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For the C.P.A., an advantage of using the cash from the Development Fund instead of money appropriated by Congress for Iraq was that there were not a lot of rules governing its use, and no federal regulations or congressional oversight of what happened to it. It was Iraqi money, not anything from American taxpayers.
In an interview, Paul Bremer, who was the head of the C.P.A., defended the agency’s handling of the funds, and said the money was badly needed to keep Iraqi government ministries in operation. In particular, he defended the decision to accelerate the cash flights in June 2004, just before the provisional authority closed and was replaced by an interim Iraqi government. In the last two weeks of June, the C.P.A. ordered $4 billion to $5 billion in cash to be flown to Baghdad from New York in a rapid-fire series of last-minute flights.
The Iraqi government “was broke at that point,” Mr. Bremer said. “Civil servants had not been paid for about three months. We had to get funds there right away.” He said that there was a budget process in Baghdad that determined how much cash was requested from the Federal Reserve.
“The issue is what happened to the money once it was distributed through the minister of finance,” he said. “We had a very clear record of funds going to the Iraqi system.”
Mr. Bowen was dismissive of Mr. Bremer’s defense of the C.P.A. Accounting for the funds was so lax, he said, that there were few credible records of how it was spent. “Our auditors interviewed numerous senior advisers of the C.P.A., and we learned from them that the controls on the Development Fund of Iraq money were inadequate,” Mr. Bowen said. “We didn’t make this up; we learned this from C.P.A. staff.”
Former Treasury Department officials also questioned the need for the flights. Treasury had already sent $1.7 billion in cash from Iraqi government accounts in the United States to Baghdad in the first weeks after the invasion, and then had developed a new Iraqi currency that was introduced that October. They say the new currency ended the need for further cash infusions from the United States.
“We did not know that Bremer was flying in all that cash,” said Ged Smith, who was the head of the Treasury Department team that worked on Iraq’s financial reconstruction after the invasion. “I can’t see a reason for it.”
Mr. Bowen said that Brick Tracker, his office’s most sensitive investigation, began in 2010 when Wael el-Zein, a Lebanese- American on his staff, received a tip about stolen money hidden in Lebanon. An informant told him about the bunker, which in addition to the cash, was believed to also have held approximately $200 million in gold belonging to the Iraqi government.
But by this time, official Washington had long since forgotten about the flights from Andrews. The C.I.A. expressed little interest in pursuing the matter, and the F.B.I. said it lacked jurisdiction, Mr. Bowen recalled. And when Mr. Bowen and his staff tried to conduct an investigation of the missing cash in Lebanon, they also met with resistance from the United States Embassy in Beirut.
Mr. Bowen was not allowed to travel to Lebanon on official business. Two of his investigators who did travel to Lebanon were denied permission from the embassy to see the bunker themselves because it was too dangerous. When Mr. Bowen’s staff members met in Beirut with Lebanon’s prosecutor general, Said Mirza, he initially agreed to cooperate on an investigation, but later decided against it.
The office of the special inspector general for Iraq closed in 2013, and Mr. Bowen is now working in the private sector. Mr. Bowen thinks at least some of the money has been moved, and said it is impossible to say whether any of it is still in the bunker. He says he is still frustrated by the lack of cooperation he got from his own government in his efforts to pursue the missing cash. “We struggled to gain timely support from the interagency as we pursued this case,” Mr. Bowen said.