At a public intelligence conference in San Antonio, Texas, last week, Mary Margaret Graham, a 27-year veteran of the CIA and now the deputy director of national intelligence for collection, said the annual intelligence budget was $44 billion.

The number was reported Monday in U.S. News & World Report, whose national security reporter, Kevin Whitelaw, was among hundreds of people attending Graham's talk.

"I thought, 'I can't believe she said that,"' Whitelaw said Monday. "The government has spent so much time and energy arguing that it needs to remain classified."

The figure itself comes as no great shock: News reports in the past couple of years have estimated the budget at $40 billion. But Graham's saying it in public was a surprise, because the government has repeatedly gone to court to keep the current intelligence budget and even budgets as far back as the 1940s from being disclosed.

Carl Kropf, a spokesman for the office of the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, said Graham would not comment. Kropf declined to say whether the figure was accurate or whether her revelation had been accidental.

Graham mentioned the number on Oct. 31 at an annual conference on intelligence gathered from satellite and other photographs.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, expressed amused satisfaction that the budget figure had slipped out.

"It is ironic," Aftergood said. "We sued the CIA four times for this kind of information and lost. You can't get it through legal channels."

In court cases, intelligence officials have argued that disclosing the spy budget would create pressure to disclose more spending details, and that such revelations could aid U.S. adversaries.

That argument has been rejected by many in the Congress and other experts, who note that most of the Defense Department budget is published in exhaustive detail without evident harm.

The national commission on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, recommended that both the overall intelligence budget and spending by individual agencies be made public "in order to combat the secrecy and complexity" that it found was harming national security.

"The taxpayers deserve to know what they're spending for intelligence," said Lee Hamilton, the former congressman who was vice chairman of the commission.

Even more important, Hamilton said, public discussion of the total budgets of intelligence agencies would encourage Congress to exercise "robust oversight."

The debate over whether the intelligence budget should be secret dates at least to the 1970s, said Loch Johnson, an intelligence historian who worked for the Church Committee investigation of the intelligence agencies by the Senate in the mid-'70s.