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Pricey Spies Snoop For U.S.

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The Washington Post

Published: August 28, 2008

WASHINGTON - About a quarter of the nation's core intelligence work force are contractors, perhaps as many as 37,000 private employees who work side-by-side with civil servants as analysts, technology specialists and mission managers, according to a report about government outsourcing by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The vast majority of those private spies work in the Washington region. Many of them have been hired since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to augment what had been an intelligence community depleted by deep cuts in the 1990s, officials from the national intelligence office said Wednesday.

There are about 100,000 government intelligence workers, the officials said. Contract workers each cost the government about $207,000 annually, compared with about $125,000 for a civilian government employee's salary and benefits, officials said.

The intelligence world rarely shares such fine-grained detail about national security activity, usually blanketed in secrecy.

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