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Senior U.S. officers investigated in Iraq graft case
The federal authorities examining the early, chaotic days of the $125 billion U.S.-led effort to rebuild Iraq have significantly broadened their inquiry to include senior U.S. military officers who oversaw the program, according to interviews with senior government officials and court documents.
Court records show that last month investigators subpoenaed the personal bank records of Colonel Anthony Bell, who is now retired from the army but who was in charge of reconstruction contracting in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 when the small operation grew into a frenzied attempt to remake the country's broken infrastructure. In addition, investigators are examining the activities of Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Hirtle of the Air Force, who was a senior contracting officer in Baghdad in 2004, according to two federal officials involved in the inquiry.
It is not clear what specific evidence exists against the two men, and both said they had nothing to hide from investigators. Yet officials say that several criminal cases over the past few years point to widespread corruption in the operation the men helped to run. As part of the inquiry, the authorities are taking a fresh look at information given to them by Dale Stoffel, an American arms dealer and contractor who was killed in Iraq in late 2004.
Before he was shot on a road north of Baghdad, Stoffel drew a portrait worthy of a pulp crime novel: tens of thousands of dollars stuffed into pizza boxes and delivered surreptitiously to the American contracting offices in Baghdad, and payoffs made in paper bags that were scattered in "dead drops" around the Green Zone, the nerve center of the United States government's presence in Iraq, two senior federal officials said.
Stoffel, who gave investigators information about the office where Bell and Hirtle worked, was deemed credible enough that he was granted limited immunity from prosecution in exchange for his information, according to government documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with officials and Stoffel's lawyer, John Quinn Jr. There is no evidence that his death was related to his allegations of corruption.
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Prosecutors have won 35 convictions on cases related to reconstruction in Iraq, yet most of them involved private contractors or midlevel officials. The current inquiry is aiming at higher-level officials, according to investigators involved in the case, and is also trying to determine if there are connections between those officials and figures in the other cases. Although Bell and Hirtle were military officers, they worked in a civilian contracting office.
"These long-running investigations continue to mature and expand, embracing a wider array of potential suspects," a federal investigator said.
The reconstruction effort, intended to improve services and convince Iraqis of American good will, largely managed to do neither. The wider investigation raises the question of whether American corruption was a primary factor in damaging an effort whose failures have been ascribed to poor planning and unforeseen violence.
The investigations, which are being conducted by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, the Justice Department, the army's Criminal Investigation Command and other federal agencies, cover a period when millions of dollars in cash, often in stacks of shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills, were dispensed from a loosely guarded safe in the basement of one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces.
Former American officials describe payments to local contractors from huge sums of cash dumped onto tables and stuffed into sacks as if it were Halloween candy.
"You had no oversight, chaos and breathtaking sums of money," said Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who helped create the Wartime Contracting Commission, an oversight board. "And over all of that was the notion that failure was O.K. It doesn't get any better for criminals than that set of circumstances."
In one case of graft from that period, Major John Cockerham of the army pleaded guilty to accepting nearly $10 million in bribes as a contracting officer for the Iraq war and other military efforts from 2004 to 2007, when he was arrested. Cockerham's wife has also pleaded guilty, as have several other contracting officers.
In Cockerham's private notebooks, Bell is identified as a possible recipient of an enormous bribe as recently as 2006, the two senior federal officials said. It is unclear whether the bribe was actually offered or paid.
When asked if Cockerham had ever offered him a bribe, Bell said by telephone, "I think we'll end the discussion," but stayed on the line. Bell's response was equally terse when asked if he thought that Hirtle had carried out his duties properly: "No discussion on that at this time."
The current focus on Bell is revealed in federal court papers filed in Georgia, where he has a residence and is trying to quash a subpoena of his bank records by the Special Inspector General. The papers, dated Jan. 27, indicate that Bell's records were sought in connection with an investigation of bribery, kickbacks and fraud.
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