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independent and aggressive inspector general sleuthing around Baghdad. And so White House officials turned to someone they knew was on their side, someone who would say all the right things to Congress but who knew the Washington game of burying problems under a blizzard of rhetoric and paperwork.
    Or so they may have thought. Once Bowen was appointed in 2004, it didn’t take the White House long to realize their mistake. Stuart Bowen was, indeed, a Bush loyalist, but he wasn’t a Bush lackey. Once he was named to the post of special inspector general, he did the unthinkable—he took the job seriously. He became the only American official who cared about the disappearance of the billions of dollars flown from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to Baghdad—and he launched an investigation to try to find out what happened. When he started getting at the truth, however, he faced powerful resistance in Baghdad and Washington.
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    Bowen got an early clue of what he was confronting during his first trip to Baghdad after being named inspector general. Walking through the CPA’s offices in one of Saddam’s former palaces in the Green Zone, Bowen overheard part of a conversation between two CPA officials walking just in front of him. “We can’t keep doing this,” one CPA official said to the other. “There’s an IG here now.”
    Soon, Bowen and his investigators began to hear bizarre stories about the way the Coalition Provisional Authority was doing business. Bowen’s people heard about boxes of cash being carried out of the CPA’s offices, with no records of where it went. They heard of contractors being paid millions of dollars for projects that were never built. There were whispers of massive kickbacks and bribes, of foreign workers brought to Iraq in slavelike conditions, of U.S. Army officers slipping cash meant for reconstruction projects into their footlockers to take home. With huge amounts of cash being poured into the war zone, there were signs that the American enterprise in Iraq was being transformed into a vast kleptocracy.
    Bowen was stunned to realize that the CPA was a dream world, a bizarre mix of Republican ideologues and freebooters out to strike it rich. As the insurgency intensified and Americans were forced to withdraw behind blast walls in the Green Zone, the CPA’s frenzied spending grew worse, not better. In June 2004, in the last two weeks before the CPA went out of business and handed the country over to a new interim Iraqi government under Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, the CPA ordered between $4 and $5 billion in cash to be flown to Baghdad from New York in a rapid-fire series of last-minute jingle flights. More than one thousand contracts were awarded by the CPA that month, according to the
Los Angeles Times.
The CPA was shoveling money out as fast as it could be flown into the country, and there were no controls on where that money went.
    As Bowen began to investigate cases of fraud and corruption, his old allies at the White House grew angry with him. Iraq had become a political sinkhole for President Bush, and Bowen’s investigations were threatening to make things worse. Working through friendly Republicans in Congress, the White House quietly tried to eliminate Bowen’s office and shut down his investigations as soon as he began to ask questions about sensitive topics. But Bowen was tipped off about the effort and was able to warn his own allies in Congress, including Sen. Susan Collins, a moderate Republican from Maine, who blocked the White House effort. By October 2004, she had begun to move to place Bowen’s job on more solid footing.
    It did not take Bowen and his investigative staff long to start asking questions about the cash flights and the CPA’s use of the DFI. Bowen and his staff couldn’t believe the amounts of cash that were being flown to Baghdad, and were shocked by the fact that the CPA was unable to