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take charge of security and logistics for the Treasury team.
    After Treasury ended its cash flights, Basel kept on working, this time for the CPA, which continued to fly cash in from New York after the Treasury had completed its initial infusion to the Central Bank of Iraq. The Treasury team did not realize it, but their idea of tapping into Iraq’s overseas accounts to help the Iraqi financial system had resonated with the CPA and the Bush White House. The CPA quietly arranged to double down on the Treasury plan and started flying in far more cash from New York to Baghdad than the Treasury team had ever considered.
    Soon, the CPA gained access to cash held in the Development Fund of Iraq (DFI), a new account created at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York by a United Nations resolution in May 2003. The account held billions of dollars from the Iraqi government’s revenues from oil sales. The UN resolution gave the CPA control over the DFI for use in Iraq’s reconstruction, but also called for the creation of a monitoring board to make sure that the CPA properly used the money for the benefit of the Iraqi people.
    The DFI account was a tempting target for the Americans, and so the CPA, established as the sovereign authority over the government of Iraq, issued orders for the release of the money with no real debate, no real controls, and no real supervision. The monitoring board was largely ignored. Before long, more air force cargo planes filled with more billions of dollars were on their way to Baghdad.
    These new cash flights were conducted in a way that kept the Treasury Department in the dark. The senior Treasury officials who had been in charge of the earliest cash flights were never told what the CPA was doing. Both John Taylor and Ged Smith said that they were not involved in the CPA’s cash flights, and Smith said he still cannot understand their purpose. Once Iraq had a new currency, there was no need to keep shipping more American dollars, he believed. “We did not know that Bremer was flying in all that cash,” said Smith. “I can’t see a reason for it. Why was the CPA flying in more money after there was a new currency?”
    Between May 2003 and June 2004, the CPA arranged for about $20 billion to be sent from New York to Baghdad, including between $12 and $14 billion in cash flown on cargo planes. The cash continued to be flown into Iraq even as Congress was separately voting to spend tens of billions in U.S. taxpayer money for Iraqi reconstruction each year. Overall, the United States spent $63 billion of its own money on Iraq’s reconstruction throughout the war.
    For the CPA, one of the big advantages of using the cash from the Development Fund of Iraq instead of money appropriated by Congress was the absence of rules governing how they could use it and the lack of federal regulations or congressional oversight. It was Iraqi money, not American taxpayer funds, and as a result, few people in Washington really cared what the CPA did with it. In effect, it was free cash with no strings attached. And the only Iraqi government leader that the CPA’s chief, Paul Bremer, really had to answer to was, well, Paul Bremer.
    In an interview, Bremer defended his handling of the cash flights, saying that the money was badly needed to keep Iraqi government ministries in operation. “[The Iraqi government] was broke at that point,” Bremer said. “Civil servants had not been paid for about three months. We had to get funds there right away.”
    â€œWe also needed to get the government started on long-term funding for its regular needs,” Bremer continued. He insisted that there was a budget process in Baghdad which determined how much cash was requested from the Federal Reserve, beginning with proposals from each Iraqi government ministry.
    â€œAll those proposals were reviewed by the minister of finance and the minister of planning. Once those two steps were