The oversight system that has evolved has been very successful in dividing different functions for Manhattan II in ways that balance institutional rivalries between national security organizations without compromising secrecy. Thus the CIA generates the black budget that in turns transfers these funds to projects that are institutionally located in the military intelligence and special operations units of the DoD. The various military intelligence agencies in turn hire private contractors and/or provide the necessary military resources for these covert programs to be conducted in national laboratories, military bases, private corporations or other classified locations. The program managers of each of the classified projects associated with Manhattan II answer directly to an ‘executive committee’ that is outside of the regular oversight process in DoD, CIA, Congress and the Executive Office. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have control of the testing and applications of Manhattan II products that are conducted in collaboration with the intelligence community. The respective intelligence, defense and appropriations committees in the US Congress provide legitimacy for Manhattan II and the black budget that funds it by not revoking the budgetary powers allocated to the CIA through the 1949 CIA Act. Finally, the Executive Office through the National Security Council issues the necessary executive orders/NSC directives to coordinate the functions and activities in all the branches of government in order to secretly run Manhattan II. Thus each branch of the national security system plays an important role in Manhattan II, without being fully in control of it, thereby insuring a division of powers according to different functions required for Manhattan II. Effective oversight of Manhattan II, however, comes from an ‘executive committee’ that is immune to the partisan political process and whose oversight power and control of resources makes it virtually a ‘shadow government’.

It needs to be emphasized that the ‘unofficial’ black budget and Manhattan Project have legally evolved in ways to respond to a national security contingency that is yet to be revealed to the American public. The classified adversary that this elaborate secret system has been developed to respond to is arguably a potential threat that warrants an extraordinary network of covert programs that dwarf the original Manhattan Project and annually consume as much as 1.1 trillion dollars in a non-transparent manner. More disturbingly, the importance of Manhattan II is such that the CIA has evidently used organized criminal networks and the drug trade as sources to partially fund Manhattan II.

 

It is unclear when the full scope and impact of Manhattan II will be disclosed to the American public. However, the consequences in terms of increased loss of trust in federal government agencies, loss of morale among senior agency officials instructed to cover up black budget transactions, non-transparency in the flow of government appropriations, targeting of policy makers and business leaders who discover the fraudulent accounting and money laundering that occurs with the black budget, all warrant a serious examination of the need for maintaining the secrecy of Manhattan II and the black budget that funds it. Finally, the classified adversary against whom Manhattan II is directed requires immediate declassification due to the inherent dangers of dealing with what appears to be an undisclosed security threat in a non-transparent and unaccountable manner, and totally outside of the moral/legal restrictions that emerge from vigorous public debate in democratic societies.

Consequently, effective oversight of Manhattan II, comes from an ‘executive committee’ especially established in a way that would make it immune to the partisan political process thus ensuring strict secrecy can be preserved, and politically motivated leaks prevented. The power and resources delegated to this ‘executive oversight committee’ for Manhattan II by the Executive Office, and its role in ensuring that ‘black budget’ funds are correctly used and kept secret from the general public, justifies a description of it as a ‘shadow government’.