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account for so much of it.
    Bremer now says that he agreed with the inspector general that there could have been better accountability on the spending that took place in individual Iraqi ministries. “The issue is what happened to the money once it was distributed through the Minister of Finance,” Bremer said in an interview. “We had a very clear record of funds going to the Iraqi system. The funds were all distributed to the minister of finance. The inspector general implied we should have established better controls in other ministries. That would have been a very nice thing to do but it would have required hundreds of internationally trained auditors. It would have taken us at least three years to set up that system.”
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    For his part, Bowen is dismissive of Bremer’s defense of the CPA’s actions. Rather, Bowen says he found the CPA’s handling of the cash and its distribution arbitrary and capricious. One stunning example came when CPA officials decided that the Kurds in northern Iraq should get a cut.
    The Kurds were in the process of carving out their own semi-independent state of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, and they had powerful leaders whom the Americans wanted to keep happy. And so, in June 2004, three Chinook helicopters were loaded with $1.6 billion in cash freshly offloaded from a U.S. Air Force cargo plane. The three helicopters flew from Baghdad airport to Erbil in Kurdistan, where the money was delivered to a branch of the Iraqi Central Bank.
    The cash arrived without warning. None of the officials at the bank branch in Erbil knew the money was coming, and they had no idea at first what to do with it. The Americans unloaded it into piles, after which it was stored in the bank building until bank officials could figure out what to do next.
    Later, after senior American officials realized that the cash had been left with bank officials who were entirely unprepared to receive it, they called back to the bank branch in Erbil to check on it. The American officials were told that the cash had been taken care of and that everything was fine, according to staffers with Bowen’s IG office.
    The CPA never saw the money again, never knew where it went or how it was spent.
    It almost certainly disappeared into the private bank accounts of powerful figures in Kurdistan.
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    The CPA’s management of Iraq came to an end on July 1, 2004, as an interim government was installed under Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. His government was a temporary placeholder until Iraq could hold elections, but there was no doubt at the time that Allawi was the man the United States wanted to become the permanent leader of Iraq. In fact, Allawi was known in Iraq as “the spymaster’s favorite” because of his longstanding ties to the CIA.
    When the CPA accelerated the cash flights from New York in the final two weeks of its existence, the Americans already knew that Allawi would be taking over as prime minister—and that he would be facing a tough election campaign to keep the job. As an exile who had spent much of his adult life in London, he was far more popular with the Americans and British than he was with the Iraqi people. He was a Shiite but also had a past as a Baathist, and thus lacked solid Shiite support, which was crucial in a majority-Shiite nation.
    His popularity in Washington and his political vulnerability in Baghdad raise an interesting question—was the decision to suddenly accelerate the cash flights in the CPA’s dying days part of an effort by the Bush administration to give Allawi a financial edge, to bolster him and consolidate his hold on power?
    Similar questions have been raised in the past. In 2005, Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter for
The New Yorker,
wrote that the Bush administration had in the spring of 2004 engaged in a secret debate over whether to provide financial support to Allawi and his political allies while also using American money