How many secret agencies are there in US?

It is no secret to anyone that the United States has the world’s most ramified system of secret services. Until a just short time ago, if you asked an expert how many agencies this system has, he would have probably been perplexed. But now you can finally get the exact answer - the U.S. special services comprise more than 1,300 governmental and about 2,000 private agencies.

The figure was cited by the Washington Post after a two-year survey. To provide such a huge number of secret agencies with additional work premises, over 30 new offices are being built or may have already been built in and around Washington alone with the overall floorspace 22 times higher than that of Congress and 3 times higher than that of the Pentagon. How many employees are needed to fill those premises? The Washington Post says it may be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands.    

The survey involved 15 reporters led by prominent analysts William Arkin and Dana Priest. In a short video clip under a telling title, “You know think you know America? But you don’t know top secret America!”, William Arkin shared his view of what’s going on with U.S. secret services:"Dana Priest was even more categorical."         

How much has been spent and is being spent remain unclear. But as it turned out, over 850,000 secret agents and officials have access to classified data, of whom nearly 260,000 work for private agencies. Meanwhile, one clever proverb says: “A secret shared by two people is no longer a secret”.