Pay Any Price by James Risen Read Free Book Online Page A

bunker, agency officials showed little interest and made it clear that they were not going to cooperate with Bowen’s staff in any probe of the matter.
    (Long before I learned that Bowen’s office was also investigating the same case, a former CIA officer told me in an interview that he had learned of the existence of a secret hiding place in Lebanon filled with U.S. dollars shipped from Baghdad to Lebanon by powerful Iraqi leaders. This source said that he had been told about it by a contact in Syrian intelligence.)
    When Bowen and his staff tried to conduct an investigation of the missing cash in Lebanon, they also met with resistance from the U.S. embassy in Beirut. U.S. Ambassador Michele Sison denied Bowen country clearance, meaning that he was not allowed to travel to Lebanon on official business. Two of his investigators who did go to Lebanon were also denied permission from the embassy to visit the bunker themselves. Embassy officials told them that it was too dangerous for American government officials to travel to the area. Bowen saw it as another sign of how little interest the U.S. government had in conducting any investigation into the missing cash.
    Bowen’s staffers were able to meet in Beirut with Lebanon’s prosecutor general, Said Mirza, who agreed to cooperate on an investigation. Mirza said that he would conduct a raid on the bunker and help to recover the funds. Bowen would then be able to trace the origins of the cash back to Iraq and perhaps to East Rutherford.
    But after his initial promises, the Lebanese prosecutor started dragging his feet, pledging an investigation and raid but never delivering. Bowen eventually realized that the Lebanese prosecutor was unwilling to move against the bunker, and that he may have been pressured to abandon his plans.
    Bowen’s investigators also discussed the case with the FBI in Washington, but FBI agents told them they did not believe they had any jurisdiction to pursue the matter. The FBI never launched an investigation. Bowen and his staff were frustrated, but they kept their work secret, never mentioning in public that they were on the trail of the missing cash.
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    During a private meeting in Baghdad in either late 2011 or early 2012, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki casually asked U.S. Ambassador James Jeffrey what the U.S. government knew about reports of a bunker in Lebanon filled with U.S. currency brought from Iraq. Jeffrey told him that he had heard the reports but did not know any details, Jeffrey said in an interview. Jeffrey told Maliki that the American official who knew the most about it was Stuart Bowen, and that Maliki should talk to him about it.
    â€œHe said, hey, I’m hearing all these rumors about this money, what do you know,” recalled Jeffrey, who was U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2010 until 2012. “And I told him to talk to Stuart Bowen.” When Bowen met with Maliki in Baghdad in 2013, the prime minister questioned Bowen about the missing cash. Bowen said that Maliki made it clear to him that he knew about the bunker in Lebanon, and Bowen came away from his meeting convinced that the theft of so much Iraqi money after it was so cavalierly handled and shipped by the Americans still angered the prime minister.
    Yet despite Maliki’s signs of personal interest in the matter, the Iraqi government has not taken any action to go after the cash in Lebanon. The Baghdad government may be paralyzed because no one really wants to pursue the powerful Iraqi figures involved with the theft.
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    The mystery surrounding the cash and the Lebanese bunker is one that the American government, with all its bureaucratic rules and limitations, was unlikely to ever solve, and it also seems unlikely that the Iraqi government will ever try to get the money back. Most of the original $2 billion in uncirculated U.S. currency is believed to still be sitting in the bunker and other locations in Lebanon, waiting to be spent