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complete, proposals went before the CPA Program Review Board, and if approved they would submit it to me for final sign-off. Then the chief financial officer would propose it to the Fed.” Bremer further explained that the CPA Program Review Board also had Iraqi representatives on it, so they were “involved in the budget process from the beginning.”
    But the truth is that much of the cash flown from the United States to Iraq was never used to fund Iraqi ministries or to meet Iraqi payrolls or to keep the lights on in Baghdad. Instead, it simply disappeared.
    In the changeover from Treasury to the CPA, the one constant was Basel, the man in charge of making certain that the cash safely made it from the Baghdad airport to downtown Baghdad. Once the CPA took over, the flights to Baghdad from New York became so routine, Basel says, that pilots gave them their own nickname—“jingle flights.”
    Basel became the indispensable figure in the midst of the supply chain, the one man who knew the routine, who knew how to move pallets of cash from the airport down Baghdad’s Route Irish and to the CPA in the Green Zone, or to the Iraqi Central Bank, through the teeth of the Iraqi insurgency. In the process, he stored up a headful of weird trivia. He learned, for instance, that a Chevrolet Suburban with a driver and one heavily armed passenger riding shotgun could hold about $96 million in $100 bills—if you flattened the back seats.
    Basel took to the cash transport business with relish, planning every trip between the airport and downtown with military precision. He would lead his security and transportation teams to the airport at least twelve hours before each jingle flight was due to arrive, so that he would have the flexibility to alter his schedule or route if there were signs of trouble. After the flight landed, Basel and his detail would drive right up to the cargo plane and meet the U.S. military officer, usually a colonel or lieutenant colonel, who had escorted the cash. Along with Iraqi officials, an American from the CPA’s comptroller’s office would meet the plane with Basel and witness the delivery. The cash would be counted as it came out of the airplane’s cargo hold, and counted again when it arrived downtown.
    Basel used sleight of hand to confuse insurgents or criminal gangs trying to ambush his convoys once they left the airport. He would leave the airport at dawn, when there was little traffic, and constantly change the convoy’s routes and types of vehicles used to carry the cash. He would rotate from SUVs to garbage or produce trucks; he would often send out a decoy truck first to see if it was attacked. To guard against betrayal by insiders, he would sometimes tell his Iraqi security and transport staff that the convoy was due to leave the airport at a certain time only to change or cancel the delivery at the last moment. “We wanted to be unpredictable,” Basel said.
    Two platoons of U.S. soldiers escorted each convoy while Basel rode with an ex–Iraqi Special Forces soldier who was his most trusted shooter. One of their most frequent destinations was the Iraqi Central Bank, which was not in the Green Zone, and so Basel would arrange to have Iraqis positioned on the streets nearby to warn him in advance of any signs of an ambush waiting at the bank.
    Between May 2003 and June 2004, while the CPA was in operation, Basel was in charge of all the cash flights and said he never lost a single dollar. All of the cash that arrived at the Baghdad airport got to its destination downtown, he insisted. “Absolutely, all the money I guarded got to where it was supposed to go,” Basel said, emphatically.
    But what happened to it after Basel delivered the cash was another question.
    Today, at least
$11.7 billion
of the approximately $20 billion the CPA ordered sent to Iraq from New York is either unaccounted for or has simply disappeared.
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